CONFESSIONS OF A GNOSTIC GARDENER

by R.R. McGregor

"Liberty" December, 1994, pp.51-52

The mark of Cain is still being applied to the temples of renegade
horticulturalists

I kept telling my wife that no one would notice the marijuana I was growing
in the back yard. Trees block most of our yard from the neighbors' view,
and the plants were scattered next to shrubs and stumps, looking like any
of the other weeds around the place. I only tended them after dark, and I
was confident that I could harvest from them all summer with no problems.
But she was worried sick about it.
She doesn't mind that I smoke marijuana, though she rarely smokes
it herself. Oh, she does enjoy a bowl of good hashish when I can get it,
and she likes a few puffs of high-quality sensimilla once in a while to
enhance our lovemaking, but she doesn't bother with green home-grown pot.
She's quite satisfied to wind down after work with a glass of wine.

No, it's not the smoking she worries about. It's the Gestapo --
the Drug Police -- and the nosy neighbor behind us who'd be happy to see us
dragged from our house in chains and burned at the stake.
We're heretics, she says.

So I cut down the green and bushy plants, just when they were
getting to the point where I'd be able to pinch off a nightly pipeful of
mild leaf. I had wanted to keep them, to nurture them until autumn when
their budding flowers would sparkle with cannabinol-rich dots of resin.
If it were just me, I would have kept the plants. For years, I'd
rehearsed dramatic courtroom speeches in my mind, imagining I could handle
my own case as a pro se defendant were I ever arrested for drugs. I'd
plead the Ninth Amendment, convincing the jury with impeccable rhetoric
that Congress has no constitutional power to prohibit the voluntary
ingestion of any substance. I't talk about how George Washington promoted
hemp as a cash crop, how he grew cannabis at Mount Vernon -- and not just
for rope and canvas, but for medicinal use as well. I'd testify that
marijuana is the best (if not only) therapy for glaucoma, that it eases the
pain and nausea of cancer chemotherapy. I'd point out that it has been
used as a fiber crop for thousands of years, and that an acre of marijuana
can provide as much fiber for paper as an acre of 50-year-old trees. I'd
wind up by telling the jury about their right -- based on the Magna Carta
-- to nullify unjust laws, and that it was their duty to acquit me in spite
of anything Congress might say.

I'd even romanticized about doing time. Some of the greatest
people in history had been to prison -- Votaire, Paine, Thoreau. I'd get
in shape, I'd study, I'd write essays that would shake the foundations of
orthodoxy. Or so I would imagine.

But it's not just me. My dear wife, my love, could be thrown into
the street, if not into prison, and all the precious things she has
collected through the years auctioned off to buy more bullhorns, bullets,
and battering rams for the local moral guardians.
It's ironic that cultivating my own hemp for my own use is a
federal felony bearing draconian penalties, while possession of an ounce or
less of black market pot (in our state) is a misdemeanor. The law
actually encourages me to support the black market and all that entails.

Who knows where black-market pot comes from? It could be grown by
a harmless laid-back hippie in California, or a poor farmer in Kentucky
trying to earn enough to pay the taxes on his land. Or it could be
smuggled into the country by Mafia types who deal in murder and extortion.
Worse, it could be brought in by CIA or Communist operatives who'll use
their profits to finance murderous covert actions.
Most people may think of pot smokers as anti-establishment hippies.
But while I've always had a healthy suspicion of authority, I've never
really considered myself a hippie. I grew up in a working-class family in
a place where, once out of high school, girls got married and boys joined
the service. I learned about smoking pot in Vietnam. While the hippies
celebrated the Love Generation in San Francisco in '67, I was an
18-year-old Marine tank mechanic on a sandy beach in Chu Lai.

