The Great Gun Debate

     My heart broke when I heard of the Newtown, CT shooting back in December. As an anthropologist, one of the things I try to understand are the reasons for killing or otherwise harming other humans. Killing children, especially 6 and 7 year olds, is a little harder for me to wrap my head around, although it certainly serves its cultural purposes, but a masacre at an elementary school proved challenging to the point of heartbreak. What most bothers me about this incident are the future lives of the surviving children, their siblings and all other children who were profoundly altered by this event face. I lament over the psychological trauma these children faced so needlessly. Six years old is a very young age to be confronted with such bare truths of humanity as delusions, matricide, murder and suicide. Learning to cope with this incident may be one of the bravest things these children ever do. I have been writing my graduate school application essays and so I've spent some time over the last few months interrogating my own childhood memories to find what experiences may have precipitated my interest in medical anthropology. I asked myself why I was interested in illness and health in the way that I am and why I choose a non-clinical career path.  Illness touched my family when I was very young and persisted throughout my entire upbringing but it wasn't something always talked about. Perhaps I search for a deeper understanding of illness through medical anthropology to counteract the lack of understanding I felt growing up. The doctors showed their concern for my mother and treated her aggressively but with care. The 'care' she received at her general hospital was exemplary, I make no mistake, but even though we traveled the 100 miles or so to get great advanced care, I always felt a little bereft of support on the car ride home.  We still drove home with the illness (it was chronic but sustainable with frequent treatments) and brought it back to our home. It never left us and all that time in between trips to the hospital it was seldom attended to, checked up on or inquired about. That was all dealt with in the personal while the illness was addressed in the clinical and never the two should meet. This consistent lack of understanding, on all sides, left me wanting to know more about illness and not just in the clinical sense but in the meaning sense. The greater meaning behind things eluded me growing up as what information is provided to children can be abridged to fit curriculum or doctrine. Hepatitis was always learned about in association with drug abuse and carried a moral weight. My mother contracted it through a blood transfusion however and this reasoning was never morally mediated. Junkies got Hep C, not mommies.
     I wonder now about the Newtown children and how they now face the monumental task of making sense of and giving meaning to a mass-shooting at their elementary school. Will they be supported in their quest for information? I want to distinguish here between explanation and comprehension and the greater organizational feats our minds accomplish when we find meaning in  traumatic events. That Adam Lanza took his own life, and therefore his voice and story, I regret because much is lost here in way of understanding, which is immensely valuable in therapeutic contexts. How do you begin to explain to a traumatized 8 year old that abnormalities in Lanza's brain contributed to his attack? How do you explain brain abnormalities in general? Show them diagnostic images?  Detail how neurons can communicate in different ways in different brains? Would this help them understand Lanza's actions without instilling a lasting doubt of the mentally ill in their minds? How would one venture to explain that the very video games they (or more likely their older siblings) play contributed to Lanza's violence? These questions are delicate and have no absolute answers whatsoever, making this job of helping children understand such events precarious, to say the least. The clinicians and therapists that have been working with, and will work with, these children are a courageous group indeed to take on such an assignment.
     Obviously, a more engaged conversation about guns can serve to both prevent future shootings, or so suggested, and to lessen the trauma associated with gun killings. Gun violence, if 'solved', cannot provide the answer as killing is much more complex than method and motive alone.  At the very least, I hope the great debate that remains will give rise to a new application of philosophy and a better national understanding of ethics. Whatever we point our finger to or place blame upon, change is expected and needed but any change will fail if understanding isn't broadened. It will, I hope, influence the lives of those surviving children in ways that are healing and restorative. Perhaps the shooting in Newtown will give rise to a new generation of anthropologists that study links between mental illness and violence or gun culture. Without a doubt, this experience will change their world perspectives and I argue we should begin a national conversation about how these perspectives can be seen for the good rather than for the bad. My hopes for these children are that they are brought to a more dynamic understanding of human nature, in all its disturbing truth, and gain a new understanding of the world like I did. Such an understanding can become an advantage later in life and I truly hope it will be for the Newtown children and all those who were traumatized by this incident.

