48 lines
2.7 KiB
Plaintext
48 lines
2.7 KiB
Plaintext
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 1993 22:13:02 -0600 (CST)
|
|
From: Steven VanderStaay <vandesl@OKRA.MILLSAPS.EDU>
|
|
Subject: return of the herb
|
|
Sender: Drug Abuse Education Information and Research <DRUGABUS@UMAB.BITNET>
|
|
Message-id: <01H6FZ9DA7R691W1RB@YMIR.Claremont.Edu>
|
|
|
|
The NEW YORKER (11/22) featured an interesting sketch of Ansley Hamid,
|
|
who teaches anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Hamid, who
|
|
studies drug use in Harlem, has recently noted an increase in marijuana use--an
|
|
increase he is pleased with. The piece caught my eye as the teenage
|
|
crack-dealers I'm now studying smoke marijuana as an alternative to cocaine--an
|
|
alternative that pleases me ("Coke makes you trigger happy," they tell me, "The
|
|
weed eases your mind." They've been doing this for years, but the piece about
|
|
Hamid made me wonder if the trend is a larger one and if, in fact, it does bode
|
|
well for our inner cities. If bringing more marijuana into such areas could, as
|
|
Hamid argues, reduce crack usage and provide a soothing effect on the
|
|
community, a new twist could be added to the legalization argument.
|
|
|
|
excerpts from the sketch:
|
|
|
|
Ansley Hamid, a gray-haired, forty-nine-yar old professor, is something
|
|
of a celebrity in Harlem. On the crowded corenr of 132nd and frederick Douglass
|
|
, and in any number of the gutted tenements that line Adam Clayton Powell
|
|
bouldevard, he is welcomed with backslaps and expressive hellos...
|
|
Since the early eighties, Professor Hamid has appeared in the area at
|
|
irregular yet not unpredictable intervals: with the emergence of each new
|
|
innercity trend in drug consumption comes the Professor, notebook in hand, to
|
|
monitor the drug's arrival, its flourishing, and its fading away. In 1984, for
|
|
instance,he was one of the first to note and document the growing use of the
|
|
cocaine derivative crack...
|
|
Visiting his old haunts...early last summer, Professor H began sniffing
|
|
that acrid smell which said to him that the smoking of marijuana, long a Harlem
|
|
fixture, was on the rise. And this fall he has discovered twelve undergound,
|
|
over-the-counter pot stores in West Harlem...
|
|
P. Hamid is not at all worried about the development [marijuana]...he
|
|
spoke of marijuana's offering a third way between crack and sobriety..."Crack
|
|
takes all your chances away, he said. "That drug makes you think only of that
|
|
drug. But marijuana--it reminds you of everything, and it can give the whole
|
|
world back."
|
|
Later, as he headed downtown, toward home, he returned to the topic of
|
|
marijuana, and how happy he was to have it back. "In the sixties, black men
|
|
went off and got stoned and came back wanting to open crafts stores--a threat
|
|
neither to themselves nor to others," he said. "It was a time of progress."
|
|
|
|
Steven VanderStaay
|
|
Millsaps College
|
|
Jackson, Mississippi
|