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JHORT1
WHY DID THE AMERICAN WOMEN'S
LIB Movement go moribund for a period
in mid 1970?The answer may lie in the
varied career of T. Grace Atkinson,
prominent in the movement back in the
Cavern days, but later ostracised through
personality difficulties. Out in the politi-
cal wilderness T. Grace decided to make
her own way. She found the means to it
when she met an elderly Italian night-
cleaner who had been unjustly sacked
from her job. Rightly surmising where the
power is in New York T.Grace went to
see Joe Columbo, the then head of the
Mafia. Columbo was moved by the night-
cleaner's plight, and got her her job back
within 24 hours. Joe was also moved by
T.G.A. and the rough tough mafia hood
and the intense fiery women's rights
champion found a strange fascination
¦with each other.
The scene moves on to Central Park
New York, in the summer of 1970.
While speaking to a crowd of 50,000,
Columbo was gunned down with near
fatal head wounds. Elsewhere in New
York, representatives of various nation-
wide women's groups were discussing
the role of violence in their movement,
and how it could be used:'
The door crashed open. T. Grace
Atkinson stood there, dressed in black,
with a rolled up poster under her arm.
Amid dead silence she marched to the
front of the room.
"What do you bitches know about
violence," she screamed, and flung
down the poster, "this is my lover,
with his head in pieces." She dropped
the gory picture and burst into sobs.
Numbly, the delegates broke up and
went their separate ways.
THE BRITISH ARMY has traditionally
relied on the bottom end of society
to recruit its cannon fodder. Historically
they used the dole queue as the most
useful ground. This means that lately the
army has been recruiting blacks. These
soldiers, though they are prized as
front line material, don't find such a
happy reception, when they apply for
promotion, certainly not into the officer
class. So recently even the army had to
admit that there had been what it called
a 'race riot' at the huge army camp at
Tidworth, in Wiltshire. Many of the
casualties in Ulster have been black, used
by our masters to fight their oppressed
brothers and sisters. Blacks in the US
army and navy have increasingly been
challenging their allotted role. The situa-
tion here, incidentally, is not helped by
the attitude of the editor of West Indian
World, who thinks West Indians should
join up "to learn a bit of discipline".
The growth of paramilitary bodies
controlled by local authority bodies and
private firms continue. Now Sheffield
Corporation are recruiting 'a private
security force' who will patrol working
class areas in uniforms, armed with clubs
and in pairs.
HAS NIXON FLIPPED at the thought of
four more years, his, all his? Apparently
his sinister hangers-on are worried that
this might be. There are recent
reports from his holiday pad, Camp
David, that he has been wandering alone
in the woods, wearing purple flared
trousers and smoking a pipe.
NEEDLE, excellent health service info
mag, no. 12 is now out. Compiled by
NHS workers it delineates the stamping
out by administrative efficiency of what
was, even in 1948 only a half baked
measure towards a universal free health
service. From 27 Pearman St., London
SE1.
THE CHICAGO SEVEN have had their
convictions by Judge Julius Hoffman '
(remember him?) reversed by the appeal
court. That court said that the conduct
of the court during their trial would have
ensured their acquittal even if nothing
else had. All fine and dandy, except that
they are now liable to stand trial in New
York on a similar set of charges.
"Prior to smoking
marijuana he was a
stable and sensible
man. He was later to
tout a self-styled
pseudosocialism and
develop an interest
in macrobiotics."
Ivor Gaber (Assis-
tant Editor of
'Drugs & Society',
4 Little Essex St.,
WC2) examines the
current field of
research into the
weed.
In an area such as this, public
knowledge is very much domi-
nated by the treatment given
to new information by the mass
media. Research that provides
ammunition for the anti-cannabis
lobby is avidly consumed, while
contrary research is usually
ignored. Recently, for example,
'Drugs and Society' published some
research on student drug-taking
that demonstrated that marijuana
smokers were more likely to enter
stable sexual relationships ... to play
an active part in the social life of the
college and were highly unlikely to
graduate to heroin. The national
press, when they used the story,
made no mention of the above but
instead concentrated on the possi-
bility that most college smokers had
begun at school. One paper managed
to extrapolate from the fact that
smokers had very little contact
with the church, that religion was
the solution to the drug problem at
college.
Conversely, a piece of research
conducted by a group in Bristol that
claimed to prove that cannabis use led to
cerbral atrophy (a wasting away of the
brain cells), received extensive media
coverage both here and in the States. It
was only in the columns of 'The Lancet',
'Drugs and Society', and 'IT' that these
findings were challenged. They were
challenged on three grounds; first because
the small sample (10) had no adequate
control group, second because all the
patients had come to the hospital
complaining of headaches, dizziness, etc
(and were therefore self-selecting), and
finally because all ten had used LSD,
additionally eight had used ampheta-
mines and five had used barbiturates. Why
select cannabis as the cause of the brain
damage?
The cannabis debate is not dissimilar
to that concerning the relationship
between cigarettes and lung cancer. As
early as 1950 research workers were
demonstrating a strong causal link
between smoking and lung cancer but
because public opinion was not receptive
to the idea it was given very little publici-
ty. Twenty years later, with public
opinion generally accepting the link,
every new piece of corroborative evidence
is greeted as a major breakthrough.
