My mom is  so goddamn cute.  I spend afternoons at the hospital and she takes over in the evening through morning unless my sister can give her a night off.  Every night I come home and she’s packaged the breakfast for Billy Jean the Tripod Lab in a Ziploc baggy and left it on the kitchen table, the closest elevated surface to the actual dog dish outside.  I doubt she suspects I’d neglect to feed her but my mother is nothing if not thorough and organized.

I’ve been trying to leave the bag handy so she reuses it.

Let’s talk about Pot and it’s most auspiciously efficacious cousin, Hemp.

I assume you know that I’m a frequent imbiber and would go so far as to champion the Buddha as valuable if not imperative component of my creative process.  After all, every record I ever made I did so completely sober, under the influence of nothing more than coffee or deep fried fish sandwiches.  I like to get baked and write though.

This is not necessarily an issue of freedom of expression or needless and ultimately deleterious persecution or even the man keeping us down.  Well, it’s all those things, but it’s not my intention to bring them things to the forefront.  I hope to make you see, the issue is bigger than that.  Those are symptoms.  Side effects of the “War On Drugs”.  At the end of the day, it is an environmental, economic, health care and human rights issue.

Treatment for these symptoms, requisitely including a more equitable application of jurisprudence, would represent a sizable chunk from the asses of industries pharma, oil, timber and big stupid self righteous neoconservatives and right wing Christian zealots who seek to expunge mankind’s historical quest to self medicate.  This has been going on for as long history has been written.  The self medication bit I mean.

You may or may not be aware that this country incarcerates more people per capita than any other country on this planet.  States are going broke and one of the most insidious determinants is draconian state and federal drug laws.  States, municipalities and local elected officials are beginning to understand that the detention of non violent drug offenders is less than congruent with their fiduciary obligation to tax paying citizens.

It’s a useless mess.  A clusterfuck without moral, ethical or practical imperative.  The entire effort, from imprisonment to blowback and all the bureaucratic minutia in between costs us tens of billions a year.  Probably as much as fifty billion annually.  End it all, shave a few more points off defense spending and hello health care.  No more taxes worth contemplating.

Fuck me and you.  Seriously, fuck us.

Never has their been so wealthy a nation with such fucked up priorities.  We are a continent of jackasses.

What it is, is bullshit.  In 2008, total arrests for possession and or intent to distribute marijuana totaled 847,863, more than twice what they were in 1980.  Total violent crime arrests for the same year totaled 594,911, up only 7.98% from 1980.  One simple statistic speaks volumes about our priorities.  Pretty fucked up when you consider they’re not hurting anybody.

Some more simple truths about pot: Well over 40% percent of us have done it and no one has ever, ever died from it.  Ever.  Well over half a million a year die from abuse of perfectly legal drugs.  About 20,000 expire prematurely from illegal drugs.  People who smoke pot don’t beat their spouses, start fights in bars or knock over liquor stores to support their habit.  Regular marijuana use is no way linked to a propensity for schizophrenia.  Marijuana smoke is no where near as damaging to the lungs as is tobacco.  There are at least as many arguments to be made for the beneficial effects of marijuana on the brain as to the contrary; evidence shows that it may even mitigate the negative effects of binge drinking regarding oxidative stress or excitotoxic cell death.  Have some martinis and pack a bowl, I say.  Just because you smoke pot, doesn’t mean their exists any greater likelihood you’ll become a junkie, a blow hound or a crack whore.  Pot is a terminus as opposed to a gateway drug despite the disingenuous propaganda we are so often forced to gag on .  Anti-marijuana ads foisted by the government only encourage minors to do bong rips and at some two billion bucks, we’re looking at another huge waste of time and money.

I really need some pot.

I’m of the opinion that it would be far more pragmatic to tax and regulate, if only to keep the Devil’s foliage out of the hands of minors.

Money is being made, but it benefits none of us directly with the exception of employment in the prison facilities and therefore the communities where they exist.  See, who knows the cost in broken homes, families and lives?  Who can guess at the damage done to society?  No one knows how unfairly it’s been used as a tool against minorities.  That it has been, is not in dispute.

I’ll tell you one thing for sure, non violent drug offenders may go to prison relatively innocent, but they emerge as criminals.  Tens of thousands every year.  Their future’s so bright………

No single aspect of the “War On Drugs” can be demonstrated as successful.  It’s an egregiously expensive, colossal failure.  Nothing has been accomplished, save making matters much, much worse.  Anyone looking for an example of government failing the people, need look no further than the “War on Drugs”.

