Does Marijuana Treat Hysteria?

As a person who spent some years during the Seventies in the lovely town of San Francisco, this writer remembers well the smell in the wind those days. He added to the wind his own contribution, oh, he did. Thinking over those old times, it has occurred to me that perhaps marijuana vents hysteria. It cures hysteria temporarily by letting it rush out the door all at once.

The first smoke of the evening was the best. After that, the high progressively tapered and dwindled until, by the end of the party, tiredness made me punchier than weed.

There is a sense of a bubble bursting. Then a chatter-fest. Everyone is happy to try to understand everyone else. Everyone is happy to breathe in and out, and that simple act has acquired mystic pleasure. "Floating, free as a bird..." (Moody Blues) The buzz congeals a bit and everyone is in a happy time and place. Happy hippies were we.

Another water-pipe and we talked religion and the life of the soul.

Another pipe and we talked about politics and the organic engines of revolution.

Another pipe and we talked about people not present and sex.

Another pipe and we talked about the housing market. Excitedly.

We had vented our hysteria.

Curious it is that folks who appear to be unvented hysterics are the loudest condemners of marijuana. So hysteric they are that they dare not even allow research which might prove their point. It just might disprove it, too. A small chance, possibly, but why take any risk at all?

Hysterics need control.

So we put people in jail. On and on. Simply for owning marijuana. For our committing these assaults on logic that blow a person out of their life-niche and into worlds dismal beyond belief, we will surely someday need to seek God's forgiveness. Lest we forget where we have been. We know better. We all know better. We are better.

It doesn't seem to have hurt many people.

Why do we?