![](\"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Jeff-Spiccoli-1.jpg\")
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Before Alex Berenson, there was Merle Haggard. And before cannabis was blamed<\/a> for America\u2019s mass-shooting epidemic, there was the lazy stoner stereotype.\u00a0<\/p>\n Country music\u2019s conservative retort to the 1960s counterculture movement, Haggard recorded a string of reactionary anthems in the early 1970s\u2014part of the backlash to the Great Society and the civil-rights movement that then-President Richard Nixon deliberately stoked to eke out a narrow election in 1968. Haggard derided the use of drugs, including cannabis (\u201cOkie from Muskogee\u201d), as well as perceived shiftiness and the welfare state (\u201cWorkin\u2019 Man Blues\u201d). In so doing, Haggard also, as author Josiah Hesse documented<\/a> in Runner\u2019s High,<\/em> fueled a then-innovative way to denigrate and marginalize cannabis use.\u00a0<\/p>\n Helped along by other bleary-eyed, shifty representations in film and music, Merle Haggard<\/a> helped create the myth of the lazy stoner. This is indeed a myth, as recent research shows. Yet it is one that refuses to die, despite repeated debunking. But hidden in the tired allusions to Cheech & Chong and Spiccoli (has anyone over the age of 40 actually seen Fast Times at Ridgemont High<\/em>?) and slightly fresher Seth Rogen references is a secret of American political and cultural discourse.<\/p>\n For at least a century, weed has been a handy weapon in the culture war. And it remains so. Instead of vanishing, anti-cannabis hysteria evolves with the times. Reefer madness\u2019s evolution, from fears over \u201cIndian hemp\u201d printed in early 20th-century yellow journalism to lascivious women and violent men of color to aimless burnt-out hippies, suggests anti-cannabis sentiment is a mirror that reflects the fears and grievances of the time\u2014not anything that the plant does per se.\u00a0<\/p>\n Today, as legalization grows more popular than any politician, anti-cannabis sentiment appears to be shifting gears yet again. So, it\u2019s worthwhile to review the full arc of history, in order to preview the next propaganda cycle.<\/p>\n Legalizing marijuana often means more crime, more violence, and more impaired driving. <\/p>\n California’s experience is a warning for Arkansas. <\/p>\n Vote NO on Issue 4. https:\/\/t.co\/SdFsjPSvvB<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) September 13, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n \u201cLazy stoners\u201d bounced around the news cycle this past fall. Researchers at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom<\/a> discovered that, based on a survey of 274 adolescent and adult cannabis users, who were asked to rate their feelings of apathy and enjoyment, you can smoke weed every day and enjoy life as much (or as little) as people who abstain.\u00a0<\/p>\n They discovered this, they said<\/a> in a news release, much to their astonishment.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe were surprised to see that there was really very little difference between cannabis users and non-users when it came to lack of motivation or lack of enjoyment, even among those who used cannabis every day,\u201d Martine Skumlien, a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge\u2019s Department of Psychiatry, was quoted in a news release as saying. \u201cThis is contrary to the stereotypical portrayal we see on TV and in movies.\u201d<\/p>\n The fact that a researcher at one of the best universities on the planet is surprised that cannabis users aren\u2019t all The Dude or Jesse Pinkman is a data point for how durable the lazy stoner stereotype has proven to be. You can thank popular culture for perpetuating this myth, but science isn\u2019t helping. Other studies have found<\/a> evidence for \u201camotivational syndrome,\u201d first described<\/a> in American scientific literature in 1968, but another part of the problem is every refutation is treated as if it\u2019s the first.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Cambridge research followed a 2021 study published in the Harm Reduction Journal, which found<\/a> light and moderate cannabis users to be more physically active than non-users. If Skumlien and her colleagues missed this earlier research, it would explain their surprise. But there\u2019s also an issue with the premise. As they note, \u201climited scientific evidence exists to support\u201d the claim that cannabis use is linked to amotivational syndrome. \u00a0<\/p>\n This means the lazy stoner myth is a political-cultural creation.<\/p>\n Social sciences are frustratingly vague for anyone who eats raw data. And though it\u2019s hard to pinpoint with total accuracy\u2014an 1893 report from British health officials in colonial India also noted<\/a> \u201capathy\u201d and \u201clethargy\u201d in heavy users\u2014the modern-day shiftless stoner trope does appear to have entered the American cultural consciousness in the Nixon era, when Merle Haggard was slagging on hippies<\/a> wearing Roman sandals and using LSD rather than cowboy boots and moonshine.