Rolling on the River – River Journal Online – News for Tarrytown, Sleepy Hollow, Irvington, Ossining, Briarcliff Manor, Croton-on-Hudson, Cortlandt and Peekskill

My brother Stephen drove his automotive flush right into a tree one evening, nearly 50 years in the past, ending his life. He had by no means been the identical after our light mom was struck down by a lightning bolt out of the blue, in any other case often called an enormous cerebral hemorrhage. Stephen’s incapacity, at age 18, to deal with such profound ache sucked him right into a whirlpool spiraling in the direction of oblivion.  

He fell in with a crowd that did him no good. He self-medicated continually to flee the burden of his brutally chilly, cruel, motherless actuality. He nurtured a $50-a-day heroin behavior ($440 a day In as we speak’s {dollars}).  

Even when Stephen by no means smoked weed, or if the substance didn’t exist in any respect, would which have saved him? What do you assume. Stephen and his circumstances proved his undoing, not marijuana or another inanimate object that has no motivation or ethical compass or any semblance of a sentient being.   

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That’s why I’m at a loss to grasp what somebody means once they name hashish a “gateway” drug. I’m doubtful that they know what they imply. I do know my brother’s private demons had nothing to do with something he ingested. They ate at him – swallowed him complete – purely from inside.  

Leisure use of “grass” in my youthful days was not a gateway to drug dependancy or self-destruction. In some unspecified time in the future I ended as a result of I not discovered it gratifying or helpful.  

How is it, then, that, for some, hashish acts as a so-called “gateway” drug resulting in degradation, whereas others who indulged in it have turn into President of the US? Does marijuana resolve whom it can devastate and whom it can elevate? Or does the person make that selection based mostly on free will? 

*** Demonizing marijuana because the offender as an alternative of specializing in private self-discipline and duty isn’t in contrast to positing {that a} gun pulls its personal set off, with the shooter a hapless sufferer of the gun’s autonomous motion.

I respect the sentiment of those that have issue coming to grips with hashish being legally offered or publicly consumed of their communal yard. In any case, change is difficult. Those that by no means preferred the stuff to start with are understandably out of types with the brand new actuality {that a} drug deemed unlawful yesterday has finished a 180 just about in a single day. Those that decry its use are experiencing whiplash. 

9 a long time in the past, America’s 13-year prohibition of the sale and consumption of alcohol was ended by an act of Congress. Would as we speak’s “gateway” advocates have objected to that legalization too?