We figured out as a nation as early as 1933, collectively, that prohibition of alcohol was a spectacularly dumb idea.  It gave rise to organized crime and people poisoning themselves with bathtub gin.  Why then, do we still fail to recognize the damage wrought on society by prohibiting any and all other substances that have at least as storied a history as alcohol?  The answer here is the Daily Double.  The answer here is money and power.

A  simple corollary.  Cause and effect.

In the early part of the twentieth century there were two very powerful men.  Two very powerful families.  Two very powerful industries.  Oil and textiles.  Petrochemical and paper, rope etc.  The “etc.” wasn’t yet a big deal, but the speculators could see that it might be.  The fusion of the two was predicted to be tremendously, obscenely, lucrative.  Technology, science and chemistry, although in infancy, was about to bust out, hire hookers and buy everyone in the know a brand new house and car.

It did.  All that and more including a delicious bag of salt and vinegar chips.  As a result of fossil products and pulp from trees, America volcanoed from the agrarian age into an industrial one and began to dominate world manufacturing of products, finance and military power.  Don’t forget the experiment of alcohol prohibition had as it’s impetus the notion that sober workers would be more productive.

That went really well.

The men were  John D. Rockefeller and William Randolph Hearst.  Magnates of oil and paper respectively.  Hemp, not marijuana, represented the single largest threat to their empires ever.  An incredible natural resource was hemp.  The strongest natural fiber known to man to this day.  Beats the shit out of nylon et al.  Makes cotton look Fisher Price.  An entire crop can be turned over in twelve to sixteen weeks.  A non flowering plant that requires no pesticides that thrives at almost any latitude and is actually good for the soil.  Anything can be fashioned from it.  Clothing, oil and fuels, paper, lotions, soaps, waterproof incredibly durable concrete, foods rich in protein and antioxidants.

Hemp remains the world’s best kept secret.  Schwarzenegger recently vetoed a bill allowing for it’s cultivation in California.  Woulda been huge.  Our best hope as the world’s fifth largest economy and this Austrian diphshit vetoes it despite it’s evil cousin being perfectly legal and everyone smoking the shit out of it in his state.  The original reason gone and he still lacks the courage to step up.  Beyond Arnold outing himself as a giant vagina, what does this tell you?

So they demonized it.  Back in the day.  They produced propagandic films depicting depraved negro jazz musicians raping white women immediately after smoking it’s demonic and potent cousin of specie, cannabis sativa.  Early model Ford’s fast motioned off roads into ditches, drivers and occupants flying like drunken acrobats in an era before seat belts.  Everyone who came in contact with it either lost their fucking minds or suffered a fate they didn’t deserve and didn’t see coming.  The aftermath of a single vintage 1920’s joint (marijuana cigarette), was littered with destruction and carnage.

No wonder post 1950’s generations came to view such nonsense as high comedy.  Then there was Manson, hippies and Vietnam.  The subsequent first cultural war in America.  A story for another day, but without those neanthropic landmines, I imagine we’d be a lot further along and better off.

If you think about it, it really was the first successful attempt to manipulate the masses in this country through an organized regimen of fear and loathing.  Unfortunately it was and has been extraordinarily successful.  How sad.  This was their prototype for what they do now every day.

I could easily make the case for the legalization of all drugs.  It’s just that I have reservations.  I’ve done just about everything under the sun including heroin and meth.  Meth can ruin a life in weeks.  It’s the worst  recreational substance I’ve ever seen.  On the other hand,  William S Bourroughs survived and thrived as an opiate junkie for fifty years or so.  I have to be honest and tell you, I don’t know where to draw the line.

The facts are exhaustive.  And the fact is, it’s patriotic to support legalization of marijuana at least.  It would do us no harm and a world of good.  Hemp too.  Let us build and rebuild using the most intelligent, efficacious and viable resource nature has ever provided.

We simply must abandon this puritanical zeitgeist.  It makes no sense, defies logic and it will be our ruin, it prevents us from all manner of practical things and exists as an excuse for spending our way into oblivion.  The traditional precepts of God and and country are archaic, obsolete and fucking absurd.  We are smarter and more practical than this.  We remain the wealthiest country in the history of mankind and stand on the verge of fucking it all up because of superstition and fear.  Enough is really enough.

Drinks for my friends.

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