Pyle: Marijuana makes people do weird stuff

No doubt about it. Marijuana makes people do really weird stuff.

Paranoia. Rationalization. Looking at the world in such a way that nothing is your fault and everything bad is the responsibility of someone else. A serious detachment from reality.

And that's the people who are opposed to marijuana.

People who are for it, or at least for the decriminalization or medical use of marijuana in all its forms? A good deal more clear thought, reasonable risk-benefit analysis and human compassion.

And brownies.

And you can quit looking at me like that. My last experience was in, oh, 1981, a long way from here, in the apartment of a newspaper photographer during a ridiculously cheap poker game. The whole experience gave me a splitting headache and cleaned out my couch-cushion grubstake in even less time than usual. So I'm done. Unless.

Unless I or someone I care about comes down with one of the many corruptions of the flesh that experience, scientific testing or desperation suggests would respond to some medicinal application of cannabis — smoked, liquefied, powdered, pureed or candied.

If it does what no other substance will do to cure, or even ease, the misery of epilepsy, chemotherapy, post-traumatic stress disorder, chronic pain or the like, then I'm all for it.

And you are, too. Unless another drug has gotten to you first. The respectability drug. The electability drug. The Big Pharma drug.

Witness the fit thrown the other day by Utah's Favorite Fox News Congressman, Jason Chaffetz, who literally threatened to send the mayor of Washington, D.C., to jail because she dared to implement the local referendum where 70 percent of the District's voters approved a law legalizing the personal use and cultivation — but not sale — of small amounts of marijuana.

Consider the knee-jerk reaction of Utah Gov. Gary Herbert who, even as he tried to ease human suffering with his Healthy Utah plan to provide more widespread access to health insurance, dismissed a proposal from state Sen. Mark Madsen to legalize certain forms of cannabis extracts and preparations to treat a particular list of impairments.

Do something to respect the will of the people and local control, and Chaffetz, who usually trumpets those things, goes ape. Do something to ease human suffering and Herbert, who is more interested in that than a lot of his fellow Republicans, instantly assumes a slippery slope to widespread fraud and abuse.

And, of course, there will be fraud and abuse.

But the paranoia associated with marijuana prohibition makes the paranoia associated with marijuana use — if there is such a thing — look very small indeed. Mostly because the anti-pot psychosis is usually found in people with political power, command of SWAT teams and patent rights to medical concoctions that are less effective and carry more recognized fatal side effects than any strength of weed.

Thus it is just sad when elected officials sound the alarm about the evil side-effects of legal or medicinal pot use, even as the big pharmaceutical companies and the respectable physicians they wine and dine market opioid medications that are infinitely more addictive than cannabis and which induced 16,000 fatal overdoses in 2012 alone.

But, then Oxycontin is made by a large, and politically generous, corporation, in a clean room by people wearing moonsuits. So what could go wrong? Utah medical marijuana, even if it were to be grown and distributed in the highly regimented way envisioned by Madsen's bill, would be a lot cheaper, be grown here and, there is every reason to believe, do more for certain kinds of patients with fewer risks.

Would it be abused, misused and oversold? Of course. What ain't?

Would it go a long way to ease human suffering in people who now have to choose between suffering, or watching a loved one suffer, great pain or debilitation on the one hand and commit a criminal act on the other? Unquestionably.

The fact that we are even arguing about that is a psychosis all its own.

George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, is eager to commission a study documenting the medicinal benefits of pecan pie a la' mode. gpyle@sltrib.com