No, high schoolers are not smoking killer marijuana — and it’s dangerous to say they are
A 2019 Trump Administration lie about “instant-killer” cannabis that will “wipe us all out” on an apocalyptic level has been tattooed to the American collective subconscious — fueling another dangerous moral panic.
It’ll be years before we can competently discuss the historical importance of Donald Trump’s first (and hopefully last) term as POTUS.
Personally, I hope he’s remembered not only for his fascist ideology but also for our collective glimpse into just how fucking weird and stupid that bizarre little casino man truly is.
In the short term, however, journalists and researchers are already reeling from the comet-sized crater he smashed into America’s collected reality. The administration’s massive disinformation campaign has infected social media pages, town halls, and evangelical churches around the United States.
On the left, many of us mistakenly ride high in our saddles with the false assumption that only rednecks and the tinfoil hat crowd are susceptible to the MAGA propaganda machine. This is a mistake. It’s impossible to guess how long it’ll take to untangle the projected 30,375 lies from our social fabric —because of its sheer mass, it has been planted in every corner of the country.
Not a single one of us is immune to it.
This isn’t a book review, but it started as one about the new horror novel White Smoke by Author Tiffany D. Jackson. There are many things to admire about Jackson. White Smoke is her first real foray into horror, and the conventions lend themselves well to her brash, “battle at city hall” narrative style. Horror is the punk rock of genre fiction — it’s visceral, aggressive, and was invented to upset the status quo (both genres were also essentially created by minorities only to be largely co-opted by white men). This is the battlefield Jackson thrives in.
Ghost stories, with their fixation on lingering evils of the past, are the ideal canvas for Jackson to paint America’s founding sins. On this front, she brutally delivers earnest takedowns of systemic abuse.
That said, you can read our review of White Smoke and more horror-related stuff over at Wayward Magazine. But right now, we’re going to talk about the bizarre right-wing propaganda this novel portrays as factual and how dangerous it is.
Minor spoilers ahead for White Smoke ahead.
For most of White Smoke, protagonist Marigold teases of an embarrassing and unbelievably shameful act that she committed prior to the story’s start. When the reveal comes around, it’s hard not to laugh.
Marigold almost died. Because she smoked pot.
Jackson clarifies that it’s not just marijuana that almost killed Marigold (though none of the characters seems to have a problem believing it could’ve been). It was something devious done by those dangerous drug dealers (a whole other misconception in itself).
You see, like most teens, Marigold doesn’t use hard drugs. She merely self-medicates with pot because she suffers from a debilitating, pharmaceutical-resistant anxiety disorder. For those unaware, treatment-resistant anxiety is a real and sometimes unbearable condition. It can drive people to social reclusion and nearly one-third of patients with this condition attempt suicide.
It’s no wonder Marigold is committed to finding relief by any means possible. A better writer would have treated Marigold with empathy, but ultimately, she’s used as a ridiculous cautionary tale touting the dangers of a teen (who has no support from her parents or a therapist) who seeks relief from a dangerous mental illness via marijuana.
I Promise, Marijuana Won’t Kill You
When Marigold‘s old weed dealer is out of town, she turns to a guy she doesn’t know. Turns out, this guy laces his weed with fentanyl. Later that night, Marigold unknowingly smokes the synthetic opioid and goes into cardiopulmonary arrest. Fortunately, her younger brother acts quick enough to save her life. Marigold was moments from death.
Cardiopulmonary arrest (or ‘coding’ as hospital staff call it) is the failure of the heart and respiratory systems and is fatal without proper care quickly. Hospitals typically have ‘code teams’ on standby to save the lives of coding patients.
This might initially seem like a reasonable turn of the plot. After all, Fentanyl is the most widely used synthetic opioid and the U.S. is currently in the grips of an opioid epidemic that takes around 50,000 lives a year.
It’s absolute bullshit though.
Fentanyl vaporizes at a low temperature (500 degrees Celcius). Fentanyl users smoke by cooking the drug in a special pipe that keeps it at a temperature of around 280 degrees Celcius. The flames in a lighter or cherry of a joint burn at 2,000 degrees Celcius, preventing any psychoactive effect.
Even if someone were able to invent a method of smoking Fentanyl in marijuana, the consequences would be null. You can’t fit enough into your joint, bowl, or hookah to hurt you, create an addiction, or even feel it. And it wouldn’t kill you right away either — Fentanyl is a medicine meant for human ingestion, after all.
