Detroit Metro Times - Columns
John Sinclair
Published: February 1, 2011
I said goodbye to Amsterdam after a long and productive winter spent
living and working in the bosom of my extended family at Radio Free
Amsterdam, serving as poet in residence at the 420 Café and daily
enjoying the freedom to smoke marijuana at will whether one is sick or
not.
Arriving at the London St. Pancras train station, I caught the
Piccadilly tube to my modest quarters at the Headpress bunker in Wood
Green and picked up a copy of the Evening Standard on the way, only to
find a full-blown revival of the Reefer Madness approach on the front
page of the Health & Beautysection from a writer named Sophie Goodchild:
"OUT OF THEIR MINDS: THE TRUTH ABOUT TEENS, CANNABIS AND PSYCHOSIS."
"The award-winning foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn describes how
his son Henry turned from talented artist to disheveled wreck," Sophie
reports.
"'He stopped shaving or washing his hair and went barefoot, so his feet
became septic. He also soiled his jeans more than once.'
"Author Julie Myerson also knows how excessive cannabis use can threaten
to wreck families," Sophie goes on. "Her son Jake became hooked on the
potent 'skunk' form of cannabis and Myerson was forced to throw him out
of the family home in south London."
Harry Anslinger must be dancing in his grave to hear this drivel. A
sidebar titled "CANNABIS: THE LOWS" proclaims "You may have a problem if
you answer 'yes' to any of the following:
1) Do you ever get high alone?" Every day, lady, every day!
5) "When your stash is nearly empty, do you feel anxious or worried
about how to get more?" Every time, lady, every time — unless I'm in
Amsterdam, where they always have exactly what you want at the hash
counter, any time you want it. No anxiety there! And in Michigan now,
only when one's caregiver hasn't arrived by the appointed hour or it's
after closing at the compassionate care center.
Me, I'm addicted to newspapers, and I follow the global cannabis news
pretty closely, but it's been quite a while since this particular tack
has been taken. Generally marijuana seems to be considered basically
harmless and is grudgingly conceded even to have positive medicinal
properties, but it gets you high and there's supposedly something
fundamentally wrong with that.
Bang! The woodwork squeaks and out come all the freaks of law
enforcement to terrorize and abuse the smoking population for several
generations, in ways and with means way too vast to enumerate here. Plus
which, as they say, there's the "preaching to the choir" factor where
the speaker keeps saying the same things over and over again and
everyone says "amen" and outside the church the sinners and the
greedheads and the money-changers just keep on stepping.
My problem is that the more I think about it the madder I get. Despite
the reams of righteous information and reasonable argument against the
idiotic War on Drugs and the insufferable ignorance and brutality with
which it is waged, hundreds of thousands of marijuana smokers continue
to be victimized and persecuted by its relentless minions, dragged
through the courts and jails and "treatment programs," imprisoned,
stripped of their rights, and treated like vicious criminals.
But in the end it's all about getting high — and what's wrong with that?
They get high and we don't put them in prison. You can't even read the
Metro Times online without a bunch of vodka all up in your face, but you
have to worry about getting searched and arrested every time you leave
the pad because you've got a couple of joints in your pocket? Or be
getting high and listening to some records and the storm troopers come
busting into your house like you had John Dillinger in there with you?
Like Richard Pryor said, "How long? How long must this bullshit go on?"
And I guess the answer is, as long as we let them get away with it. It's
a big job to end the War on Drugs, because even though it's been
well-established that the emperor is completely bereft of clothing, he
still has his Army and Navy and Marine Corps and their local
equivalents, his legions of prison guards and employees, his endless
ranks of lawyers and court personnel to churn the reeking cauldron of
"justice" — or to cite the late brother Pryor again, "just us."
If you want a perfect example of what this mess is really about, look no
further than to the immediate north of Detroit, where the law
enforcement establishment of Oakland County and several of its
communities continue to punish marijuana smokers — even state-sanctioned
medical marijuana patients and their licensed suppliers ("caregivers") —
as if the state's marijuana laws had not actually been severely altered
by the action of a majority of its voters.
But the nature of the law doesn't really bother the forces of
enforcement as long as they can get away with their devilishment and
keep raking in the proceeds from the state Legislature and the county
commissioners and the searches and seizures and confiscations that are
their rewards for trying to keep us from getting high or simply taking
our medicine.
Books: I read in AlterNet of a pair of books that bear on our subject,
however tangentially. This first is by a guy I knew back in the day,
when he was attending the University of Michigan, Daniel Okrent, who's
gone on to wide journalistic acclaim. Last Call: The Rise and Fall of
Prohibition (Scribner) deals with the period "when booze was banned but
pot was not" and is instructive for its study of an illegal substance
and the culture that grew out of it, and also for pointing out that
alcohol prohibition lasted only 12 years while ours has been going on
eight or nine times longer than even the War in Afghanistan.
James Cockcroft's Mexico's Revolution: Then and Now (Monthly Review
Press) raises the question: "What are the U.S.'s Real motives for
launching a drug war in Mexico?" and, in the words of the AlterNet
reviewer, "exposes the thinking behind U.S. narcotrafficking policy and
the militarization of Mexico and further south."
Prisoners: My heart goes out to my old friend and comrade Dana Beal,
who's just suffered his third bust in three years for driving loads of
marijuana and/or money across the United States, something he's done for
about 40 years now. Beal claims in one case to have been delivering a
vanload of medical marijuana to patients in Michigan, in another to have
just collected a sizable cash donation towards the establishment of an
ibogaine clinic just outside the U.S. borders. Beal runs Cures Not Wars,
and organizes the Global Marijuana March each May.
Beal's in his 60s and still being persecuted. Two other close friends of
mine from the same generation are currently serving federal time for
large-scale marijuana violations, and just in case they let these guys
read the newspapers, let's send a big Detroit shout-out to brother Eddy
Lepp in California and Gorgeous George Kucewicz in New Jersey.
Finally, maybe you noticed the snide references to marijuana use in
connection with the creep in Arizona who shot up all those people. "I
was trying to tell him, you know, you need to get your life on the right
track," a friend of his testified to The Washington Post, adding that he
believed Loughner was using marijuana, saying, "I was telling him about
God and all that. And he broke down crying, and he gave me a big ol'
hug, and said, 'Thank you, you're one of the only ones that ever
listened to me.'"
I hate to take a cheap shot, but maybe he should've stuck with
marijuana.
—London, January 27-28, 2011
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http://m.metrotimes.com/columns/read-the-news-oh-boy-1.1098701
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