Dr. Drew and “marijuana addicts”
Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 6:20 pm | By: Radical Russ
Driving home tonight, the radio was on a station I don’t normally listen to and the Dr. Drew show was on. He got a call from a young man, age 23, about to graduate college and become a teacher. The man admits to smoking marijuana daily since about age 16. Man wants to know how long he needs to stop smoking pot in order to pass his drug test to become a teacher. Dr. Drew tells him two months, tells him he is a marijuana “addict”, responds that there is no such thing as “psychological addiction”, says every marijuana “addict” he treats in California has their medical marijuana card (well, duh, who wants to be arrested?), tells the young man that the marijuana “addiction” has put him in denial and led to “drug motivational” thinking because the young man admitted he only wanted to know how long to stop smoking so he could pass and then start smoking again after he became a teacher.
The problem I have with the Dr. Drew show I heard is this reflexive labeling of someone who uses marijuana daily as an “addict”. This young man sounds like he’s doing OK. He’s graduating college at age 23, just about right on time. He’s becoming a teacher. If he was drinking a beer every day, would he be an alcoholic? Would his promise to drink beer after he became a teacher be an example of “alcoholic motivational thinking?” The only problem he has is the illegality of marijuana and the idiocy of collecting people’s urine to judge their fitness for teaching children.
Some people have an unhealthy relationship with cannabis. According to NIDA, about 9% of users can develop marijuana dependence. All I ask is that Dr. Drew make it clear that 91% of us are not dependent, we just like to use cannabis! Like Hunter S. Thompson said, it’s like beer, ice, and grapefruit – you could live your life without it, but why?
To be fair, Dr. Drew also says that if you want to smoke pot, go ahead, he doesn’t want to stop anyone, but if you want to stop and want help he can help you. (For a hefty fee, of course, though I think he failed to mention that.) I think he’s probably not in favor of arresting and imprisoning pot smokers. But when all you’ve got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail – he’s a drug counselor who sees only the most desperately addicted day after day, so every pot smoker looks like a future client to him.
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