THC, Cannabis, and Addiction in Ireland

In most Nationalist circles here and abroad the cannabis plant, it’s flower, and it’s active compound THC are looked down upon, along with everything associated with them. Most want to treat it the same as any other potent material, both synthetic and natural, which means to aggressively suppress it’s supply and use. No thought is given to the methods of ridding society of harmful substances and their subcultures – an oversight which passively condones a continuation of The War On Drugs – an American drug policy which has been imposed on the world which has not only failed, but also acts as a cover for the Deep State’s own involvement in the trade. I wish to make a case for cannabis being no more threatening to the health of individuals or society than alcohol and that the current approach to protecting society from drugs is a mistakenly seriously counter-productive. Additionally, both sides of the debate have to concede that the issue isn’t black and white, with many competing facts and studies supporting both positions.

Medicinal Cannabis For Ireland

In late 2016 it has been decided that by Spring 2017, medicinal cannabis can be prescribed in Ireland. I don’t know what my confederates make of this, but I personally have mixed feelings on the issue, leaning more towards celebrating the move. It’s been established by trials and numerous personal accounts that cannabis can not only ease the symptoms of many conditions, but cure many of those conditions, as well as act as a preventative to a few conditions – speaking primarily about cannabis oil extract as opposed to cannabis inhaled, on its own or with tobacco. It should be noted that the method of intake matters as it is metabolised differently with each delivery method.

As an example, epilepsy is being treated in children and adults around the world, with cannabis oil. A drug exists which is taken for a certain number of months, after which the sufferer is probably cured. Cannabis oil has the very same healing capacity with one very important difference – the lack of side effects. After being cured by this drug, the sufferer may find themselves with a host of related nervous system issues. And although cannabis is harmful to a small minority of people, these harmless side-effects are pronounced and very uncomfortable, making the course of treatment impossible. A family member of mine has a nervous system issue from a traffic collision almost a decade ago. She’s now on this drug course and looks forward to trying cannabis oil if the drug doesn’t do its magic. THC and other compounds in cannabis are powerful superweapons which can interact with our nervous system as well as other systems. We would be foolish, cruel, and irresponsible to disallow sufferers from exploring the potential healing qualities of this natural substance and instead insist they make-do with synthetic drugs which have iatrogenic effects.

It would also be wise to consider the pharmacological industrial complex. The key to any successful business is to ensure that, one way or another, your customers become repeat customers, and in time purchase more of your products or services. Your doctor, pharmacy, and friendly 19th Century German drug manufacturer, are not exempt from this law of economics, and neither are they somehow morally above “hacking” that system. Cannabis aside, there are 100s, if not 1,000s, of naturally occurring or relatively harmless cures and therapies which are ignored or actively suppressed. Instead, we’re drilling holes in peoples’ mouths, cutting them up and removing pieces of them, and irradiating them. I refuse to try and reconcile the facts that we live in a time with the world’s greatest minds paired with the greatest resources and yet we’re hacking away at God’s Temple like a crew of feckless monkeys. Treating it as if we somehow know more than it does. I bring this up to demonstrate what forces stand in the way of the popularization of a temperate weed that could out-mode a vast amount of an industry by the simple virtue that it doesn’t make people sicker when they take it.

Potential Social Impact of Medicinal Cannabis

Already, people are thinking of conditions they have or can feign to earn a prescription to legally purchase cannabis for everyday and recreational use. This is a wholly unavoidable reality to this degree of legalization. Whether the trend is widespread is yet to be seen, but the trends in other territories with medicinal cannabis show us this trend is exaggerated by media. Regardless of the scale, it presents a hole in the dam of cannabis prohibition which will lead to a crack and eventual demolishment as social acceptability of the substance will increase, unless a popular organised resistance to its acceptance rises in reaction. This decision by the government is celebrated by many who oppose prohibition as a major step towards their end goal.

