PrintApril 13, 2007
What are they Smoking?
"What are you smoking?" is a familiar question meant to imply mental impairment from the ingestion of controlled substances, usually in a sarcastic vein. But I have to wonder if we shouldn't be paying closer attention to this very question when it comes to understanding the increasingly paranoid subculture of marijuana activists, visible on the internet and in public events.
I don't know if it's true, but there's a story about Mexican drug traffickers cutting smuggled marijuana with dried horse manure. When I first acquired this information I dismissed it as nonsensical trivia. After viewing a C-SPAN program featuring Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia addressing the American Enterprise Institute and Justice Scalia having to deal with a heckler, I began to wonder if the marijuana laced horse manure story is in fact, true.
After being forcibly ushered out of the question-and-answer session by the speech organizers for disruptive behavior, the disrespectful ruffian heckler, seething with anger, accused the organizers of being Nazis. I immediately recognized the insult as a drug culture slur, one that I was first exposed to when reading about how the Bush Administration had imprisoned recreational drug superstar, actor Tommy Chong, for selling bongs from his Internet web site. I was perusing the Cannabis News Network for background information for another piece and found the drug user chat rooms ablaze with livid druggies paying hate rants to Bush; "Nazi" was mild name calling compared to other insults.
I point this out because the Internet has created a forum for the drug use fraternity that is morphing into an angry cult resembling 1930's Nazi Germany fervor. These people are angry-dangerously angry-and Kool-Aid drinking crazy. I consider the Nazi slur as a projection of the accusers' own secular progressive weed-cult mindset.
When trying to explain this unhealthy and irrational anger one has to suspect that the mind-altering recreational drugs are in part the cause of their boiling rage. However, something has changed. Pot smokers once were docile, they got stoned, and then they would munch and vegetate. But somehow everything has changed-they are beginning to act like bodybuilders on steroids. Could it be that marijuana users are also taking an aggression-inducing drug?
From a business standpoint, it is easy to understand why a recreational drug smuggler would want to cut marijuana with horse manure. A pound of marijuana sells for around four thousand dollars on the street. At that price if the smuggler were to cut the marijuana with one ounce per pound of dried horse manure, he could realize a gain of $250 dollars per pound. Even if the buyer became aware of the shortchanging, to whom are they going to complain?
I'm going to take some writer's liberty and speculate that a Mexican drug smuggler is wealthy, wealthy enough to afford horses, well-bred horses that get only the best treatment, maybe even racehorses. Well-muscled valuable racehorses that are expected to win races. I would also suspect that he would have a breeding program creating a stable of yearlings from which he could select the best horses. Now, this drug smuggler really isn't interested in playing by the rules; after all, he got wealthy by breaking the rules. What's to keep him from selling a mix of marijuana and manure? He has the financial incentive to do so. If he is that unscrupulous, what is to keep him from doctoring his yearlings before he offers them for sale?
Now let's consider the business end of the horse. The equine digestive tract is similar to humans in that they have only one stomach. The natural feeding habit of the horse is to often eat small amounts of roughage. Domestication has changed all of this: horses are now expected to eat large amounts of concentrate once or twice a day. This greatly undermines the horse's digestive capabilities. It has been established that we can improve the digestive efficiency of a horse by feeding it small meals often, but this has to be weighed against the labor costs of doing so. The rate of passage of food through the stomach is highly variable, depending on how the horse is fed. Passage time may be as short as 15 minutes when the horse is consuming a large meal. If the horse is fasted, it will take 24 hours for the stomach to clear.
In the horse racing world, occasionally, a buyer will purchase a yearling and later discover that the horse is shrinking, yes shrinking, it's muscle mass seems to be going away. Although temporary the condition is caused by the fact that the new owner is no longer giving the horse anabolic steroids. Steroids were the rage in the late ‘80s; however, they are now pretty much gone in racing because they are easy to detect. Unethical individuals, however, will put a marginal yearling on a highly concentrated regimen of anabolic steroids to pump up the horse in an effort to fetch a better price at the sale barn. Savvy veteran buyers can spot pumped up horses, but for the novice, the big muscles are quite an enticement. Marginal horses can now become very valuable. Rarely are yearlings checked for steroids before purchase. One tip off is the demeanor of the horse: an aggressive attitude accompanies the use of anabolic steroids.
The bodybuilding community has developed a term for this aggressive behavior: "Roid rage" is the descriptive term for steroid-induced "spontaneous, highly aggressive, out-of-control behavior where the police either were called or should have intervened." A few researchers have suggested that psychiatric symptoms including increased aggression are a common side effect of anabolic steroid use. The researchers do not rule out, however, the possibility that in a small minority of predisposed individuals, "steroid use may be sufficient to push them over the edge and contribute to irrational or violent behavior."
Veterinary steroids were responsible for the record-breaking performance of Ben Johnson, the guy from Canada, who became the villain of the 1988 Olympics. Public outrage over Johnson's steroid-fueled victory at the Seoul games led the way for the Anabolic Steroid Control Act in 1990. Like other drugs made illegal, a black market sprouts up to supply consumers. Today, Tijuana, Mexico is a haven for veterinary pharmacy shops (over 200) that supply anything the steroid consumer could ever desire.
Without dwelling on the point, let's speculate that horses often urinate and defecate in the same place, and that concentrations of the spent fuel are left to dry. Later this cocktail, including quantities of un-metabolized anabolic steroids, becomes marijuana mix fiber. Remember, feeding programs can have a negative effect on digestive capabilities; large amounts of feed combined with steroids can pass quickly through the digestive tract and result in poor absorption of the feed as well as the steroids. Is it possible that sufficient quantities of the steroids pass and have a secondary effect on the next user, the dope smoker?
Smoking is a drug delivery method for narcotics as well as steroids. Granted, further investigation is necessary to prove or disprove my theory as to why we have so much aggressive behavior from the weed cult, but the best way I can describe the anger is . . . They're smoking horse manure!
