So far, the Food and Drug Administration has OKed the study. The current hurdle is the Department of Health and Human Services, which must give the OK in order for Doblin and his team to obtain the marijuana for the study. It's not a matter of hooking up with a local dealer and obtaining the stuff. The marijuana has to come from the official US Government crop at the University of Mississippi.
If, instead of studying the beneficial aspects of marijuana, Dr. Doblin wanted to study its harmful effects, it's clear he would have a much easier time of it with the Feds.
Getting to the Nitty Gritty
"I'm not a psychologist or a therapist dealing with individual patients," he told the Israeli attendees. "I'm a public policy person dealing with sick public policies."
In his Israel remarks, he cites the rise of religious fundamentalism. He is fair and mentions all of the big three: Islam, Judaism and Christianity. "I think this rise of fundamentalism is pretty much the core problem in the world right now," he says. He means the separation and division of people from other people. He sees marijuana as a counter to this us-versus-them sense of difference between peoples that is so much an engine for violence and warfare.
"For many of us, psychedelics -- and marijuana especially -- have helped us have experiences of connection, mystical experiences where you feel part of everything, and that there's a deeper sense of identity than our religion or our country or our gender or our race; and that once you have this deeper sense of identity, you're more likely to be tolerant, you're more likely to appreciate differences rather than be scared by differences. And that's where peacemaking can come from."
My wife has said for years the reason marijuana is illegal is that it makes an individual less in awe of power and authority and more in awe of the process of living, and the beauty and joy that goes along with that process. For me, it has a lot to do with Freud's idea of the life instinct versus the death instinct.
"[T]he inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man," Freud writes in Civilization And It's Discontents . This aggression, he says, "constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization."
He goes on to say "civilization is a process of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that, families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. ...[T]he struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction ... is what all life essentially consists of."
Jungian analyst Loren E. Pedersen in Dark Hearts: The Unconscious Forces That Shape Men's Lives puts a Jungian spin on the destructive death instinct and sees it as the masculine focus on power as "a result of [men's] failure to incorporate the feminine in themselves."
The point is, if we're going to seriously address issues of post-traumatic-stress resulting from combat experience, the old, currently passà © notions of deep, unconscious forces at work in our day-to-day activities and decisions may be worth revisiting. And if something like a toke of marijuana helps inject a little Eros into a life stuck in the hell of death -- that is a good thing.
The days of pure behaviorist manipulation and the treatment of mental problems with harsh, numbing prescription drugs may be in need of revision. The smiling Dr. Doblin may be right: Marijuana may help a troubled combat vet regain some sense of belonging to a greater species of humanity than that represented by the flag and the Marine Corps Hymn. But, then, we're back to the subversive quality of marijuana. But maybe some people need a little subversiveness to help them climb out of the hell they find themselves caught in.
In his fine book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, war correspondent Chris Hedges nicely resurrects Freud's notion of Eros and Thanatos, the Greek term sometimes used for the death instinct. For Hedges, the former is "the impulse within us that propels us to become close to others" and the latter is "the impulse that works toward the annihilation of all living things, including ourselves."
Soldiers in war can be traumatically overwhelmed by violence and death. "The lust for violence, the freedom to eradicate the world around them, even human lives, is seductive," Hedges reports. "War ascendant wipes out Eros. War celebrates only power."
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