Canna bureaucracy

Some thoughts on a snowy morning.

The cannabis question has been with us for over a century, now.  From the earliest days of the colonies, hemp was a prime crop, one which George Washington planted not only as a textile, but in hopes of supplanting tobacco as a recreational smoke. Extracts of hemp oils and flowers were used by physicians in the Royal Court and in the New World, its properties had been explored by the early rulers and scientists of China and one would have to have a completely unrealistic view of mankind to believe that no one on Earth had ever taken the time to select and crossbreed the frost and drought-resistant plants for stronger resin and larger flowers.   We’re curious little monkeys.  Gregor Mendel was just the first one to write notes about it.

Cannabis is relatively benign, but let us be honest, very little on this world is beyond abuse. No doubt over the centuries, people who have lacked motivation or fallen on hard times or suffered from underlying depression have taken to smoking too much hemp at too young an age for too long, and wound up roughly as smart as a football bat.

Fact is, people have ruined their lives with just about everything possible, cradle to the grave, since there were two of us here, according to most of the stories that have been going around since fire was new.  

None of those stories ever goes on to tell how making rules ever actually stopped people from doing those things.  The long list of punishments for breaking the rules suggests that, human nature being what it is, maybe the whole rule thing never worked out any better for them than it has for the United States and her once again tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to be free.

Prohibition, the bastard stepchild of conspiracy theory, corporate manipulation and racism, has wandered a strange and checkered road to the present, where it once again rises before us in all its complexity of ignored facts, generations of institutional prejudice and billions in federal salaries and private-sector profit, emerging scientific understanding  suppressed by the minority of sharply divided opinions for a variety of political agendas,  a struggle of cultures and values in which almost every voice of science, compassion and reason has been ignored.  Even with the example of one failure glaring from less than a century in the past, the United States Government continues to pursue a path of interdiction, instead of innovation.

And the fault does not fall at any single doorstep.

Too many of the spokespeople for both sides have too much invested personally to truly see the big picture; ego, an addiction to the limelight, or a bulldog-vicious determination to win at all costs, even the loss of allies and friends and at the price of bloodshed and destruction.  Conversely, too many on both sides see and care solely about the big picture- at the cost of any awareness of the individuals involved, save a tactical awareness of their value as images, either for vilification or promotion, distraction or filler.

Let’s be clear from the start; like Samuel Clemens’ friend Mark Twain, I wouldn’t belong to any group that would have me.  A critical thinker in the tradition of Mister Twain, Cummings, Asimov, and Heinlein,  I find no contradiction between being an outspoken advocate of absolute freedom and equality for cannabis and hemp users, providers and growers, and my beliefs in maintaining a strong intelligent military, reducing the cost and intrusion of government, reforming campaign contributions , putting an end to the welfare-poverty treadmill, preserving the Second Amendment, enforcing the death penalty, and reducing taxes. 

I am an American with personal reasons for wanting this plant returned to our use above and beyond the simple fact that the Government has no right to prohibit it.

I am not some welfare daddy trying to score free government weed without losing any of my SNAP benefits or having to actually pay the rent in the apartment where I neglect my kids while dealing crack and bath salts.

Oops… sorry, did I drop a stereotype? 

Guess what?  They don’t exist without examples.

Sell your PC crap to someone who hasn’t slept in their vehicle inside the urban blight of a major metropolis for the better part of a month.

I am also not some “let’s all go save the planet” fan who has a signed copy of “An Inconvenient Truth”.  I personally think Algore is a full of shit as the rest of the talking heads pimping a cause.  He flew around in a huge jet and traveled in a limo, he lives in a mansion and his wife was the genius that decided outlawing Judas Priest would end teen suicide, remember? If George W. Bush did a decent thing in his career, it was keeping Gore out of the White House.  No one was ever delusional enough to think that Dubya was a genius, maybe because, for as many stupid things as he said, he never claimed to invent the Internet.

I know that cannabis oil doesn't cure cancer, although it has a devastating ffect on some cells and tumors some of the time.  And I know that it will take a lot more than this "seed-bearing plant" to aaccomplish the "healing of the nations" or even the restart of the American economy.

So I’m a contradiction.  In the end, the only thing I have in common with 95% of the people in the movement to end Prohibition is a desire to consume and possess the byproducts of a simple plant in a responsible fashion without fear of fine, citation, arrest, seizure or invasion of my property.  We share a common goal.  I don’t have to like them or invite them over for lunch. Many of them are zealots as bad as if not worse than the opposition.  

As a group, we have achieved some stumbling steps, in much the same fashion that the buffalo once migrated in vast numbers, traveling in a generally east-west direction across the Great Plains.  Calling it a concerted effort would have been stretching things a bit, indicating a directing will where there was only instinct and appetite.

I have watched as the “leaders” (really the spokespersons) have led this fight, mainly from the rear or the conference hall or the buffet line, in much the same way that the rutting bulls contested for dominance among those ancient wandering herds and steered their direction.  

