Reefer Madness

Seven decades ago, a film called Reefer Madness urgently warned parents that cannabis was the “enemy of innocent youth.” The drug, it cautioned, was destined to lead young people down a sin filled path laced with degradation, insanity, rape and murder. “Drug crazed abandon!” proclaimed a poster advertising the film. “A menace worse than death!”

Taken seriously at the time, the "morality tale" behind Reefer Madness is now the subject of much hilarity. Posters, t-shirts and mugs are available to purchase online bearing the film’s name, and its venerated cult status is such that not only has it been re-released in cinemas and on DVD, but it has even been adapted into a musical.

Yet though the cries of “worse than death!” are now widely recognised as ludicrous, strong traces of the moralistic rhetoric underpinning Reefer Madness can still be found in contemporary debates about cannabis. In the midst of the controversy surrounding the sacking of government drugs advisor David Nutt last year, for example, the then Home Secretary Alan Johnson warned that there were “thousands at risk of being sucked into a world of hopeless despair through drug addiction,” while tabloid newspapers urged readers to be aware of a “cannabis pandemic” and the “psychotic symptoms” associated with a new strain of “super-skunk.”

Like the plot of Reefer Madness, such claims are dramatically exaggerated. David Nutt has described the risk of psychotic illness as a result of smoking cannabis as “relatively small,” and his replacement as chief government drugs advisor, Professor Les Iverson, has also gone on record saying that links between cannabis and schizophrenia are “another scaremongering tactic from the anti-cannabis brigade.” Cannabis, according to Iverson, is “one of the safer” recreational drugs.

In the past, both Nutt and Iverson have also advocated legalisation; however, very few British politicians are willing to listen. Decriminalisation of cannabis would “send out the wrong messages” they often say, perhaps with a twisted vision of drug crazed abandon playing out in their minds. Though if drug policy is really about sending out the right and wrong messages, why does a substance as vicious and harmful as alcohol remain on the market? Surely, following the “messages” logic, alcohol should similarly be the subject of a ban.

But then, like cannabis, if banned alcohol would too be driven underground – its users criminalised, prosecuted, fined or even jailed. And the justice system has already got enough on its plate, what with all the psychotic stoners already clogging up the courts. In 2008/9, for instance, there were more than 167,500 cannabis related offences recorded in England and Wales alone.

The heart of the problem is prohibition itself, for with an estimated two – five million regular cannabis users in the UK, it has clearly failed in its mission to “stamp out drugs.” A new direction is necessary, and other countries are already leading the way. The Mexican president last week called for a “fundamental debate” on the “pros and cons” of drug legalisation, and in America a bill proposing the legalisation of cannabis will be on a Californian state ballot that will take place on November 2^nd.

Such moves clearly represent the future, yet in the UK our politicians remain stranded in the past – harping on about “sending out the wrong messages” as they fail spectacularly to move the wheels of history forwards and not back. It may be obvious to most that Reefer Madness is nothing more than a work of stilted fiction, but it seems that, in 2010, the stuffy British political elite are among the last still clinging desperately to its myths.

Cloned food: a new era of market nihilism

In 2001, Professor Ian Wilmut, the scientist who created Dolly the Sheep, sparked an ethical row when he described the cloning of farm animals for food as “a natural progression” and the “sensible thing to do”. In the context of global food shortages, cloned meat could be a “huge potential benefit to mankind,” he said. But nine years on, and on the back of revelations that cloned meat has inadvertently entered the British food chain for the first time, Wilmut’s prophesised benefits are yet to materialize. According to UN estimates, over a billion people are now “undernourished,” and this is a figure that continues to rise.

Still, as Wilmut’s prediction dissolves into history, in agricultural circles support continues to swell in favour of cloned animals. Last week, an anonymous British farmer told the New York Times he was “using milk from a cow bred from a clone as part of his daily production,” and the president of the Scottish National Farmers Union described stringent European cloning rules as “ridiculous.” Cloning is “widespread elsewhere in the world,” he said. “If you go to the US or Canada you will almost certainly be consuming meat and dairy products from cloned animals at every turn.”

Under EU legislation on “Novel Foods,” meat or dairy from cloned animals “cannot be put on the market without a safety assessment and a specific authorizing legal act.” But semen from millions of Bulls is imported into the EU every year – and most of it from America and Canada, where cloning is now widespread. As one EU official told the Telegraph: “It is more than probable [that among the imported semen] are doses from cloned animals. If just one per cent or 0.1 per cent is from cloned animals then there are 100,000s or 1,000s of first generation offspring.”

Loopholes in labelling laws mean that the offspring of cloned animals are not technically considered “genetically modified” under EU legislation. As such, produce derived from these animals in Europe – meats, cheeses, chocolates – slips under the radar. And some of it likely ends up in British supermarkets, even although the official stance of the Food Standards Agency is that food derived from the offspring of cloned animals still requires a special novel foods licence to be sold in the UK.

Like Professor Wilmut said in 2001, this is a “natural progression.” Not of nature itself, obviously, but of agribusiness. Because like any other capitalist enterprise, profit and efficiency, not ethics and egalitarianism, are the underlying principles of animal farming. An animal to a farmer is like a share to a stockbroker – not much more than a means to an end. Therefore, if a cloned cow can increase “efficiency” by producing larger quantities of milk, and a cloned bull can sire a whole herd of “elite” cattle, to the mind of the farmer, current EU legislation is not but a barrier to profits.

Hence frustrated British farmers have unsurprisingly begun to flout or bend cloning regulations. And as a weird air of science fiction sets in, it becomes clear that in the immediate sense what cloned animals represent is not a grave threat to public health; but rather, something that is potentially much worse. For what we are now entering is a new era of scientific, for-profit nihilism, based on a cruel and ideologically hazardous form of animal eugenics. While there will undoubtedly be rewards (financial, of course), the beneficiaries are unlikely to be the poor, or the hungry, or even the traditional farmers – never mind the animals themselves. In light of repeated warnings about the detrimental effects of animal agriculture, surely we need to be consuming less meat, not finding new ways to consume more. Now that would be a progression; that would be the sensible thing to do.

This article appeared originally at: http://www.opendemocracy.net/ryan-gallagher/cloned-food-open-your-throats-for-market-nihilism