Epilogue: Science, Truth and Tomorrow
By Prof Tim
Harry Anslinger was not a scientist. He was a political hack who invented an alternate reality to serve his own selfish motives. Sound familiar?
People like Harry Anslinger are not fans of science. Anyone who makes their living off of calculated deceit tends to be an enemy of science. Science is not perfect, but it is the best means that humans have ever invented for distinguishing between truth and falsehood. The difference between scientists and people like Harry Anslinger is that scientists insist that truth must correspond with verifiable facts.
Harry Anslinger managed to deceive a lot of people for a long time, but his Reefer Madness delusion could not carry on forever. There are simply too many facts that contradict Anslinger’s Reefer Madness fairy tale. It is unfortunate that Anslinger’s fabrications went unchallenged for as long as they did, but that’s the way it is with truth regimes. The authors of truth regimes are usually bullies who want to intimidate their opponents into silence. Copernicus (1995) published his magnum opus, On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres, posthumously because he feared the wrath of the Catholic Church. When Galileo published a pro-Copernicus screed, the Roman Inquisition threatened to kill him (Hofstadter, 2010).
Truth regimes play hardball.
Even though the Catholic Church intimidated Galileo into recanting, thanks to science, the truth eventually won out (Sobel, 1999). The time has arrived to dump Harry Anslinger’s anti-scientific Reefer Madness truth regime into the same dustbin that disposed of geocentrism. That won’t happen until people, like the many contributors to this volume, stand up and fight for scientific truth. Bullies are cowards. They tend to cut and run when their adversaries push back.
The next time you hear a Harry Anslinger acolyte, like Jeff Sessions, make an ignorant comment about cannabis—such as, “I thought those guys [the Ku Klux Klan] were OK until I learned they smoked pot” (Lee, 2017) —I urge you to act like a good scientist and push back. That is how science makes progress. Science vanquishes ignorance by demanding that truth must comply with the facts.
Too much social and scientific progress has been held up for far too long by ignorance-peddlers like Harry Anslinger and Jeff Sessions. There is too much to be gained by forging ahead with scientific investigations of cannabis to allow obstructionists to delay the inevitable for yet another day.
Forward!
References
Copernicus, Nicolaus. 1995. On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres. Prometheus Books.
Hofstadter, Dan. 2010. The Earth Moves: Galileo and the Roman Inquisition. WW Norton & Company.
Lee, Michelle Ye Hee. 2016. “Jeff Sessions’s Comments on Race: For the Record.” Washington Post, December 2, 2016.
Sobel, Dava. 1999. Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love. Bloomsbury Publishing, USA.
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