In memoriam: Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown, CT. 12/14/12

all about access

December 6, 2012 is a day Seattle will always remember. On that day, the streets of Capitol Hill were awash with revelry as Washington officially deemed pot socially acceptable. Or did it? The social approval of using Tetrahydrocannabinol containing plants in their various states and forms has long been around. As any piece of visual media does, Reefer Madness (1936) spoke to a certain public concern; one generative of paranoid anxieties and yet one worthy of dramatic consideration. Legislation has finally caught up with culture. Or has it? Spirits are good and smoke hangs high but this new era in Washington (and Colorado) has its ambivalences. Employment discrimination is upheld (although cigarette smoking can be discriminated against as well). You cannot legal buy or sell it anywhere but you can possess it or grow it if you are a medicinal patient.  And it is still being used in courts as derogatory claims. It is going to be regarded like alcohol is, which has long enjoyed a contradictory place in American lives, being legal but with any consumption putting one at risk for a number of alcohol related crimes. Weed is going to hold a similar place in Washington law and while I agree we are not yet ready for a full scale decriminalization, it is putting us in a tricky situation until retail markets open up. Forward moving, I think it is going to be a process for using to become fully legal in a social way. It is still a highly stigmatized drug although the negative connotations applied are less injurious than other drugs. It is, some would say, the everyman's drug. A comic drug; one that brings like minds together and disparate minds closer. It is a also poised at the interested intersection of medicine and recreation. As a healing compound, it is controlled and access points are well, not all access. As a recreational substance, however, it will eventually become easier to come by than the medicine and this delegitimizes its use for medicinal purposes. As it is, no planned changes to the medical marijuana law are up on the table. This undermining of its medicinal properties is not entirely without merit. The medical marijuana clinic system in Washington is known, by the public and medical practitioners alike, as a joke. One can walk in to a clinic and get an authorization with no medical records that prove any of the 'qualifying conditions' and no referral. They can then walk right in to a dispensary, within the same hour, and purchase 'medicine'. With this 'medicine' now being set to reach the open market, I wonder about the dynamic now between the recreational user and the medicinal user. Some would say quality may be different (better?) at the clinics but the horticultural standards are essentially nonexistent and this market, as it stands, is highly unregulated. Sold to an open public, however, there will definitely be standards in place. In fact, Washington's notoriously stringent Liquor Control Board will take over its regulation. Could medicinal users be at a disadvantage here? Could their safety be overlooked while recreational users, in the year or so it will take to open up the market, are met with product that is more regulated? Does this seem like a logical organization? What still needs to be hashed out to mediate the Federal rulings and the State's law? There is a rupture here, between a human's right of access to healing medicines and the 'access stigma' the state still fosters. This stigma makes how you procure your medicine flexible in its morality and legality. Many questions will need to be answered over the next year or so in Washington and Colorado as the public market is established and the culture becomes more acquainted with the idea of decriminalization. For now, a social arbitration exists during every purchase, sale, growth or use of marijuana in all its forms and states. Judgment is withheld, or so the law suggests, at the state level but not Federally. This is a major source of contention among users and though this has always plagued medicinal users since 1998, I can foresee major disconnects between all users and all institutions.
My hopes for this process are better and more consistent access for medicinal patients and lessened stigma against this set of users. I want to address this and bring this to conversation in a way respectful of medicinal users. It is crucial to our continued understanding of this patient group that we keep this discussion on the table despite the new laws that have passed in Washington and Colorado. As it stands, Seattle maintains several medicinal marijuana access points but many (so many) are positioned near areas of notorious criminal activity or inconveniently away from major transportation routes. I have honestly been disappointed at how Washington has handled their medicinal marijuana  system and hold legitimate concern for the new open market we are about to come upon. 

Reefer Madness: Tell Your Children

1938 Louis J. Gasnier, dir. 66 min. 

George A. Hirliman Productions. Hollywood.