My battalion's enlisted men's club served only beer, usually warm,
and I've never liked beer. I used to trade my two-can ration for sodas or
small cans of orange juice, so I seldom had the benefit of the drunkenness
that most of my fellows used as a diversion. After a few months "in
country," when I had earned the trust of those around me, one of my buddies
offered me a joint to help relieve the alternating drudgery and tension of
daily work and nightly guard duty.
I can still remember that first joint -- the wonderful sense of
relaxation and pleasure, the tunnel vision, the time distortion, the
laughter as we sat around a candle passing it back and forth, watching the
curling smoke jerk in zigzag movements as the thundering artillery behind
us made the very air shake. From lthat time on, marijuana was my favorite
drug. With pot, Vietnam became tolerable, at times even enjoyable. There
is no peacetime experience quite comparable to watching the sun rise out of
the South China Sea, leaning back against a machine gun in a bunker made of
sand bags, or riding on the fender of an M60 tank, watching the sun flash
through a green jungle canopy -- if there's a little cannabis around to
enhance the scene. It was even possible to pretend that we were actually
doing something positive for our country, though few of us really believed
it.

So I'm not interested in ending my habit, thak you, though I know
there are many in this free country, the country I unquestioningly served
in my youth, who would in a heartbeat force me into some brainwashing
"chemical dependency" clinic to "cure" me of my illegal affliction.
Even with those who know and like me, I must be careful. While most of my
friends are people who, if they don't smoke themselves, are tolerant of the
pastime, there are many whose good opinion of me would change to either
pity or disdain, as if I harbored some dark perversion, if they learned of
my habit. My in-laws are deeply religious, and I'm not sure that there
aren't a couple of them who would, reluctantly, turn me in to the police
for my own good. They would surely pray for my soul.
The possession of my soul is what it's all about. My wife is
right: we're heretics.

Heresy is about choosing, and a heretic is one who chooses an
unacceptable dogma or creed. My wife and I have accepted the idea that our
lives and bodies are our own, and that we should be able to decide for
ourselves what to do with them. We claim an inalienable right to prescribe
our own medications, our own painkillers, our own therapies for dealing
with the diseases, trials, and stresses of life.
In these insane times, this is heresy bordering on treason.

Heresy did not end with the conclusion of the religious wars of the
seventeenth century. Secular religions with new orthodoxies have arisen,
and theses new orthodoxies have defined new heresies. In Nazi Germany,
Jews, lhomosexuals, and gypsies were persecuted for political and social
reasons above and beyond religion, as were dissident poets in the Soviet
Union and racially mixed couples in the Old South.
Right now, Native Americans eating peyote to better commune with
their god are heretics. And so are marijuana smokers around the world --
except, perhaps, in Holland. We are subject to arrest, imprisonment, and
possible death for our behavior.

No -- that last sentence is not quite true. Behavior is not really
what the persecution is about. Heresy is essentially a thought-crime. The
outward act is merely a manifestation of the true crime: the defiance of
authority, the failure to conform to orthodox belief. Authoritarians are
not merely interested in controlling behavior. Their true interest is not
the body, but the soul.

Prohibitionists describe marijuana as agateway to stronger drugs, a
downward-spiraling road to mental and physical debilitation, degradation,
disease, and death. There is some truth to this, but only metaphorically.
The gateway that marijuana opens leads not to physical death, but to the
death of intolerance and blind obedience. Marijuana is an introspective
drug. With the right dosage, external time seems to slow down and internal
time speed up. The mind seems to work faster, giving the user time to
analyze the thoughts and emotions that normally fly past unnoticed. This
allows the user to think critically and deeply.
Critical thinking is the stronger drug authoritarians fear.

