Meet the Anti-Pot Activists
Meet the Anti-Pot Activists
Pot tours, weed tastings , and cannabis cabaret. Stealing the spotlight from opponents of marijuana legalization are the commercialized weed events they warned would normalize the drug. Who’s laughing now, you ask? They are.
“Calling it ‘medical marijuana’ is a joke,” says Carla Lowe, 75-year-old founder of Citizens Against Legalizing Marijuana. “It’s been a joke from the beginning.”
The former K-12 teacher with five grown children has spent the past 33 years as an anti-drug activist in California. With the organization she created, nicknamed CALM, Lowe has made it her mission to dispel the “lies” circulating about cannabis—a drug she first witnessed while substitute teaching in the 1970s (“these kids with long hair kept giggling in the back of the class”). Correlations between her students’ performance (“they weren’t focusing”) and their apparent use of the drug worried Lowe. But it wasn’t until she suspected that her teenage son had gotten involved (“he grew his hair out, he didn’t want to swim anymore”) that she decided to take up the fight herself. While witnessing a UC Davis study on marijuana, she was “horrified” to see THC-injected monkeys looking “apathetic,” lying around their cages. “You know who they reminded me of?” she asks me. “They reminded me of the kids.”
Lowe says what she saw has “stuck with her.” She rapidly switches from one argument to the next as if performing on a game show. “It’s illegal under federal law, and it’s illegal because it’s a dangerous drug,” she says. “Federal law reigns supreme.” On a hunter green poster she hands out to visitors, Lowe has printed a huge definition of marijuana: “It is a fat soluble, mind altering, highly toxic drug that remains in the body for up to one month, building up with each additional joint. The two organs most affected are the brain and sexual organs.”
Despite conflicting conclusions on how marijuana affects the brain (there are both studies proving it does and it doesn’t), Lowe vehemently defends her assertion that it makes people dumber. Humans aside, of course, there are other concerns for Lowe, who describes herself as “kind of” an environmentalist. “They are raping of our forest! They’re killing people,” she nearly yells, unprompted. Who is killing? I ask. “The growers. They will do anything to protect their crops.” And while Lowe admits that cannibidiol, the non-psychoactive component of marijuana, can have positive effects on certain patients (she cites epilepsy), she’s not satisfied with simply medical journals as proof. “I understand people who say I think it makes me feel better, but it’s not the criteria used. That’s just an anecdote.”
It’s “anecdotes” like these that Smart Colorado is looking to amend. Started in 2010 by Diane Carlson and a few others, SC is a citizen-led organization focused on providing education for kids following marijuana’s legalization. “There is no knowledge. They don’t know anything until they get caught,” says Carlson, a mother of five in Denver. “There aren’t enough regulations. Right now you could buy an entire ounce of marijuana. That’s enough to get an entire high school high.” With no tracking system in place, Carlson said she foresees buyers virtually hopscotching through her city buying ounce after ounce. Still, while Smart Colorado openly opposed Amendment 64 and continues to find it problematic, it has no plans to talk repeal. Born from a conversation with a group of teens to find out what was standing in their way (“most said weed”), its goal is awareness. “No matter how anybody feels, the science is there: This isn’t great for our kids.”
Of equal vigor but less enthusiasm is Tom Gorman, the 70-year-old director of the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, which brings state and national resources to target major drug-trafficking organizations. “I don’t make any bones against it—I am against legalizing marijuana,” he says. A staunch opponent of Amendment 64, Gorman watched as the Centennial State’s medical-marijuana program led to an apparent increase in violence and an expanded black market.
Now, with recreational marijuana legal, he predicts Colorado will soon look like a scene from the Wild Weed West. “We’re worried that Mexican cartels and organized crime will come in and try to get a piece of the action,” Gorman told The Daily Beast. “I predict that within six years in Colorado there will be an initiative on the ballot to repeal Amendment 64.” He believes that legalized recreational marijuana will prove toxic for teens—both psychically and mentally. “When it starts impacting our youth, that’s when minds will change. That’s our future.”
No anti-pot activist seems to have the future more in mind than Bob Doyle, executive director of the Colorado Tobacco Education and Prevention Alliance. He fears that marijuana industry is pushing a similar agenda. “This is the next tobacco industry,” he says. “The focus is going to be on increasing use and increasing addiction.” If Doyle is right, he says Amendment 64 put public health in jeopardy. “I’ve seen the script before,” he says, referring literally to blueprints from the tobacco industry that are now available. “I’ve seen this movie before. We shouldn’t make the same mistakes again.”
Mason Tvett, director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project and one of the co-directors of the campaign behind Amendment 64, is unfazed by his opponents. “At this point anyone who argues that marijuana doesn’t have medical benefits is likely to be laughed out of the room. The book is closed on that one,” he told The Daily Beast. It’s keeping teens in the dark about marijuana’s risks versus alcohol, he says, that is irresponsible. “They say they don’t want teens to think marijuana is less harmful than alcohol—because it’s true. These people are scared of the truth."
Related from The Daily Beast
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