Word: reefer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When I was in third grade at the New Lincoln School in Manhattan, a clever sex education teacher showed my class a movie on drugs. In the style of classics like Reefer Madness, the film showed how different drugs were produced, how people could ingest them, and their extremely nasty side effects. Heroin was fashionable at the time, so glistening hypodermics and needle-tracked arms were prominently featured, along with short biographies of celebrities who had died of overdoses. Although the effect of such films on children today has probably been greatly diffused by constant exposure to drugs...
...ailments and in 1996 saw a bill he crafted, Proposition 215, pass in California, legalizing the use of pot for the seriously ill. The "grandfather" of the medicinal-marijuana movement said his fight to "restore cannabis" stemmed from a backlash against its medical use following the late-'30s film Reefer Madness. He was 73 and had cancer...
...more than 12 million Americans who use it regularly. We smoke marijuana not because we are driven by uncontrollable “Reefer Madness” cravings, as some propaganda would have others believe, but because we have learned its value from experience. Yet almost all of the research, writing, political activity and legislation devoted to marijuana has been concerned only with the question of whether it is harmful and how much harm it does. The only exception is the growing interest in the exploration of cannabis as a medicine, but as encouraging as that development is, it represents only...
...Reefer Madness (Houghton Mifflin; 310 pages) is the title of Schlosser's new book, and in it he widens his scope from a single industry to take on the entirety of what he calls America's "underground economy"--that vast, shadowy realm of financial activity that goes unrecorded because it's either illegal or unsavory or both. Like the fast-food business, the underground economy has ballooned over the past 30 years, to about $1 trillion, and Schlosser aims to find out why. He's hunting big conceptual game here, nothing less than America's troubled, hypocritical soul...
Schlosser isn't attacking the pot industry here; he's going after the institutional hypocrisies that force it underground while leaving far more damaging practices, like the abuse of migrant workers, to fester openly. What ties Reefer Madness together is Schlosser's passionate belief that America is deeply neurotic, a nation divided against itself into a sunny, whitewashed mainstream and a lusty, angry, deeply denied subconscious. He just might be the shrink America needs. His next book will take on the prison system, and it will complete what amounts to a three-volume history of the underbelly of late...