Marijuana and medieval Muslim drug wars

The anti-marijuana movement is a major obstacle to ending the drug wars that have raged across continents for over fifteen centuries. Beginning in 5th century North Africa, religious factions targeted users of illicit substances in much the way prohibitionists do today. Drug users were scapegoated for social problems unrelated to their drug use while cannabis consumption itself was made a shibboleth—a means of exposing hidden identities, ethnicities, heresies, and political agendas.

Ritualized persecutions of ostracized individuals and groups that consume marijuana have ensured that drug laws remain repressive and dangerous. It’s a simple process. Scapegoating a material substance such as marijuana for society’s problems is only one short step away from condemning the people who consume it:

The Sufis were not the only group blamed for the destruction caused by hashish. The fabled Haydar was an older contemporary of Genghis Khan, and about the time of Haydar’s death, the Mongols were poised to invade the lands of Islam [13th century CE]. Blaming moral and material ills of any kind upon the machinations of foreigners and enemies is a common human trait. Thus the Mongols were a natural target for those searching for an explanation of what brought about a social evil assumed to have reached dangerous proportions in their times. – Franz Rosenthal, The Herb: Hashish Versus Medieval Muslim Society – (c. 1971), p. 54.

The religious theme runs deep in drug prohibition. President Richard Nixon’s henchman, John Ehrlichman—who admitted to counseling Nixon to use marijuana criminalization to crack down on alleged pot smoking political opponents—was a member of the Christian Science religion as was Nixon advisor H. R. Haldeman. Christian Science rejects any reliance on the medical or recreational use of drugs. It claims drugs interfere with spiritual healing, so it practices faith healing instead. Its members would literally rather die than consume a drug, and they do. Haldeman died of abdominal cancer in 1993 while refusing any medicinal treatments or painkillers, including marijuana.

Kevin Sabet, a founder (along with co-founders Patrick J. Kennedy and David Frum) of the anti-marijuana organization Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM), is a member of the Baha’i faith, a Muslim sect founded in 1863 that currently comprises about 8-million members scattered throughout the world. In contrast to the tolerance shown by Sufism toward marijuana, Baha’i strongly forbids cannabis as well as alcohol consumption, except for medicinal purposes. Baha’i was founded by Bahá’u’lláh, who warned against any substance that induces “sluggishness and torpor” and harms the body. Abdu’l-Bahá, his son and successor, called hashish “the worst of all intoxicants” and described its effects as causing “disintegration of thought and the complete torpor of the soul.” Baha’i’s hostility toward marijuana consumers has been surpassed by persecution of the Baha’i themselves, particularly in Iran where the 1979 Islamic Revolution caused the deaths of about 200 Baha’i.

As Baha’i’s most celebrated disciple, Kevin (Abraham) Sabet, President and CEO of SAM, has a political science degree from Berkeley (2001) and a social policy degree from Oxford (2007). His medical opinions regarding marijuana are often exposed as demonstrably false when subjected to the rigors and conclusions of modern science. Sabet himself is not formally trained in any specific physical, biological, pharmaceutical or medical science. He is not a professional psychiatrist with an actual medical degree in psychiatry, even though he somehow managed to attain a position as Assistant Professor Adjunct of Psychiatry at Yale University, as well as an Adjunct Assistant Professorship at the University of Florida School of Medicine—Drug Policy Institute.

The narrow lens through which Kevin Sabet views marijuana is inherently Islamic, moralizing, self-aggrandizing, and self-enriching, not medical or scientific. He opposes policies that would expand scientific research on marijuana’s potential as a medical treatment. Both Sabet and Patrick Kennedy want each ingredient of medical cannabis to be pharmaceutically sourced, packaged individually, and distributed separately in pill or skin patch form, making the natural source, the marijuana flower in all its THC, CBD and aromatic terpene glory unavailable. Doing this would preclude any potential entourage effect that might occur among marijuana’s various constituents.

Sabet’s Big Pharma style prescription drug preferences are distinctly American. Europeans and many people of other nations don’t object to combining or taking their medications in the form of herbal supplements or natural ingredients. They are more likely to visit a local drug compounder to obtain their drugs in some more preferable or convenient form. They’re willing to swallow a dry magic mushroom they grew at home in preference to taking a boring and expensive pill at a psychiatric clinic.

Smoking or vaporizing marijuana is the quickest, most efficient, and most convenient means of consuming marijuana’s active ingredients. Sabet’s lifelong crusade to penalize herbal marijuana consumers for how and why they consume marijuana has helped initiate thousands of needless criminal arrests. It has resulted in premature and unnecessarily agonizing deaths for those who were subsequently denied marijuana for use as a palliative. Like many religious extremists throughout history, Kevin Sabet doesn’t appear to concern himself with the harm that he, his organizations, and his ideologies produce.

In contrast to Baha’i, religions that use intoxicants in their religious practices for spiritual healing and to enhance the soul include Catholicism that uses wine, the Native American Church that uses peyote, Rastafarianism that uses cannabis, Hinduism that uses cannabis and soma, Bwiti that uses iboga (Gabon, West Africa), ancient Greek religions that used opium and other psychoactives, Amazonian indigenous religions that use ayahuasca, and Mazatec (Mexico) that uses psilocybin mushrooms. Under some U.S. federal laws each of the named religions in theory has a federal legal right to practice their religions using their chosen sacramental herbs, even though infidels, atheists, secularists, Mongols (Tibetan Buddhists), Israelites, and heathens who might want to claim cannabis or another drug as their own personal sacrament currently do not enjoy a federal legal right to possess either cannabis, psilocybin, peyote, ibogaine, LSD, or MDMA (Ecstasy).

The marijuana legalization movement shows no sign of weakening as more people throughout the world add cannabis to their shopping lists. Cannabis consumers encourage drug peace, not drug wars. A workable drug peace will necessitate an absolute separation of church and state on issues regarding drugs and their use. Dominionistic sects and religions such as Catholicism, Baha’i, Mormonism and Evangelicalism that reject recreational use of marijuana so they can dominate other religious groups or citizens must not be given a legal, social, or moral standing in either determining or undermining the alternative lives and successful social adaptations of others regarding their drug use. Ending the drug war means drug use by adults who are fully and truthfully educated about drugs must be treated as a fundamental human right in the fight to preserve domestic tranquility and the rights of citizens everywhere to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.