LogicSoDeveloped
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The family of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old boy who was killed last month in Florida by a neighborhood watch volunteer, confirmed on Monday that he had been suspended from school for possession of a trace amount of marijuana. In a news conference, Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, accused authorities of leaking the information, along with details of the shooting, in order to demonize her son’s memory.
“They’ve killed my son and now they’re trying to kill his reputation,” said Fulton.
Can it be long now before the boy’s possible history of drug use is cited as justification for the self-defense claim put forth by the killer, George Zimmerman? According to Zimmerman’s account of the shooting, Martin, who was unarmed, violently attacked him from behind, leading Zimmerman to cry out for help before shooting his aggressor.
But Martin’s possible experimentation with pot should be no threat to his reputation. The research on marijuana and violence shows clearly that the drug either reduces aggression or has no effect — findings that fall in line with pop culture’s mellow image of stoners. The idea that marijuana makes people dangerous is as absurd as the claim that wearing a hoodie is suspicious.
Trayvon Martin’s Parents Tell TIME: ‘He’s in Heaven with God, and He Has on a Hoodie’
Despite its widespread use — nearly two-thirds of the adult population aged 21 to 54 has tried marijuana at least once — more than eight decades of reefer-madness propaganda have served to obscure the facts about the substance and who uses it. Indeed, most antidrug campaigns have stigmatized not only drugs, but their users as well.
Here, it’s useful to remember that the nation’s vehement antidrug rhetoric is rooted in explicit racism. For example, the first state laws banning cocaine were passed in response to media reports about how the drug made black men homicidal, prone to raping white women and, worst of all to the police, impervious to bullets. An article about the issue in the New York Times in 1914 was headlined “Negro Cocaine ‘Fiends’ Are a New Southern Menace.”
Similarly, the first state legislation banning opium was linked to fears of Chinese men allegedly using the drug to seduce white women.
The campaign for national marijuana prohibition, which came in the 1930s, involved racism against both African Americans and Mexicans. One advocate of banning the drug wrote in the Times in 1935: “Marijuana, perhaps now the most insidious of our narcotics, is a direct by-product of unrestricted Mexican immigration. … Mexican peddlers have been caught distributing sample marijuana cigarets to school children.”
Sound familiar?
These days, the racism surrounding drugs is less obvious, but no less real. I experienced a vivid illustration of this myself in the late 1990s, when I appeared on Oprah to discuss Bill Moyers’ PBS series on addiction; I was a guest on Oprah’s show, as well as an associate producer of the PBS series. The first hour of Moyers’ documentary included a montage of clips from interviews with nine people with addiction, a group I’d booked with an eye to diversity of race, class and recovery experience. Moyers decided to include me as one of the interviewees.
On Oprah’s show, her other guests included Bill Moyers, his son William who is a recovering addict, along with another white female addict who appeared in the documentary. To open the show, Oprah displayed photos of everyone I’d included in the original documentary and asked the audience to see if they could pick out those who suffered from addiction. The audience overwhelmingly selected the black men — and, remember, this was Oprah’s audience, not one likely to be selected for its overt racial biases.
Read the rest at: http://healthland.time.com/2012/03/...ntence-trayvon-martin-to-death/#ixzz1qKypUnTx
“They’ve killed my son and now they’re trying to kill his reputation,” said Fulton.
Can it be long now before the boy’s possible history of drug use is cited as justification for the self-defense claim put forth by the killer, George Zimmerman? According to Zimmerman’s account of the shooting, Martin, who was unarmed, violently attacked him from behind, leading Zimmerman to cry out for help before shooting his aggressor.
But Martin’s possible experimentation with pot should be no threat to his reputation. The research on marijuana and violence shows clearly that the drug either reduces aggression or has no effect — findings that fall in line with pop culture’s mellow image of stoners. The idea that marijuana makes people dangerous is as absurd as the claim that wearing a hoodie is suspicious.
Trayvon Martin’s Parents Tell TIME: ‘He’s in Heaven with God, and He Has on a Hoodie’
Despite its widespread use — nearly two-thirds of the adult population aged 21 to 54 has tried marijuana at least once — more than eight decades of reefer-madness propaganda have served to obscure the facts about the substance and who uses it. Indeed, most antidrug campaigns have stigmatized not only drugs, but their users as well.
Here, it’s useful to remember that the nation’s vehement antidrug rhetoric is rooted in explicit racism. For example, the first state laws banning cocaine were passed in response to media reports about how the drug made black men homicidal, prone to raping white women and, worst of all to the police, impervious to bullets. An article about the issue in the New York Times in 1914 was headlined “Negro Cocaine ‘Fiends’ Are a New Southern Menace.”
Similarly, the first state legislation banning opium was linked to fears of Chinese men allegedly using the drug to seduce white women.
The campaign for national marijuana prohibition, which came in the 1930s, involved racism against both African Americans and Mexicans. One advocate of banning the drug wrote in the Times in 1935: “Marijuana, perhaps now the most insidious of our narcotics, is a direct by-product of unrestricted Mexican immigration. … Mexican peddlers have been caught distributing sample marijuana cigarets to school children.”
Sound familiar?
These days, the racism surrounding drugs is less obvious, but no less real. I experienced a vivid illustration of this myself in the late 1990s, when I appeared on Oprah to discuss Bill Moyers’ PBS series on addiction; I was a guest on Oprah’s show, as well as an associate producer of the PBS series. The first hour of Moyers’ documentary included a montage of clips from interviews with nine people with addiction, a group I’d booked with an eye to diversity of race, class and recovery experience. Moyers decided to include me as one of the interviewees.
On Oprah’s show, her other guests included Bill Moyers, his son William who is a recovering addict, along with another white female addict who appeared in the documentary. To open the show, Oprah displayed photos of everyone I’d included in the original documentary and asked the audience to see if they could pick out those who suffered from addiction. The audience overwhelmingly selected the black men — and, remember, this was Oprah’s audience, not one likely to be selected for its overt racial biases.
Read the rest at: http://healthland.time.com/2012/03/...ntence-trayvon-martin-to-death/#ixzz1qKypUnTx