I’ve seen them online, in pics and clips, seen podcasts and TV spots, watched hours of YouTube, seen them hobnob with famous musicians and actors, representatives and senators, film makers and glass blowers, hot chicks and tattoo artists and horticulture experts from across the globe.

I’ve seen pics of them at the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, at the Hard Rock Cafe and Colorado smoke shops, at festivals and gatherings, rallies and benefit concerts.

I haven’t seen any of them in handcuffs.

Maybe I expect too much.

Maybe I’ve read enough history to recall that very few people have ever managed a major shift in consciousness signing petitions, appearing on their own TV show online, or playing by the rules.

But in the end I am ronin.

I would like to say that I bow to no man, or creed, or banner, but I’m too cynical for that. I have folded down like an abject slave in the face of necessity and hunger and despair, surrendered courtesy and grace to anger and self-righteousness, and broken every vow of honor I ever took on my name.

I have no honor, nothing to lose, no shame left.

I stand to gain nothing by my honesty, except to reclaim maybe just a shadow of that honor.

Always a fair trade.

We are being led by fools.

On both sides.

While Moms for Marijuana walked the halls of Congress and retired LEOs LEAPed, the checks and balances system has been further dismantled around us amid the smoke and mirrors of market instabilities, the start-up of Obamacare, budget battles and disingenuously-manufactured terrorist attacks. 

While Congressmen and gubernatorial candidates smiled and made promises, corporate patents on seed stock and genetic information have placed much of the potential benefit of legalization forever beyond our reach, without a word from advocacy groups or the Department charged with protecting your right to fair Commerce practices.  

Your President and mine took the occasion of his re-election to sign the Indefinite Detention and Detainment Act into law on New Year’s Eve of that same year, while continuing to raid dispensaries, seize property, arrest seniors and kill veterans, keeping the troops in the Middle East, detaining innocent people in Gitmo, losing diplomatic personnel in Benghazi.

While attempting by every means possible to separate Americans and especially patients from their right to keep and bear arms, the Attorney General’s office and assorted law enforcement agencies lost track of hundreds of weapons.  Almost fifty of then were later linked to shootings, in some cases the deaths of federal officers. Despite rallies following Newtown and Aurora, the National Rifle Association remains silent about Illinois legislation to remove the handgun rights of medical cannabis users.

They does this because supporters of legalization who are members allow them to, and because the leaders of the cannabis advocacy groups do not call for activists to speak out on their websites and at their rallies, to demand that they truly defend the rights of ALL gun owners.

The Supreme Court has been busy defending the rights of Monsanto (the folks with the patent rights to you future crops of cannabis and hemp) to grow and sell genetically manipulated organisms without labeling, with no idea what the long-term effects of consumption or environmental impact may be.  

During the same period, the SCOTUS continued to deny American citizens the right to grow and possess a plant with a proven history of over 5,000 years of nutritional and medicinal applications; denied simple cultivation and personal consumption to law-abiding U.S. citizens, including those with pressing medical needs and chronic or terminal ailments.  

Exemptions have been granted in the case of Washington State and Colorado, but how can there geographically-defined freedom or exclusion from those freedoms inside anything that can honestly be called The United States? And yet the advocates are happily, busily taking the longest possible path to challenge this absurdity; endlessly submitting petitions and chatting on live streaming podcasts, between demonstrations on the best way to clean your glassware and a showcase of that mad Tahoe Kush.

Our government will relent and allow experiments to crossbreed the avian flu virus into humans, a potential weapon and a contagion nightmare, but North American research into the uses and true effects of the multiple components of cannabis proceed at a snail’s pace, regaining lost information in microscopic steps, while advocates judge the best pot brownies in Denver.

The Federal government placed the plant and its byproducts in the Schedule of Control Substances as a dangerous narcotic with no medical value despite the findings and recommendations of a Presidential Commission, the same Federal Government that holds two medical patents on cannabis derivative medicines, Sativex and Marinol.

And while all this has happened, we have been endlessly distracted by polls and petitions, and the breathless reporting of yet another court case.  We have smiling statements made by people in Brooks Brothers suits but nothing about a rally on the Capitol Mall, or a serious, media-covered, large-scale protest outside a Supreme Court trial, led by the people who travel around the country assuring us we are making progress when down here on the ground, evidence of that progress is pretty thin.

Why does it seem as if NORML, the Marijuana Policy Project, the Campaign for the Restoration and Regulation of Hemp and most of the rest of the advocacy groups are competing with each other?  Why fight for the spotlight?  

What does it matter if Steve Elliott interviews someone on the other end of the country from the Capitol Building, the only place where anything that truly matters is going to happen now that Colorado and Washington have managed to vote in legal cannabis, albeit in much different forms?

We have half a dozen advocacy groups, most founded around and by lawyers, and yet no one in them seems able to read a government text, or sort out the legalese of the Acts in question. We are asked to ask congress to ask the President to sign an Executive Order in direct contravention to the checks and balances system, then asked to tell the President to tell a Congress (who should have been listening to we, the People for the last three decades and have clearly not been) that they need to ignore the short-term millions from pharmaceutical and faith-based super PACs and private prison contractors and vote for us, the folks who have no choice but to pay them for ignoring us.

