“For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” II Timothy 1:7

By Riley J. Hood—Milwaukee County Constitution Party
As of July 2021, there have been radio ads for a lawsuit against Paraquat, saying it causes Parkinson’s disease. According to Merriam Webster, “Definition of paraquat: a highly toxic contact herbicide containing a salt of a cation [C12H14N2]2” I remember paraquat from 1978. Reuters posted on Apr 2, 2015, “Paraquat caused a public health scare in the United States in 1970s: Mexican drug enforcement authorities, with funding from the U.S. government, sprayed the chemical on marijuana that later crossed the border. In the 1980s, paraquat was the agent in suicide and murder scares in Japan.”
The New York Times ran a lengthy, pro-NORML article on 11/19/1978 headlined, “Poisonous fallout from the War on Marijuana,” by Jesse Kornbluth.  His article starts, “Daryl Dodson, then a $125a week intern on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, first heard that the Mexican Government was spraying a lung seeking poison on illegal marijuana fields  n February 1977.” “Keith Stroup, director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), first heard about aerial spraying of the Mexican marijuana fields with this lethal herbicide, paraquat, a few months earlier.” Kornbluth adds, “A year later, however, paraquat has become, for many young Americans, a symbol of governmental malversation as emotionally charged as napalm was for an earlier generation.” The exposure of this tactic was considered embarrassing to Jimmy Carter, yet the Mexican government began spraying the pot with paraquat, and the opium poppies with 2,9 D, as early as 1975.
Kornbluth offered a libertarian explanation, “The object was to eradicate drugs at the source, and the program was a success. With one minor exception: Mexican marijuana growers had learned that paraquat drenched plants might still be sold as commercial grade marijuana if they could be harvested before the herbicide turned the leaves brittle and the taste harsh. Because their illegal crop meant the difference between a subsistence income of $200 a year and a cultivator’s income of as much as $5,000, the Mexicans unhesitatingly harvested the poisoned marijuana. And then they sold it.” Kornbluth adds, “and it may endanger the lives of American smokers.” This argument was taken up by the pot-lobby and their pot-head friends in the Carter Administration.  Kornbluth and NORML said the State Department asserted that paraquat would ruin the taste of hash brownies, and make that foul smelling pot smoke even worse. Kornbluth asserted, “The dangers of paraquat were no secret to the State Department. Swallowing as little as a half-ounce is suicidal, paraquat gravitates to the lungs, where it causes such massive damage that death almost invariably occurs within two weeks. There is no known antidote.”
That was the pro-pot logic of 1978. Today’s controversy is about Paraquat causing Parkinson’s Disease. It isn’t as if there are a whole lot a farmers left in Milwaukee County. Maybe some gardeners used it, but the real target of the ad are the many pot-heads in our impoverished post-industrial city. The Milwaukee County Constitution Party asserts the following, if you engage in self-destructive behavior, you are responsible for the results. If you engage in illegal self-destructive behavior, then that is the chance you took. Pot-heads complain about paraquat, but are oddly silent about opium, angel dust, or fentanyl lacing the pot. Their hypocrisy also extends to the very nature of marijuana itself.
According to Alex Berenson, “Seventy miles northwest of New York City is a hospital that looks like a prison, its drab brick buildings wrapped in layers of fencing and barbed wire. This grim facility is called the Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychiatric Institute. It’s one of three places the state of New York sends the criminally mentally ill: defendants judged not guilty by reason of insanity. Until recently, my wife Jackie­—Dr. Jacqueline Berenson—was a senior psychiatrist there. Many of Mid-Hudson’s 300 patients are killers and arsonists. At least one is a cannibal. Most have been diagnosed with psychotic disorders like schizophrenia that provoked them to violence against family members or strangers. A couple of years ago, Jackie was telling me about a patient. In passing, she said something like, of course he’d been smoking pot his whole life. Of course? I said. Yes, they all smoke. So, marijuana causes schizophrenia? I was surprised, to say the least. I tended to be a libertarian on drugs. Jackie would have been within her rights to say, I know what I’m talking about, unlike you. Instead, she offered something neutral like, I think that’s what the big studies say. You should read them.” Berenson adds “I began to wonder why, with the stocks of cannabis companies soaring and politicians promoting legalization as a low-risk way to raise tax revenue and reduce crime: I had never heard the truth about marijuana, mental illness, and violence.”
Berenson asserts, “Even cannabis advocates, like Rob Kampia, the co-founder of the Marijuana Policy Project, acknowledge that they have always viewed medical marijuana laws primarily as a way to protect recreational users.” And that is the current State of Wisconsin, where both parties in the State Legislature and Governor Scott Walker legalized CBD oil and industrial hemp.
Now there is a pot-dispensary every four blocks in my neighborhood, and the monstrosity Mandela Barnes is pushing for legal recreational marijuana use calling it a civil rights issue. In a 2017 speech calling for federal legalization, Cory Booker said that “states are seeing decreases in violent crime.” The first four states to legalize marijuana were Colorado, Washington, Alaska and Oregon. Those four states had about 450 murders and 30,300 aggravated assaults in 2013. In 2018 they had almost 620 murders and 38,000 aggravated assaults—an increase of 37 percent for murders and 25 percent for aggravated assaults, so much for pot mellowing out the population.
Berenson asserts, “the National Academy of Medicine found in 2017 that “cannabis use is likely to increase the risk of developing schizophrenia and other psychoses; the higher the use, the greater the risk.” The Milwaukee Constitution Party agrees with Berenson, “For centuries, people worldwide have understood that cannabis causes mental illness and violence just as they’ve known that opiates cause addiction and overdose. Hard data on the relationship between marijuana and madness dates back 150 years, to British asylum registers in India.”  We assert that if smoking pot promotes psychosis, schizophrenia and mental illness, that there is a probably significant link between marijuana and Parkinson’s, paraquat or no. Finally, we agree with our Wisconsin Constitution Party Platform, “We oppose the use of marijuana, cocaine, barbiturates, heroin, opioids and other harmful addictive drugs, for the purposes of criminal behavior, getting high and all the destructive consequences of those habits, with or without a doctor’s prescription, we oppose prescription drug abuse as well from street gangs selling “scrips” to the abuse of Medicare D.”