Canada Up in Smoke
by John Paul Meenan, Crisis Magazine:
The day is nigh. Today, October 17, marijuana becomes legal in Canada, only the second sovereign nation to let loose the reins of law on the notorious drug (the other being Uruguay, with other nations taking a more incremental approach). Nine U.S. states have also approved recreational use: Colorado, the entire western seaboard (Washington, Oregon, California), along with Nevada, then, on the east, Vermont, Maine and Massachusetts (funny how they all voted Democrat), with 21 others approving use medicinally. Federally, marijuana is still illegal across the United States, creating quite the tension, and one wonders what will happen now at our once-friendly border.
Wednesday is the memorial of Saint Ignatius of Antioch who, as far as I know, had no connection to the green weed; on the contrary, the early bishop and martyr comes across as rather abstinent. As he wrote in his famous seven letters on his way to be torn apart by lions, his deepest desire was to “be ground like wheat for Christ.” Overall, the plant was unknown to the Romans and Greeks, being indigenous to central and south Asia from earliest recorded history. It is not mentioned in the Bible, although the ancient Assyrians, who are mentioned, and who gave much trouble to the Israelites, are recorded as dabbling in the mind-altering substance.
So, the plant has been around for a long time, but in the current milieu it is connected most with the cultural revolution of the 1960s, when getting “high” was all the rage, and may explain in some way the bizarre moral and metaphysical perspectives of those youths who grew up to become baby boomers. Then again, perhaps with Clinton, they didn’t inhale.
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