It’s my understanding that soon a legal loophole will exist where an individual or group of individuals could both obtain a license to grow medicinal cannabis and also apply for a business grant from the state. Within 2017 I foresee cannabis farms being established, run by both entrepreneurs and cannabis lovers. This is inevitable as I don’t see Nordzucker Ireland (producers of Siucra) setting aside agricultural land to get into the morally questionable business of growing weed, nor is it feasible for customs to handle the importation of it from Canada or elsewhere. For anyone lacking in a vocation out there who loves their cannabis, I strongly suggest you keep an eye out for this loophole and be ready to leap through it.

Regardless of how the substance is delivered to patients, we would be  naive or lying to each other if we believed there wouldn’t be any bleed out of the product to those who legally shouldn’t have it. If any moves are made to strongly regulate farmers of it, this would be the reasoning used to do so. This bleed out will be a key force in the destruction of this dam of prohibition. The normalisation of its use to treat chronic and terminal illnesses in conjunction with its greater degree of access will push it into the mainstream instead of being a dirty secret kept from family members and greater society, as it traditionally has been.

As a Recreational and Personal-Use Substance

I will admit to knowing a few people who depend upon cannabis and hash to their mental, physical, and existential detriment. In my experience this is a tiny minority of users beside the countless I’ve known to enjoy a smoke and otherwise lead happy and productive lives. These are people who have spent many a weekend with friends at home or out on the town as teenagers and young adults, taking a drink and a smoke, and forging social bonds that last a lifetime. The great majority of these people “grow out of it” as life circumstances change and their priorities change with those circumstances. We must accept and respect the innate wisdom of each individual to guide their own lives if we as a social and political movement are to be respected by those people in kind. We must not condescend to them, telling them that they’re incapable of guarding themselves against improper decision-making.

Abuse and Its Social Implications

Although it is true that certain things should be prohibited from circulation in society for the protection of its individuals, an honest re-evaluation of what those things are should be performed and instead only apply prohibition to the things that are truly harmful. For instance, many would agree that pornography is harmful because of how it rewires our relationship to sex, the bodies of others, and our own bodies. It has a distorting influence that turns women into monsters and men into deviants or renders them impotent. On the other hand, we have alcohol, which virtually nobody in the Western world could conceive of prohibiting, despite its outrageous casualty and fatality rate which outstrips that of many other drugs. Why wouldn’t we prohibit alcohol? Could it be because it’s so widely enjoyed? I’d personally move to prohibit pornography, but not alcohol. Not because I enjoy it myself, but for the fact that the abuse of the substance is negligible beside the countless millions here in the West who enjoy it in moderation, as well the brewing and distilling of it being an ancient art form. Alcohol and cannabis share these things in common because they are both ultimately harmless substances on their own which only seem to afflict a very small minority of those who enjoy it. They’re not the same as cocaine, crack, or heroin – substances that literally compel dependency on a biological level. They’re only addictive to the addictive personality – a condition that could potentially exist in any of us, exists today in a small minority of us, and has at different times in history existed in varying numbers of us. As much as Joe Rogan’s liberalism annoys me, he once encapsulated this issue very expertly when he said “If weed destroyed your life it’s because weed got there first, asshole.” There is a particular type of individual who decides to spend the majority of their time seeking out and taking such a substance, just as there is a particular type of individual who decides to spend the majority of their time playing videogames. This condition can last a few years or a whole lifetime. This isn’t a personal failing, but a failing of society, because society has created the circumstances this person lives in. Just as Communism drove whole generations of young Russians to drink, frequently to the point of alcohol poisoning. Alcohol, cannabis, videogames, or any other mild stimulus, are  scientifically understood to not actually be the cause of addiction. Instead, these things are sought to fill a hole in one’s consciousness. If properly socialised and not ostracised by society, these individuals will eventually get bored of their escapism. If there are resources there to help them establish a new routine and confidence in themselves they will grow out of their dependency. If those resources aren’t there, they will grow depressed and ever-more dependent on the substance. In other words, the substance and the dependency on it is a symptom and not a cause. By prohibiting such harmful substances we would be foolishly treating the symptom of a great social disease and congratulating ourselves on our victory, while the forgotten sufferers go on to find other avenues of escape – in other words, their disease presents different symptoms and nobody is any better off.