In my case, the physical, behavioral heresy of smoking marijuana
has led me away from the authoritarian belief systems that hold sway in so
much of the world, toward a kinder, gentler, and terribly heretical belief
system. If I were to label my particular brand of heresy, I would call
myself a Pharmaceutical Gnostic. Like the Christian Gnostics of former
centuries, I will not blindly obey the authoritarian orthodoxy of the
moment; I value self-knowledge over unthinking faith. And like the
Christian Gnostics, this places me and those I love in danger of
persecution, financial ruin. imprisonment, and, if I would be so foolish as
to physically resist, injury or death at the hands of the authorities.
Today's pharmaceutical orthodoxy lies at the core of the concept of
the therapeutic state: the idea that people are unfit to determine their
own best interests, that they are too irresponsible to use medicines and
other chemicals wisely or moderately, that the state has a legitimate
interest in enforcing the opinions of its own experts. This orthodoxy is
upheld by politicians, police, mental health experts, and physicians who
insist that people use only officially sanctioned substances and therapies
to kill their pain or cure their ills. It is also promoted by
pharmaceutical corporations, who spend obscene amounts of money lobbying to
maintain their monopoly on the manufacture and sale of drugs.

Of course, it isn't necessarily wise to suggest publicly that
physicians have enriched themselves and shut out competition with a legal
monopoly on prescriptions and medical certification, effectively
prohibiting pharmacists, homeopaths, herbalists, and midwives from
prescribing remedies; that mental health practitioners are making enormous
sums from the proliferation of chemical dependency clinics; or that
politicians and police are unconstitutionally expanding their power yet
further into our private lives. Such claims are usually met with rage,
scorn, and derision, followed by the plaintive cry that our priesthood's
actions hane no such selfish motivation, and are all for the public good.

The real irony is that the United States was created as a haven for
gnostics. Freedom-seeking Old Worlders, weary of religious and social
persecution, flocked to the American colonies The Declaration of
Independence was a kind of gnostic manifesto, proclaiming that people have
a political right to pursue their own vision of happiness, limited only by
the rule that, since everyone has such a right, no one may coerce others
into following any particular vision. I read the Declaration of
Independence every few months to remind myself of what this country could
and should be, and my heary breaks to think how its promise has been
betrayed in so many ways.
If drug prohibition were this country's only problem, I wouldn't
complain. But it's only one symptom of a malady that has plagued humanity
since Cain slew Abel: the insatiable desire to use force to control the
behavior and beliefs of others. Persuasion and education can change minds,
but these methods are usually slow and often ineffective; there are always
those who stubbornly refuse to change their ways. Coercion, by contrast,
is expedient and effective.
St. Augustine, in his early writings, decried the use of
persecution to gain converts to Christianity, claiming that conversion was
meaningless without freely given consent. Later in life, he changed his
mind, because he saw so many examples of the effectiveness of coercion. He
saw that persecuting a few would lead others to convert out of fear, and
that after a time no one would remember why those few wouldn't go along
with the crowd. The message was not lost on Hitler, Stalin, or the DEA.

Is there hope for the future? Will authoritarianism give way to a
freer, more tolerant society? I'm not sure. The ideal of individual
liberty seems to be declining in America. The obvious racial and class
imbalance in drug persecutions is widening the gulfs between ethnic and
economic groups, and I worry that this will result in more social chaos,
more random violence, and more repression.
I also worry about the vast sums confiscated by the police, and how
this booty is used to increase the sophistication of their tools for prying
into our private lives. I have read of machines that hang over the
entrances to landfills that sniff each truck for toxic waste. I wonder how
long it will be before similar machines guard the entrances to public
places, detecting illegal substances in the scent of people walking by. I
also wonder, when all the drug users are caught, or killed, or cured, who
will be the new heretics -- the new Jews, queers, niggers, witches,
Satanists -- the new scapegoats for the new orthodoxy.

Two decades ago, 70% of America favored the relegalization of
marijuana. Since then, the numbers have reversed. I try to take hope in
the fact that this is the result of 15 years of negative propaganda, and
that what propaganda has done, better ideas can undo. Then I remember that
the Partnership for a Drug-Free America is getting a million dollars a day
in free advertising to convince Americans that unsanctioned drugs are
today's primary evil, and I wonder whether things will ever change.
Meanwhile, I'm back in the black market, paying extortionate prices
for reefer from unknown sources, calling friends who call friends who think
they know someone who has a friend who has some pot, hoping to avoid the
narcopolice, and praying that I won't become another forgotten gnostic
martyr.


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