<\/p>\n As mentioned before, the first appearance of cannabis as an amotivator appeared in American scientific literature in 1968. The following year, in his first year as president, Nixon convened a blue-ribbon panel. Ostensibly to study the cannabis question, the president \u201csaw the commission as a means to establish the dangers of cannabis,\u201d a \u201chit job\u201d that would demonize and marginalize Nixon\u2019s political enemies: the antiwar movement, coterminous with the broader \u201chippie movement,\u201d and Black people, as Robert Solomon, a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine wrote<\/a> in a 2020 journal article.<\/p>\n The money quote came years later from John Ehrlichman, a top Nixon adviser.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe knew we couldn\u2019t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,\u201d Ehrlichman is quoted<\/a> as telling a Harper\u2019s magazine writer in 1994 (though the interview did not appear until 2016).\u00a0 \u201cWe could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt was just an easy way to smear the counter-culture,\u201d says Martin A. Lee, an author and historian of a popular history on LSD as well as Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana<\/em>. \u201cHere are hippies all about dropping out, and here\u2019s this weed they\u2019re smoking making them amotivated.\u201d<\/p>\n As even casual scholars of cannabis history will tell you, in creating the moral panic required to get Congress to pass the Controlled Substances Act, Nixon and Ehlrichman were following a familiar script, albeit one they tinkered with appropriately. Forty years before that, Harry Anslinger, the US\u2019s \u201cfirst drug czar\u201d as head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, launched another scare campaign to pressure Congress into passing the Marihuana Tax Act.\u00a0<\/p>\n Back then, far from making users lazy, cannabis was portrayed as some kind of demon loco weed\u2014one that inspires \u201cNegroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers\u201d to create \u201cSatanic music, jazz and swing\u201d and \u201cwhite women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and others.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Anslinger himself was unoriginal. He borrowed his line from newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, whose papers spread the fake news that weed led to murder and insanity. One paper once claimed that you could grow enough cannabis in a single window planter to \u201cdrive the whole population of the United States stark, raving mad.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n These were \u201cthe great fears of the time,\u201d Solomon told Cannabis Now<\/em> in an interview. What politicians\u2019 shifting demonization of cannabis reveals is the willingness of politicians to be \u201cdemagogues,\u201d he said. \u201cThey don\u2019t care if what they\u2019re saying is true or not as long as they get re-elected.\u201d<\/p>\n There are signs that the reefer madness cycle has returned to the violence trope.\u00a0<\/p>\n Earlier this summer, Fox News host Laura Ingraham ran a segment in which she connected cannabis legalization to the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. This month, Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton tweeted that \u201c[l]egalizing marijuana often means more crime, more violence, and more impaired driving.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s not true, studies have found, but that doesn\u2019t matter. Conservatives are currently building a case that Democrat-run big cities are crime-ridden cesspools. For the first time in history, all of America\u2019s biggest cities have legal cannabis. It may be hard to say that hustler-friendly New York and Chicago are full of shiftless wastes; it may be easier to claim these cities are crime-infested.<\/p>\n Cannabis can then be presented as the handy culprit when need arises.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a shifting narrative responding to whatever\u2019s in the culture at that time,\u201d Lee observed. \u201cThe contradictions don\u2019t matter.\u201d<\/p>\n The post Why The Stoner Stereotype Keeps Shifting<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Before Alex Berenson, there was Merle Haggard. And before cannabis was blamed for America\u2019s mass-shooting epidemic, there was the lazy stoner stereotype.\u00a0 Country music\u2019s conservative retort to the 1960s counterculture movement, Haggard recorded a string of reactionary anthems in the early 1970s\u2014part of the backlash to the Great Society andContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":59976,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,99,1860,16740,16741,16742,3949,9507,16743,3799],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59975"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59975"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59975\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59977,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59975\/revisions\/59977"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n\n
Lazy Stoners Are Dead. Long Live Lazy Stoners.<\/h4>\n
\n![\"stoner](\"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Jeff-Spiccoli.jpg\")
<\/a>From Violence To Shiftlessness\u2026\u00a0<\/h4>\n
\n![\"Reefer](\"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Reefer-Madness-Poster.jpg\")
<\/a>\u2026Back To Violence<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: Why The Stoner Stereotype Keeps Shifting<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"