"Meme Queen" Susan Blackmore on Cannabis

UPDATE 10/15: Blackmore is included in the new book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.

I just got clued in (by the erudite Alec Dixon of SC Labs) that VIP Susan Blackmore is even cooler than I knew. A well-known psychologist and author of the bestselling book The Meme Machine, Blackmore now has over 600,000 views for her TedTalk on "Memes and Temes."

Dr. Blackmore appeared at the 2005 Cheltenham Science Festival to discuss whether drugs can teach us anything about ourselves. A version of her talk was published in the Daily Telegraph on May 21 of that year. In it, she says:

"Some people may smoke dope just to relax or have fun, but for me the reason goes deeper. In fact, I can honestly say that without cannabis, most of my scientific research would never have been done and most of my books on psychology and evolution would not have been written. . . . Some evenings, after a long day at my desk, I'll slip into the bath, light a candle and a spliff, and let the ideas flow - that lecture I have to give to 500 people next week, that article I'm writing for New Scientist, those tricky last words of a book I've been working on for months. This is the time when the sentences seem to write themselves. Or I might sit out in my greenhouse on a summer evening among my tomatoes and peach trees, struggling with questions about free will or the nature of the universe, and find that a smoke gives me new ways of thinking about them." [Sounds similar to Carl Sagan's experience.]

"In just about every human society there has ever been, people have used dangerous drugs – but most have developed rituals that bring an element of control or safety to the experience," Blackmore continued. "In more primitive societies, it is shamans and healers who control the use of dangerous drugs, choose appropriate settings in which to take them and teach people how to appreciate the visions and insights that they can bring. In our own society, criminals control all drug sales. This means that users have no way of knowing exactly what they are buying and no-one to teach them how to use these dangerous tools. . .

"It's an old metaphor, but people often liken the task to climbing a mountain. The drugs can take you up in a helicopter to see what's there, but you can't stay. In the end, you have to climb the mountain yourself – the hard way. Even so, by giving you that first glimpse, the drugs may provide the inspiration to keep climbing."

Blackmore has recently published Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction and is a patron of the UK Drug Policy Reform organization Transform. See a collection of her writing in support of drug legalization.

Naturally, I had to make a meme for Blackmore.

A Little Leeway from the Washington Post

Following the Ruth Marcus I-smoked-pot-but-others-should-go-to-jail-for it column, the Washington Post has now published two opeds from its columnists in favor of marijuana legalization, one by E.J. Dionne Jr. and today's by the "mostly right of center" Kathleen Parker.

Dionne asserts he's not interested in smoking marijuana, partly because he fears it might lead him back to nicotine. Parker says she partied in her youth, and has given it up in favor of caffeine (she's a Starbucks gal).

Admitting that she once lied to her young children about her pot-smoking past, Parker now says, "The correct answer to all such questions is that any drug, including alcohol, is bad for children, hence a drinking age, even if many ignore it. Children’s brains aren’t fully formed, and they are not yet aware of the dangers that accompany impaired judgment. Mind-altering chemicals are bad for adults, too, if abused. But adults at least can make informed choices."

Parker takes pains to point out that Marcus's stance "isn’t hypocrisy, which I embrace in the service of civilization, so much as perspectives developed through maturity and experience." Her own perspective, as the parent of a three teenaged boys, lead her to support legalization, because, "I couldn’t imagine then or now that children might be labeled criminals for behaviors that mostly required parental attention."

Parker writes, "Regulate and tax the tar out of it, please, but let’s stop pretending that pot consumers are nefarious denizens of the underworld. Among those who enjoy a recreational smoke are the folks selling you a house, golfing on the ninth hole and probably an editor or two here and there."

Parker, known as a conservative columnist, showed how astute her thinking was when she called for fellow former puffer Sarah Palin to step down as VP nominee in 2008, calling her "clearly out of her league."

Meanwhile, Nancy Grace has gone off the deep end on this issue, raising a Reefer Madness-style specter of "people on pot that shoot each other, that stab each other, that strangle each other, that kill whole families — wipe out a whole family.”

As an example, she talked about the first pot case she saw as a prosecutor, with a “...gorgeous lady standing in the middle of the courtroom crying, and I didn’t understand what was going on. They said she was a stockbroker. She had got addicted to pot, ended up losing her job, wrecked her car, couldn’t make her house payments on her house, so her husband got custody of the children, and now she has no house, no car, no family, nothing.” Even if true, she didn't stab or strangle her family. And arguably, stockbrokers are the real criminals in our society.