Former US Attorney-General John
Mitchell explaining why Nixon had
established a cannabis commission said,
'It (cannabis) can be a dangerous and
damaging drug ... I think we'll find
physical and chemical evidence of that.'
In other words you start with your
conclusions and work backwards finding
supportive evidence as you go.
A recent piece of research
published in the highly
respectable but ultra-
conservative Journal of the
American Medical Association
would appear to be a classic in the
'manipulate your evidence and
impose your ideology1 tradition.
The researchers, Kolansky and
Moore, postulate that short-term
intensive cannabis use can cause
'biochemical reaction or structural
change in cerebral cells'—in other
words that cannabis is a toxic drug.
To support their hypothesis they
give 13 case studies of very
straight stable people who degener-
ate into raving dope fiends after
using capnabis; but finally (as in all
good fairy stories) there is a happy
ending, most of the subjects return
to their former virtuous lines.
The research piece is rich in quotes
and it is extremely difficult to know
where to begin and what to leave out.
Aficionados of drug literature should
look for themselves (JAMA Oct 2 1972).
The particular speciality of this piece of
propaganda is the obvious political
statements ill-concealed behind an
abundance of supposedly objective
scientific verbiage. For example,
Moor and Kolansky describe the case of a
32 year old tree surgeon. Prior to smoking
he was, they say, 'ambitious and consider-
ed to be a stable and sensible man. He
was happily married and a devoted father
to his three children.' After partaking of
the dreaded weed his life style and general
attitudes change, this brings him into
conflict with his wife. Kolansky and
Moore take up the story. 'He castigated
her for being "materialistic" and
rationalised his lack of industry and
decreased ability to provide for the
family as the fault of "society" for
requiring that a man "overproduce in
order to keep the captains of industry
wealthy." He touted a self-styled
pseudosocialism, then went through a
rapid transition from an interest in
health foods to macrobiotics.'
Almost every word of the above
contains some sort of value judgement.
The use of quotation marks around
certain words and phrases seems to
imply that the subject did not under-
stand what he was talking about. They
describe his rejection of bourgeois society
as a 'rationalisation', as if his motivation
was something other than political.
They use words like 'tout' and 'self-
styled' that have obvious derogatory
connotations. They presume to judge
the credibility of his socialism,
probably knowing as much about the
subject as Spiro Agnew. And finally
they labour under the illusion that to
switch from an interest ir> health foods to
an interest in macrobiotics involves a
'rapid transition.'
This particular story has a rather nice
ending. 'When he refused the recommen-
dation for psychotherapy1, relate the
authors somewhat sadly, 'we thought it
likely that he might return to cannabis
use at some future time.' No doubt he
considered cannabis to be a more effective,
a more enjoyable and an infinitely less
expensive form of psychotherapy.
On a less serious plain there are two
more goodies from the Kolansky and
Moore research that I cannot resist
quoting. In one case they describe a
patient as suffering from 'consistent
demonstrations of poor social judgement'
If that's an ailment it sure would be
fun to diagnose. The other goody is a
quote from what they term 'general
symptamology1: 'if anyone posed a
threat to his supply of cannabis, the
peaceful facade quickly gave way to
irritability or outbursts of irrational
anger frequently accompanied by vitupera-
tive verbal attack or sullen petulance.'
In a more prosaic form they are suggesting
that the smokers became rather upset
when someone deprived them of their
dope. And here my own prejudices
come out, for I can sympathise with
the smokers' in that situation, I can kind
of see their point of view.
The assumptions behind
research such as this,
however flippantly we
might treat them, do unfortunately
represent the way the majority of
people both here and in the States
feel about dope. When for example
over 80% of the people in Britain
believe (as they do according to
NOP) that cannabis leads to heroin,
the possibilities for rational debate
are almost non-existent. But as I
said before, I do not think the issue
will be settled on the basis of the
findings of diligent research
commissions. Look for example at
what happened in the States.
President Nixon set up a commiss-
ion to investigate the legal status
of cannabis. Chairing the commiss-
ion was the Governor of Pennsylvani;
Raymond Shaffer, a man who had
spoken publicly against legalisation
(as had 11 of the 14 commissioners).
After a year's investigation, in what
must rank as one of the greatest
volte-faces of all time, the commiss-
ion recommended the abolition of
all criminal penalties for the
possession and private use of
marijuana. Nixon reacted to the
findings by declaring that they
would be enacted 'over my dead
body'. Despite the fact that that
could have been arranged the propo-
sals now lie almost totally forgotten.
In this country it has been reliably
estimated that the number of smokers
is somewhere between one and two
million. In the face of this number of
- people deliberately breaking the law it
seems to me that the eventual legalisa-
tion of cannabis is inevitable. As with
homosexuality, abortion and divorce,
social law follows rather than leads
social practice.
I am not advocating the unlimited
consumption of dope—as in .nost things,
if taken to excess I believe it probably
could be damaging. But even if it is
proven that smoking cannabis leads to
physical or psychological damage I doubt
if it would dissuade many smokers.
After all, we know that tobacco, alcohol
and barbiturates are all extremely toxic
substances, yet that does not stop the
majority of the people in this country
from committing mass hari kari. So why
should they be frightened by any
possible damage from cannabis. This
being the case, the debate as to whether
legalisation is a good or bad thing
beeome's irrelevant. It is going to happen
and the sooner we make sensible prepara-
tions for it the better.
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