The Banana Peel Project

Has anybody else noticed this?

Go to the Google homepage. Type a letter in the box. A list of suggestions or recommended searches pops up. This list is based on other people’s searches as well as your own personal history of searches.

Type “M”. I get the following list: Myspace, mapquest, msn, maps, mapquest driving directions, macys. So first of all, I never search for any of these things (with the exception of “maps,” which I search for with some regularity). And second of all, what is quite clear from this list is that there’s some money moving around somewhere. Unless you believe that people search for “Macy’s” more often than they search for “money.” Who knows.

Now type “e”. My list: mega millions, megan fox, and metro pcs. I don’t even know who Megan Fox is.

Now type “dica.” My list: medicann, medical dictionary, medical care. Fair enough.

Now type “l ma”. I get medical malpractice, medical malpractice lawyers, medical malpractice cases.

See where this is going? Type “r”. I get one suggestion: medical mart. What?

So what do we get when we type “medical mari”? Absolutely nothing. Google has no idea, no clue whatsoever, what I could possibly be trying to search for. Zero. Zip. Nada.

Yep: Google refuses to suggest that anybody search for medical marijuana.

Of course, you could also just hit enter.

From a recent article in the Oakland Tribune:

Oakland International Airport may be the nation’s only airport with a specific policy letting users of medical marijuana travel with the drug.

The policy is spelled out in a three-page document quietly enacted last year by the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office. It states that if deputies determine someone is a qualified patient or primary caregiver as defined by California law and has eight ounces or less of the drug, he or she can keep it and board the plane.

Deputies warn the pot-carrying passengers that they may be committing a felony upon arrival when they set foot in a jurisdiction where medical marijuana is not recognized. But they say they don’t call ahead to alert authorities on the other end.

“We never have. We’re certainly within our right to, but we never have,” said Sgt. J.D. Nelson, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office. “Our notification of the passengers is for their own safety and well-being.”

Isn’t it nice when our well-being depends on the goodwill of law enforcement officers? Aren’t these people supposed to be enforcers rather than arbiters of ethics and morals? Isn’t this the definition of a police state?

If this is what happens in the space between competing forms of legality–if in the absence of juridical clarity, life and limb depend on the choices of individual officers–then maybe we need to hurry up and get a new system in place.

NOTE (added 10/21/09 at 9:47 a.m. PST): If anyone knows the whereabouts of (or has access to) that three-page document specifying the specific policy of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, please let me know!

There seems to be a misunderstanding here.  Drugs are tools, technologies of the self, material objects that allow individuals to work on their bodies and minds in certain ways.  Of course, they haven’t always been seen in this way, and they certainly haven’t always been available to the degree or in the same way as they are today.  Today, drugs are everywhere and individuals are at the same time encouraged to use them and taught to fear them.

But to say that drugs are tools is not to claim that they’re just like hammers, ladders, crock pots, rakes, combine harvesters, toothbrushes, keyboards, paper, or ankle braces.  Drugs are not necessarily benign.  In fact, they are usually quite dangerous and many drugs just seem to demand that we use them irresponsibly.  Of course, hammers, ladders, crockpots, and toothbrushes have their own dangers, but for the purposes of most situations they are relatively harmless.

It will not do to think of drugs as tools in the sense of benign, stationary-until-picked-up, unproblematic devices for getting done what we want to get done.  When I say that drugs are tools, I do not always have in mind forks or ballpoint pens or barbecues, but rather something far more nefarious and uncertain.

To see drugs as tools is not to make them easier to deal with, not to somehow justify their (unexamined) use.  Bombs are tools, too.