A Schedule II controlled substance in the US, Fentanyl is eighty times more powerful than morphine. It’s commonly (and validly) used to ease the suffering of patients with severe conditions — stage four cancer patients, for example, or those on mechanical ventilators. It also works quicker than most drugs when administered intravenously, making it a critical tool in the emergency room when quick surgery can mean the difference between life and death.
While people do overdose on Fentanyl (and we are in no way implying its not a dangerous drug), it simply doesn’t happen like that. The problem is people turn to Fentanyl and other opioids most often as a replacement for, or supplement to, heroin use. While it can be deadly to mix the drug with heroin, opioids aren’t instant killers.
And if it were killing marijuana users, you would be goddamn sure to notice. Weed is much more common than heroin. Twenty-two million Americans use marijuana a month compared to 600,000 who use heroin. Experts say if Fentanyl were instantly killing cannabis users, the opioid crisis would have already reached a cataclysmic scale.
Where Did This Myth Come From?
The Trump Administration — which famously took office promising to be “tough on crime” and specifically “tough on immigrants who commit crimes” held a press conference in 2019 citing the dangers of fentanyl-laced drugs (you can watch the video here if you like). During it Press Secretary and Opioid Crisis Tsar Kellyanne Conway said:
“Fentanyl is an instant killer and a tiny little grain of it can wipe us out. And it’s being laced into marijuana, heroin, meth, cocaine and street drugs.”
This idea, of course, was meant to support the Trump Administration’s brutal and bigoted new crime laws and immigration policies. It’s not a new strategy, either. The myth that innocent teenagers are tricked into overdose by sinister drug dealers has been a far-right talking point for decades and is a critical pillar in their mission to demonize minority communities.
Conway seems to have snagged the story from two or three anecdotal statements by small police departments in the U.S. and Canada. But, by the time she shared it, those statements had been retracted. Turns out they were based on lies from witnesses who didn’t want to be caught with hard drugs.
The outright myth that fentanyl is being laced into marijuana is dangerous.
It’s not only a distraction from the crisis itself, but it can prevent opioid addicts from recovering, raise rates of opioid abuse, and lead to the demonization of patients seeking treatment for legitimately life-altering conditions.
M-J Milloy, infectious disease epidemiologist at the BC Centre on Substance use, commented on how concerning it was that the white house would repeat this urban legend during a public health emergency, especially when research shows cannabis can often be a gateway drug to help ween people off opioids.
Plus, misrepresenting marijuana to children makes them far more likely to try harder drugs in the future.
Tiffany D. Jackson Owes Her Audience Better
Again, Jackson isn’t a bad writer. And from the research we did, we’re sure we’d like her personally — she seems like a staggeringly smart individual. But, unfortunately, she failed her audience here.
Jackson isn’t just writing fiction. She’s writing to educate.
Jackson is revered, not just by the teens who read her novels, but also by educators who supply classrooms and school libraries. The pre-release buzz for “White Smoke” on Twitter and Goodreads is full of teachers excited to bring Jackson’s next yarn to new students.
Her novel Allegedly hit the 2017 New York Times Best Seller List and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Monday’s Not Coming, her third novel, won the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Award and was named one of the “Best Books of 2018” by School Library Journal.
This is all to say — Jackson is a big deal, and she’s also a trusted source to many.
That a book otherwise so willing to criticize the American criminal justice system’s institutional abuse would promote such a dangerous lie hard to overlook. At the very least, it could be argued that Jackson owes a public retraction. It would be nice to see this problem edited out of the book in future editions. I’m certain Jackson would agree that we should be taking far-right myths out of our school books, not putting more in.
That said, if you’re interested — click here to purchase White Smoke by Tiffany D. Jackson.
Aside from the problematic propaganda, there are some genuinely good scares.
About the Author
Kay VanAntwerpen (they/them) is a transgender journalist, musician, and activist from Grand Rapids, Michigan.
They studied journalism at Grand Valley State University, and have written for numerous publications including Entrepreneur Magazine and MLive Media Group.
- Most recently, they contributed to author Christopher Andrus’ non-fiction book Dough Nation: How Pizza and Small Business Can Change America.
- You can download their band’s latest album at chasingthesky.bandcamp.com
