Who Can Really Say?

Yeah, right. But I did have to run to the grocery store, drug store, and beer store. Anyway, some quick hits:

If a story in Newsweek is true, David Bernstein says Cheney and Rumsfeld should resign. Oh, and Ashcroft comes out smelling like a rose. Go figure.

Next, this link, actually the transcript of a speech called The History of the Non-Medical Use of Drugs in the United States, is long and I don't expect anyone will really read it. But I can't pass up quoting some of it. It seems that marijuana use was in part demonized in the late 1930's and 1940's because 5 murder defendants were aquitted by reason of insanity -- they were under the drug's influence at the time of the crime. Does marijuana cause insanity, you say? Well, in Congressional hearings in the 1930's that's what a Temple University professor testified to. He also testified that he'd injected the active ingredient THC into the brains of 300 dogs and two of them had died -- the problem is, he testified 10 years before the THC was actually discovered. And that same professor was called as a witness at these trials. Here's how it went:

In the most famous of these trials, what happened was two women jumped on a Newark, New Jersey bus and shot and killed and robbed the bus driver. They put on the marijuana insanity defense. The defense called the pharmacologist, and of course, you know how to do this now, you put the expert on, you say "Doctor, did you do all of this experimentation and so on?" You qualify your expert. "Did you write all about it?" "Yes, and I did the dogs" and now he is an expert. Now you ask him what? You ask the doctor "What have you done with the drug?" And he said, and I quote, "I've experimented with the dogs, I have written something about it and" -- are you ready -- "I have used the drug myself."

What do you ask him next? "Doctor, when you used the drug, what happened?"

With all the press present at this flamboyant murder trial in Newark New Jersey, in 1938, the pharmacologist said, and I quote, in response to the question "When you used the drug, what happened?", his exact response was: "After two puffs on a marijuana cigarette, I was turned into a bat."

He wasn't done yet. He testified that he flew around the room for fifteen minutes and then found himself at the bottom of a two-hundred-foot high ink well.

Well, friends, that sells a lot of papers. What do you think the Newark Star Ledger headlines the next day, October 12, 1938? "Killer Drug Turns Doctor to Bat!"

Does anyone notice a timely coincidence here (is there any other kind?). Wasn't Batman created in the late 1930's? Hmmmmm? Well I'm just saying . . . .