At the route of addictive behaviour is a need for autonomy, which is absent in the addict’s life. Many cigarette smokers will tell you their habit is them sticking their two fingers up at the Grim Reaper to proclaim that they’ll at least have some say over when and how they go. From the objective perspective this is a ridiculous proposition as smoking, videogaming, and drug-taking, actually entrain people to repeat behaviours. Subjectively, however, it is perceived as the complete opposite by the dependent. The action of metabolising a substance one has ingested or engaging in technology is, experientially, an affirmation of self-control. It soothes the user and disconnects them from the reality of their current situation and all of the expectations upon them. This is a natural tendency we have in response to intolerable conditions. Directly combating that tendency in ourselves personally or socially is akin to trying to drive back the tide with a bucket.

Another aspect to substance use and dependency is the rebellion factor, which cannot be directly confronted either. To elucidate: Holland, which sells 50 to 150 metric tonnes of cannabis to adults each year, has a significantly lower instance of preteens and teens smoking, drinking, doing drugs, and having sex than most other European or North American nations, showing them as smoking the least amount of cannabis. The report also shows a drop in their use of cannabis since a similar study in 2009. Here’s a link to that WHO study. A possible interpretation of this historical trend could be the lack of taboo and mystery surrounding these substances. My theory is substantiated by the rise in hospitalisation of teens for excessive consumption of alcohol from 2009. This trend paralleled by parents being more wary of alcohol and not allowing them to drink it in their presence, reflected by the statistical change from 75% in 2009 to 50% in 2015/2016. There is an observable correlation between prohibition and abuse, which most students of mankind know to be an historical reality. In an ancient Irish context, this is why we banished our teen boys and some girls to live in the forests to act out their rebellious and destructive drives, only being allowed back to the village after adolescence passes. Children and young people need to be consciously fostered by society and given legitimate outlets for their drives. Before we accomplish this, we would be fools to continue to impose taboos upon them.

A Healthy Place For Cannabis in Irish Society

As I’ve mentioned earlier, the use of cannabis and other substances provides us with an escape – a disconnection from social expectations, responsibilities, and a transcendence of immediate circumstances. We’re told that this is improper behaviour, so some of us live with an unhealthy relationship to it. We are the constituent parts of society and it’s functioning relies on our proper behaviour and filling of roles. At the same time we are self-aware individuals with needs and desires, both physical and spiritual. Those two functions need to be healthily balanced, and I submit that occasionally getting shit faced is a vital part of that process. We find ourselves on the downward trajectory after the peak of Western civilization and our society has begun to atrophy with us stuck inside it. It’s intolerable, frightening, angering, and disgusting. It demands every drop of our energy it can squeeze out without sufficiently angering us and gives that energy to the undeserving. It’s riddled with outmoded and broken social institutions that do more damage than good. We’re trapped in a physical, psychological, and philosophical nightmare that has no regard for our individual existence. Instead of seeing alcohol and drug use as escapism and thus using it to escape, we should see their occasional use as an opportunity to forge social bonds, decompress from social pressures, and transcend psychological and social roles, with the aim of reshaping our doomed society. Psychedelics and other substances have been historically used in ritual context for these very purposes by the peoples of the world up until our recent cultural evolution which relegated the substances to the category of abuse. A conscious re-establishment of this institution is vital to combating abuse and furthering society. This is the one caveat I would like Ireland to keep in mind as they gradually normalize the use of cannabis, because if we don’t we risk either crash-landing into a super-prohibitive society or the Aldous Huxley nightmare of constantly being doped up.