That hippie sacrament
m.metrotimes.com | May 10th 2011
Larry Gabriel's Higher Ground column last week painted a frightening picture of
the atrocities perpetrated by the Oakland County law enforcement community in
its last-ditch attempt to preserve and extend the scope of their prosecution of
the War On Drugs by persecuting medical marijuana patients and licensed
caregivers whose activities are protected by state law.
The legalization of medical marijuana by means of a ballot initiative approved
by 62 percent of Michigan voters in the 2008 election signaled the end of the
drug war that's raged unchecked for almost a half-century without appreciable
positive effect. Any fool can see that the use of recreational drugs by our
citizens has not been diminished or in any way abated by the efforts of the
legions of police, prosecutors, judges and jailers sworn to stop us from
getting high.
In my last column I surmised that perhaps the War on Drugs wasn't really about
drug use per se but was launched as an attack on certain sectors of our
citizenry whose commitment to social change was seen as presenting a threat to
the dominant order and the political, economic and cultural imperatives
established as the foundation of corporate consumer society.
During the decade from 1965 to 1975, hippies turned their backs en masse on
mainstream America and its perverse value system, refused to fight its wars,
and attempted to create an alternative way of life based in sharing, tolerance
and self-realization through collective effort and creative production. Their
withdrawal from the reigning social contract presented a real challenge to the
consumerist system and its operators: Until defecting to the hippie ideal,
these young Americans had been expected to inherit and manipulate the machinery
of exploitation and control devised by generations of rich white people to
maintain their privileged existence at the top of the social order.
It's hard for people today to picture the world the hippies populated as our
numbers grew from a few isolated pockets of bohemianism and weirdness in
disparate parts of the country into a movement of millions of determined young
white people demanding a new and better world for all Americans and a swift end
to the militarism, racism, sexism, economic exploitation and banal popular
culture at the core of the established order.
Hippies were united by their belief in personal freedom and its manifestation
in the way they looked and acted and conducted their daily lives outside the
social mainstream. As a general rule, hippies had long hair, wore funky clothes
expressing their disdain for the consumer ideal, opposed the war in Vietnam and
increasingly refused to join the armed forces, didn't have a real job and
didn't want one, often embraced collective work for the common good and lived
as equals in communes and creative groupings, actively appreciated diverse
forms of artistic expression and lived with music at the exact heart of their
lives.
Hippies loved to gather in the thousands at concerts in the parks where the
bands played for free and the people danced and laughed and had a ball together
over and over again. They also turned out in ever-increasing numbers for
rallies and demonstrations in opposition to the war in Vietnam and in support
of racial equality and social justice.
Hippie musicians created startling new forms and imaginative extensions of the
African-American musical idioms introduced into their lives through the magic
of repeated radio airplay of 45 rpm records by innovative artists such as Chuck
Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Bo Diddley, Ray Charles, James Brown,
Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye. But what bound hippies together above all else
was marijuana as a component of everyday life. A hippie smoked weed, everybody
knew that, and hippies smoked weed together, in every possible circumstance.
Despite the positive and progressive aspects of the hippie philosophy and the
hippies' committed social practice in pursuit of its principles, despite the
brilliance of their music and art forms, despite their heartfelt visions of a
better world based in peace and love and social equality for all, hippies were
demonized as criminal narcotics users to be apprehended, brought before the bar
of justice, convicted and sent to prison or scrutinized by the narcotics police
and courts for years as felonious probationers.
Nothing else the hippies did was against the law. Even our protests and
demonstrations were protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the
United States. Our lifestyle, our living and working arrangements, our music
and cultural practices, our gatherings and public celebrations, however unusual
or offensive to mainstream values, were well within the strictures of the law.
Only our mass recreational, medicinal or spiritual smoking of marijuana — which
we well knew was at the very least not a narcotic, and very possibly a
beneficial natural healing resource with no discernible negative social effects
— brought trouble with law enforcement and provided the police with a socially
acceptable way to punish these renegades from the American Way whose very
presence seemed to violate every established standard of normal behavior.
My own case exemplifies this. I was a socially active poet, performer,
underground journalist, cultural organizer and community broadcaster who also
spoke out for the legalization of marijuana starting in 1964 and actually
smoked marijuana on a daily basis. I was arrested by the Detroit Narcotics
Squad three times for possession and sales of narcotics — very small amounts of
marijuana in fact — and served a total of five years probation, six months in
the Detroit House of Correction, and 2-1/2 years of a 9-1/2- to 10-year prison
sentence before my legal challenge to the constitutionality of Michigan's
narcotics statutes eventually resulted, in 1972, with the existing law declared
unconstitutional; marijuana was then removed from the narcotics category and
possession of small amounts of marijuana reduced to a misdemeanor with a
one-year maximum sentence.
My writings and public activities, however offensive or disturbing to guardians
of the social order, were constitutionally protected. But my use of marijuana
as a righteous component of daily life branded me as a criminal — a felon —
subject to the brutal invasion of my life itself by the criminal justice system
and its enforcers in uniform or plainclothes.
I'm out of space for this installment, but with your permission I'll continue
to pursue this line of thought here in seeking a full understanding of the
destructive impact of the War on Drugs on harmless marijuana smokers and on the
fabric of our social order itself. Our lives — and our national life as well —
have suffered immeasurably from the imposition and unbridled growth of the
police-state mechanism that's been built up on our backs.
Me, I've been sick of this shit for all of my adult life, and I just hope I'll
live long enough to see the War on Drugs dead and buried and the full range of
its punitive apparatus dismantled and finally discredited once and for all.
Finally, I'd like to say it's been kicks being in the D for the frigid month of
April, the Hash Bash and the 4:20 celebrations, but I'm on my way back to
London and Amsterdam and I'll be writing more from there. Happy trails!
—Trans-Love Energies, Detroit
Original Page: http://m.metrotimes.com/mmj/that-hippie-sacrament-1.1144760
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