This is an entertaining but also truly enraging piece of American history. Sloman has been admirably thorough in detailing the recent history of this fascinating herb and the culture and law that has accrued to it. It cannot in all fairness be said that he has remained truly "objective" as he clearly has a position of his own. However, it can be said that he appears to present facts fairly and has researched the documentation and interviewed the survivors where possible.
It is entertaining because Sloman is a fairly witty writer with a measured sense of self-deprecation. I found myself liking him.
It will enrage many because of the sheer, obstinate, blood-minded nature of the establishment's determination not to see anything in cannabis that might shake its institutional prejudices and because of the catastrophic human costs to which this has led. The USA has a massively disproportionate number of the world's prison population, and most of them are in, often for shockingly long sentences, because their country chooses to criminalise their private use of psychoactive herbs.
The word "fascist" has been heavily over-used, but in that fascism inheres in the suspension of freedoms justified by manufactured fear, US drug policy and Anslinger as an individual agent quite definitely qualify. The entire history of the establishment relationship with cannabis, not just in the USA but more widely in the Western world, has been one of creating inflated and selective accounts of harm associated with cannabis use in order to confabulate an agenda for criminalisation. It seems to come down to sociological prejudice against the Yippie and Hippie movements which Sloman describes, racial prejudice against black jazz culture and a simple unwillingness to let go of an unprofitable position in which so much has already been invested. Sloman's account of this will have libertarians spitting nails. Most infuriating is that these pious suits seem to regard the law as a mere tool to engineer society the way they want it; court rulings that endorse legitimate uses of cannabis are regarded as obstacles to be got around. The legalistic piety evaporates as soon as the law itself contradicts their true agenda. These are not people that hold the law to be supreme, these are people who regard the law as a stick with which to beat a lower class of people, and if it breaks in their hand they will grab another.
Sloman drew to my attention one important detail of US Constitutional law of which I was only dimly aware. There is a hindrance to unilateral legalisation in that the USA is party to international treaties regulating traffic in certain substances. Very much to the contrary of the "we're independent and can do what we want" talk that was flying about prior to the Iraq war, Article 6 of the Constitution establishes that international treaties to which the USA is signatory are the Law of the Land, entrenched on a comparable footing to the Constitution itself. This is a major obstacle to formal legalisation of which Sloman for the first time made me, not being from the USA, aware.
I must say, as a non-American, I would have preferred a work with a less parochial remit. In all fairness, though, it does come right out and say that it covers the American history of cannabis, so I have no grounds for complaint. The later section on medical cannabis alone, and the dirty tricks campaign mounted by the state to try and get around legal rulings sanctioning it, would justify reading this book.
