Treating Deviance
How we manage what we manufacture tells us about social classes and power
You can get a bachelors degree in horticulture, but you can never touch the cannabis plant while learning.
You can touch the cannabis plant while learning to cultivate it, but you can never get the degree for doing so.
This is the legacy of prohibition.
Imagine going to technical school to learn how to repair and maintain cars, but you are never allowed to actually balance a tire or change the oil while learning, much less rebuild a transmission.
Or to culinary school, to learn how to make specialized food products, but you are not allowed to cook using the ingredients that make the food. Or use the oven, knives, or bowls.
Prohibition is built upon ignorance, and the reluctance to actively educate people about cannabis cultivation, processing, and manufacture by having them learn through doing is merely a continuation of the suppression of what some still believe to be illicit knowledge, regarding gardening and cooking.
My personal praxis to advance the human condition is to fight ignorance and disease. I was born and raised in proximity to Boston, Massachusetts, where we have institutionalized this struggle, becoming a world leader in higher education and medicine. From the 18th century, New York City grew into a global city-state through growing markets and trade, while Boston rose to influence the treatment of deviance through semi-public institutions.
The three most historically-significant institutions in Boston are: The Catholic Church, Harvard and other universities, and hospitals. Religion, education, and medicine each take a different approach to different types of social deviance. The latter two rely more (though not exclusively) on a scientific epistemic.
Deviance is a social inevitability. What constitutes deviance is a cultural construction, as is how we treat the deviant and the deviance. The Catholic Church has never and will never move away from confession as the treatment for sin. When Donald Trump publicly worries about “getting into Heaven,” he’s suffering from Protestantism, where the quality of the life one has led becomes one’s means of salvation. He could instead subscribe to Catholicism, where all he has to do is confess at the very end. It doesn’t matter how badly or in what ways one has sinned.
Cardinal Bernard Law moved known child sexual abuser priests among parishes, allowing them plentiful opportunities to repeat offenses. When the U.S. authorities brought the heat down, Cardinal Law was promoted by Pope John Paul II to administer a building in Vatican City, and never set foot outside that city-state again.
One trans-Atlantic flight later and Law was protected from extradition to face justice. Not that the church finds anything particularly wrong with clergy committing sin—they are human, after all. Sin is sin, whether it is killing one’s brother, having sex outside marriage, or eating meat on Friday during Lent. A medieval organization has no concern with concepts like “age of consent,” “rights,” or “jurisprudence.”
When John Paul II died they replaced him with a former member of Hitler Youth who, reports are, started to fondly recall those days as he slipped into dotage. His appointed co-Pope, Francis, was considered a Reformist for altering dogma to comport with centuries-old scientific findings (take that heliocentrism). The church is not entirely anti-science, just very cautious of how to incorporate things like the qualities of celestial bodies. It suffers from an epistemology wholly constructed when the naked eye was the sole means of seeing the universe, and which it cannot fundamentally alter.
Is pedophilia a mental illness? Is it a sexuality? Is it another form of dopamine-cycling? The medical gaze turns behaviors into conditions that can be treated through a variety of means, from confession to a medical professional (of symptoms, their professionalism translates these symptoms into a disease), and a variety of therapies, both psychological and psychiatric.
In the late 20th century America went through a social panic brought about largely by wages having fallen relative to productivity for a decade. As more “middle class” occupations were “opening” to young women whose own mothers did not work outside the house for money. While it was correctly presented as the opportunity for independence and equality with men—first wave feminism sought political equality via suffrage, this second wave sought economic equality—in practice domestic responsibilities such as child care belonged overwhelmingly to women. They needed to pay other workers to take care of their young children.
Boston’s northern suburbs became a focal point regarding alleged sexual abuse of children with the Fells Acres Day Care case. There was a general social anxiety about leaving one’s children to be cared for while working. As working class women have always worked outside the home for money, it is not surprising that it took second- and third-generation “middle class” women’s concerns to gin up a panic.
In the Fells Acres case, the accused faced a trial where the DA coached the witnesses on sexual abuse and where to point on a doll, when asked where the man touched you. A conviction followed, while in prison the case made against him fell apart but the Governor refused to commute his sentence.
The expressed reluctance by the courts to release information about the Jeffrey Epstein case is in the interest of protecting the innocent. The court of public opinion finds such a presumption of innocence preposterous.
This is fighting the class war in an upward direction.
We know every one of Jeffrey Epstein’s guests or “clients,” was a member of the global ruling class. MAGA wants Bill Clinton on a spit, others are looking for dirtier details about Donald Trump, there are Brits who want to see Prince Andrew held accountable—and these are just the known-knowns. Alan Dershowitz tried to put himself ahead of it in 2019, assuring the world that when those young girls were rubbing near his nether regions he was wearing underwear.
Confession. It’s the key to escaping deviance.
Usually.
I don’t think it can work for a social class though.
[Well, this piece started out as one thing and quickly moved into a different direction. I promise more on illicit education soon.]