Part 2 of Pondering the effects of ending the preposterous War on Hemp

Having "slept on" the question explored in my immediately previous blog post http://kestsgeojedc.blogspot.com/2011/08/pondering-effects-of-ending.html I awoke with some interesting thoughts about it all, so this post will attempt to explain.

Two unrelated factors have come to mind.

The more interesting one is that this appears to involve the "invisible elephant in the room" kind of thing.

The second is that even talking about this subject could put me at further risk of assault by the powers-that-be, not because what I say is accurate or inaccurate, but that it puts their jobs and esteem at risk, understandable. (And there is ample indication that the powers-that-be seek excuse to get on my case, not because of the real reason, that my technological concepts to help humanity access space much better, would upset the business plans of lots of corporate investments, but for artificial villification-created reasons, and "drugs" is an easy accusation, believable by the average person.)

Anyway, the "invisible elephant in the room" thing is what I awoke thinking about this morning. Billions of dollars of taxpayer money spent on prisons, millions of expensive prison personnel, and many more millions of lives ruined by incarceration - all because marijuana lets people relax a bit? Sometimes people seem to me to act a bit wacky at times - witness Congress nowadays - but this seems much too much. Something else must be involved, but what?

Hemp had gotten my attention back when I first thought of what is now called the "Space Elevator" circa 1969, and was seeking a potential tether material. It had to be very strong just to support its own weight, and that meant it needed to be light weight too. First search brought up hemp in my old books, which said it was the strongest material for its density known at the time, and was produced in large quantity such as for rope and structural material use; but its tensile-strength-to-density ratio was far to weak to do the job. I then abandoned the idea - for a few years until I thought of a different application and material, the Lunar "Mooncable" concept through L-1.

In the late 70's to early '90's I also became aware of marijuana, suddenly associated with hemp; several of my friends smoked it on party occasions, and I had some girlfriends who I knew smoked it on rare occasions, including one who smoked it when with me. I don't recall any bizzare behavior exhibited by any of them ever at those times; in fact, they seemed a bit more composed than usual, if anything. No driving problems, no people-interaction problems, per my personal observations. The only "problems" caused as far as I could tell were those of having to deal with it being by then a "controlled" substance, thus an artificial contrivance of law enforcement stuff, and not having anything to do with the marijuana-smoking itself. I no doubt experienced it too especially in a room with one of my girlfriends who smoked it a lot, but I noticed no influence on my own behavior, me being a meek mousey kind of person anyway, struggling as an Aspergers trying to fit into a non-Aspergers social world, which was what got my attention much of the time, especially when trying to please a girlfriend.

Over the years then and since then, I have noticed articles about the effects of marijuana. It was astonishingly lacking in scientific integrity, such as law enforcement claiming that marijuana was addictive like tobacco or alcohol or coffee. The users of marijuana I had known long ago obviously could smoke it or not smoke it; they chose to smoke it when it was time to relax and enjoy the company of others; but otherwise never smoked it. Appeared to be as addictive as, say, an ice cream cone. Obviously quite less addictive than the tobacco I smoked in my pipe at times back then, quite compulsive especially when my life was in rough times, like after divorce or after ditched by a girlfriend during my subsequent bachelor years. Thus I had direct knowledge that the "highly addictive" declaration about marijuana by law-enforcement types was not true.

I also dimly recall an article where someone was going to participate in a police experiment to see if smoking marijuana affected driving skill, by having the person drive a course swerving between orange pylons like in race car shows, doing a before and after test; this was being done, because there were no scientific evaluations of effects of smoking marijuana on driving performance. The police were actually trying to get data themselves, to prove their contention that it degraded driving performance noticably. As a "scientific" experiment this was poorly designed, obviously, clearly not even dealing with possible placebo effects "you will drive poorer a little bit because you are smoking marijuana" belief effects, for example. I do not recall the actual results of that test, maybe it was that I never encountered the sequel to that article that was to tell the results of the actual experiment - it all went quiet and not brought up any more.

So, there simply was nothing to justify all the prison stuff going on about marijuana, at least as to actual effects of marijuana - lots of cops-&-robbers exciting game stuff going on, however, authorities justified in abuse by saying they had not being obeyed, was excuse to come down hard on the offenders.

So I awoke this morning with the conclusion that this was a case of "an invisible elephant in the room" kind of thing. Something very major was not being spoken about in all this. What could it be? And I had an insight of what might be the "elephant" involved here. It was that something I had noticed fairly often among my friends who occasionally smoked marijuana: they seemed to at times have uncanny knowledge. That knowledge was hard to define, however. It seemed to involve somehow having impossible-to-acquire-by-normal-means awareness of what other people were doing, for one thing.

This is not something easily explained in our nuts & bolts screwed-together world view. But science is about discovering reality; it tends to want to build on prior decisions about reality; but the various sciences - such as physics - chemistry - biology - psychology - social science - political science all have their own symbolism domains, that only loosely meet up with the other sciences, although as time goes on they grow closer in places. But there is plenty of precedent to say there could be another field of science that would not necessarily instantly fit directly into other science terminology.

OK this could be the missing visibility of the elephant in the room. But why would law enforcement have such a bee in the bonnet about it? Really makes no sense, until I thought of the problem of professional stalkers - law enforcement or store security personnel in this case - of having their quarry have an uncanny ability to observe their stalkers. It would make stalking really hard to do a good job, having a peek-a-boo-I-see-you kind of game. We all like to do a good job, be known that we do a good job; so that would make it harder to do that.

But that would be like the thing said of guns, that making it unlawful to have a gun would only make the law-abiding folks not have guns and therefore not able to defend themselves from robbers who would have guns anyway.

Making marijuana smoking no longer illegal, would be leveling the playing field.

And people's professions that involves stalking - on foot or via videocams thousands of miles away - would find they are being watched back. A harder game to be boss-on-top-all-the-time. And the aforementioned huge shifts in the financial scene of law-and-prison, jobs lost, millions of dazed people freed and wandering around.

(And what to do with all those abandoned expensive prisons? I recall reading one facetious article, written several years ago on noticing the huge number of mysterious large prisons being built, that they would be used by the Republicans to incarcerate all Democrats, claiming they were dissidents interfering with Republican rule of the nation.)

Anyway, this all seems to point to a people-skill that is being controlled, something that can give a power edge to the privileged, as the major factor remaining, after all the hoopla is sifted out.