I was born in 1940. One of the advantages still being alive is to talk to you. But looking back at how much the world has changed in my lifetime – the legal status of women, for example, has not changed a whole lot since 1940 because women had the right to vote. They had almost all of the rights that they have today. But in that time, I grew up at the end of the world in which girls can’t do that.
A young woman went to college to meet a nice young man from a nice family and get married and settle down and have two and a half children.
In the meantime, men went to college. We grew up in the traditional world of getting the set roles of men as well as women.
The idea was that you go to college and meet some nice young lady. Which had absolutely nothing to do with the women you’re having sex with because nice young women, well somebody didn’t do that until at least the second date.
I remember a neighbor describing her dog as.. “Not only does Suzy not know anything, she doesn’t suspect anything.” That pretty much described the attitude towards homosexuality. Even those of us who were gay didn’t know we were gay because there wasn’t a gay to be. It was something that, again, sort of like haircuts, we blame on the Beatles. All of a sudden the 60s came along, and there was this thing called marijuana. But don’t do it. And there was this thing called gay sex. But don’t do it. Then somebody figured out if you do it together, it was pretty damn good.
So the attitudes began to change. But again, these are the sex taboos and are not by any means simply a part of the Judeo-Christian tradition or various parts of all kinds of religious traditions and so on. The idea is that you just don’t talk about.
And of course, that solves all the problems right there, if you just don’t talk about it there are no problems right now because nobody’s talking about it. The problem with marijuana prohibition is that actually there is no basis for that in a religious tradition. So if we don’t want kids to be gay or to use marijuana, what is the solution? Well, it’s really very simple. You just don’t talk about it. And if you don’t talk about it, then the kids might never be gay or use marijuana. And if you’re doubly careful, they’ll never do both.
The fact is, is that in the case of sex, you do have all these biblical religious arguments and so on.
There was nothing like that for Marijuana on the contrary.
Ironically, the thing that forced the issue for both was AIDS, because it was actually working pretty well for you in the sense it was evolving. At the same time though, I think we had to evolve this system about marijuana, from just don’t all talk about. With AIDS all of a sudden we had to talk about homosexuality because it first hit in the gay community and became visible.
It was discovered basically in San Francisco first. So people with AIDS started to worry in San Francisco. They could go on to use marijuana, for various reasons, and began to observe that those who use marijuana live longer than those that don’t.
One of the things about the AIDS epidemic, the AIDS issue at first, was just don’t mention it. A very odd thing about the Reagan administration is they went years for without mentioning AIDS right in the middle of the AIDS epidemic. But you just talk about it. On the other hand, just say no became Nancy Reagan’s slogan.
If you really want to think, just saying no is not really a very good response. You know, what do you think about minimum Marilyn just saying no? What do you think about life sentences for possession of marijuana? Just say no. What do you think about 20 million arrests? Just say no. Oh, good. Okay, next topic.
These two issues came together in a very queer way that if you suddenly had to confront the fact, “oh, my brother, my cousin, my friend is gay”. And then he says the marijuana is keeping him along.
He’s my friend. My brother’s. My cousin. And Marijuana is keeping him alive. So this is a good thing, and we want to talk about it.
Let’s all hug about it in the future as we go forward. That’s what we’re trying to do now with CBD and the general context. We are going to talk about.
Because what is going on with CBD really is a microcosm of a much, much broader problem. The FDA cannot get around to looking at CBD because he’s very busy. But on the other hand, they haven’t gotten around to examining acetaminophen, otherwise the brand name of Tylenol, even though it kills people every year, either because it wipes out their kidney or their liver, depending on whether it’s chronic or overdose. In fact, they took forever to get around to persuading the manufacturers to put a penny of a warning label on their package. But no president of the United States, including Barack Obama, had the courage to say that marijuana does not belong.
Cannabis does not belong as a schedule one drug. Donald Trump claims to be draining the swamp and changing things for everybody. And he is not in favor of anything that Barack Obama was in favor of. I’ll say one thing for Donald Trump. Barack Obama presided over the arrests of hundreds of thousands of young, poor black men. I’ll bet you that Donald Trump could have stood up for rich white boys.
But let’s talk about.