Letter to the Chief--Let Me Love You

Here's another days old ditty...a thing I should have addressed last week.

Barack, I was stoooned when I voted for you and when I watched the returns and when I took to the streets to celebrate your historic win. And I don't think it's funny that you seem to think the legalization of marijuana is funny. Maybe you and Michelle are just the sort of yuppies who view yerba as the stuff of collegiate shenanigans, but I view it as a damn medical necessity. When you hired my old classmate, Chris Hughes, to mastermind an Internet-savvy, interactive campaign for you in 2008, you sewed up my generation, already pretty gone over your Iraq War stance, speechification and good looks. And when, this past week, you held your first live, Presidential "Town Hall" via the Internets, the likely majority of participants were youngbloods too. And when millions of those youngbloods were polled, millions expressed their interest in your stance on legalizing weed. And you laughed about it; you all laughed, and dismissed it outright.

As tykes, in the sweet and distant 90s (and early aughts), our generation (sorry, I love to talk generations but loathe naming them), were heavily medicated. We were fed Ritalin and Adderall and a load of antidepressants. And many of us had horrible experiences. I, for one, at fifteen, in order to "treat" a series of Summer panic attacks, was put on the highest allowable dosage of Paxil. It was a brand new drug, a product to be pushed (on licenced physicians and, in turn, their patients) by a massive corporation, GlaxoSmithKline. I ceased taking it at seventeen, after a suicidal break and some atypical manic episodes that led to my failing out of prep school (even taking a months-long break from schooling altogether). Come to find, several years later, in a U.K. study followed by several Stateside, that Paxil causes suicidal episodes in teenagers and is particularly dangerous for Bipolar patients of any age. A friend of mine nearly died of heart failure after having been prescribed a deadly mixture of sleep aids and anxiety drugs as a high school junior. Another friend, having been given Adderall (read: SPEED) at eleven, was a serious basehead by sixteen; the introduction of powerful amphetamine into his system as a kid may well have been the key to his battle with addiction (begun FAR TOO EARLY).

It goes without saying, that we may be disillusioned with the government-approved prescription drug industry. Why are the powers that be comfortable feeding children chemicals that were smithed last year and not those that have been grown and used (medicinally and oh-so recreationally) for centuries upon centuries. Alls I'm saying is, teaheads have a point and prefer not to be taken lightly. I'm no spring chicken—I know the President can't go about legalizing drugs in his first year of executing in the midst of a nervous-making financial crisis. But maybe he could say something about the inanity of the war on drugs, our part in the violence in Mexico...I don't know. I think I've just realized what a centrist this guy is. More grey for March.

Visit some friends.