Highest greetings from the northeast side of Detroit, where I’m visiting with my daughter Sunny and granddaughter Beyonce and waiting right now to schedule a required foot operation that promises to restore much of my personal mobility that’s been shackled for most of the present year by a diabetic wound on my left foot that has refused to heal.
My several doctors say that portions of infected bones in my foot—sadly including my small toe—must be removed so that the flesh may heal, and then I’ll be off my feet for another month of recovery time. I’ve had to cancel all my potential performance work and my entire trip to Chicago, Memphis and New Orleans in order to attend to this problem.
I’m hoping to be healed up enough by the middle of November to get back to Amsterdam for what will be the city’s first year without a Cannabis Cup for more than three decades. The High Times entrepreneurs seem to have given up on the Dam after suffering several years of problems with local authorities on venue and licensing issues. One year the site of the exposition was raided by a force of 150 police—a veritable army by Dutch standards—and last year the expo site was shut down completely before the event could open.
Thus the High Times international Cannabis Cup will be staged earlier in November this year in Jamaica instead of Amsterdam. The magazine’s wildly popular Medical Cannabis Cups in California, Michigan and elsewhere, and its new Cannabis Cup festivities with legalized weed in Colorado, Washington and Oregon have replaced the Amsterdam event as profit centers.
With the Cannabis Cup, as with the cannabis culture as a whole, what began as a lark in the face of severe oppression by the authorities has now become Big Business. What was all about getting high and having a ball and being creative and innovative is now about contests between products and how many people will pay how much to attend a cannabis exposition of products after products to be sold to a maximum number of consumers.
My view is not the popular one, but that’s not what they pay me for. I’m an old curmudgeon and an elder who was there at the beginning of our movement, and my job is to point out what’s gone right or wrong as our long grass-roots movement is now beginning to emerge triumphant.
What’s absolutely right, of course, is that very soon we won’t be getting arrested or harassed in any way by the police for smoking marijuana. The hated drug police will be removed from our lives and we’ll be left to deal with the people standing behind them and propping them up—the vicious office-holding politicians who have used the phony issue of marijuana illegalization to create an incredible power base in the law enforcement community and the relentless engine for the War On Drugs.
The dismantling of the machinery of the War On Drugs is a formidable task at the very forefront of our agenda, and as we have seen here in Michigan the legislators and the law enforcement community will drag their heels and resist legal changes mandated by the voters with all their might for as long as they can get away with it. They’ve had a good thing going for themselves ever since they dreamed up the marijuana illegalization mythology some 80 years ago, and they’re not going to give it up until they have absolutely no further choice.
How good is this thing they’ve had? I hate to sound like a broken record, but it’s all been sleight-of-hand and smoke-and-mirrors from the beginning. As first instituted by Commissioner of Narcotics Harry Anslinger in the 1930s and then as upgraded by Richard M. Nixon and his gang in the 1970s, the war on marijuana and then the War On Drugs have been conceived and executed as a precise form of attack on people outside the mainstream of American culture: African-Americans, Mexicans, jazz musicians, poets and outsiders of every stripe—exactly the people who introduced us to the joys of marijuana and kept the pipe lit until it could get to us.
Marijuana was targeted as the standard bearer for the next generation of prohibition because that’s what these particular people smoked, and a case had to be made against this practice in order to turn these people into criminals and give the police forces the right and duty to harass and hound them without mercy. Commissioner Anslinger came up with a bunch of non-scientific horseshit to declare that marijuana was a narcotic and its users to be punished under the nation’s draconian narcotics laws.
But Anslinger was just making up shit to serve his agenda. Science had nothing to do with it. Physical harm from smoking marijuana was not even alleged. Here are excerpts from Anslinger’s testimony to law-makers in Congress:
“There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz, and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others.”
“Marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind…. the primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races…. Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death…. You smoke a joint and you’re likely to kill your brother…. Marihuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing…. Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.”
There was never a word of truth in the claim that marijuana was a narcotic. It is not a narcotic. It is not toxic. It has no narcotic properties. It is simply not a narcotic. Yet ever successive groups of lawmakers have created intricate systems of laws and punishments predicated on the myth that marijuana is a narcotic, or if no longer a narcotic then a “controlled substance” the use of which must be severely restricted and its users brutally punished by the forces of law and order.
Now that these asinine laws are being stripped away and a brighter future begins to dawn from the west, we must remain ever vigilant until our rights and freedoms are fully restored and the police completely removed from the cannabis equation. There is a new petition drive shaping up that aims to strip all language about marijuana from the state statutes and start with a clean slate.
This is an excellent idea, but in the meantime the state and local authorities across the state of Michigan are enacting new measures to restrict and stringently regulate the grass-roots marijuana dispensaries that have grown up like weeds in our communities.
Instead of introducing legal medical marijuana with a well-thought-out, comprehensive regulatory scheme that would insure that patients get the best weed for the lowest price, they stalled and hemmed and hawed until the people took care of the question for themselves, and now they want to transform it into something completely different from what the voters called for when they passed the citizens’ initiative to legalize medical marijuana several years ago.
My time has run out for this month but I’ll keep this issue in mind until it’s time to write again next month. Meanwhile I’ll be passing my 74th birthday on October 2 and celebrating the release of my new book, IT’S ALL GOOD—A john Sinclair Reader from Horner Books in my home town, Flint Michigan. FREE THE WEED!
—Detroit
September 24, 2015
© 2015 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