We attack the office and person of the Attorney General, and alternately demand and plead for him to show us mercy, as soon as he is done firing the head of the DEA, changing the rules for the OCNDP, freeing the cannabis prisoners and expunging all their records, reforming immigration, arresting and charging his boss with treason and pulling monkeys out of his butt.

Really?

No, not really.  I made up the part about the monkeys.

We’ve had a Constitutional, bi-cameral, capitalist government for quite a while now.  It functions in a limited number of ways, when it comes to making and repealing laws, adding and removing things from lists, etc.  It is a maze, but it is a maze with a limited number of entrances and two possible exits, winners and losers. 

Inexplicable is the fact that it has so thoroughly baffled the people who claim to be “working for change from the inside”, who have been admired and celebrated for “fighting the good fight” since the day Nixon’s ink dried, but none of whom seem to have a clue how to get from Point A (Prohibition) to Point B (Legalization) without creating a mountain of paper, a mass of online traffic, and a massive top-heavy lobbying machine with twelve million drivers and no clear map.

Why is this?

Marx had a simple way of breaking down most social questions, and it was a fairly valid one.

Who profits?

What happens if government simply surrenders?

Yes, we all know that it won’t happen, but what if?

What if tomorrow you were free to walk out on your front porch and light up the fattest joint you could roll? 

What would happen if you could walk over to your girlfriend’s house and spend the afternoon watching “Bones” completely baked on brownies?

What would really change in the world if you could grow your own tomatoes and cucumbers and cannabis right there in your garden, for yourself, or to trade to your 18-yr-old-or older neighbor for some cucumbers or melons or carrots?  What if you paid for a simple vendors’ license and a spot at the farmer’s market and sold it as-is, let the buyer beware, and if caught, let the illegitimate seller beware as well?  What if big growers could sell and ship their products under the same tax codes as alcohol and tobacco, or, in the case of hemp, the same rules and protections as corn and soybeans?  What if every insurance company agreed to accept cannabis as a legit medicine?  If bars could once again offer smoking sections that for the first time included a tasteful selection of cannabis?

What if the intoxication levels and penalties for cannabis DUI were the same as alcohol?  If bars, convenience and liquor stores, tobacco sales and adult novelty sales all had to be 1,000 feet from schools just like bud bars and dispensaries?

What would the people who spend their days and nights making speeches and standing in front of cameras and making up the news any way they want do for a living then?  What would they be without the identity of advocates?

What benefit is it to them if the rest of the world is free?

Free to forget them?

Because face it, we aren’t talking about inspiring people here.  Mason Tvert is a smart guy, he writes good copy, but he looks like one of his favorite lines is “Super-size it!” Mister T wasn’t exactly leading the charge, nor was Steve Elliott bellowing a call to war while waving a copy of Hemp News and a slice of pepperoni  at his side, when Obama failed to even mention cannabis in the State of the Union Address, despite early predictions and broad hints on the MPP page and Hemp News that the Choom Boss would do so.

Let’s face it, once the big bang of legalization is over, working through the smaller stuff like how we are going to regulate quality and chemicals and certify organic is going to be B-O-R-I-N-G. No one is going to read the last Weedblog post about how determined delegates hammered out acceptable levels of nitrogen in shake, loose, outdoor grown, Kush (to be used for baking only) or which company failed to win an organic certification, except the kind of people who still read Mother Jones or the Christian Science Monitor.

Not the people who are going to invite you to smoke some badass Lebanese with their stripper girlfriend, or get you kick-ass seats to a game or concert.

So things get dragged out, just a little longer than they might necessarily need to be.

More petitions, more rallies, more fundraisers and podcasts.

Just a little more of that sweet fame, the most addictive and ephemeral rush of all, made all the more sweet by how little most of the bigger names truly deserve to be famous or admired.  They may have shaken a lot of hands and kissed a lot of ass, raised a lot of money, and hosted a lot of dinners, but who are they, and where have they been?

Even those who have done great things tend to lose sight of the goal, to begin mistaking themselves for the cause.  Maybe because they have nothing truly invested. 

I bet less than a hundred members of NORML could name the President, or CEO, or whatever it is you have over there… I don’t pay much attention myself, in truth.  But he looks good in a polo shirt and sweater.  Bet he plays a mean game of golf, or tennis…

Bet he never met arranged to meet someone from a bulletin board business card and a phone call, with his heart in his mouth and a fistful of wrinkled twenties in hand for a bag of unknown buds.

Or wondered if his truck was being broken into by the crack whores outside as he watched his wife walk through a door into another room with a guy carrying two Glocks and a handful of prison tats that said bad things about his past, with two more guys who could have been his brothers riding shotgun (literally) at the bullet-scarred street door to the dispensary, while a meth head muttered and raved to your left and a tinfoiler on your right tried to explain the connection between fluoride, HAARP, chemtrails, 9/11, the Jews, the Vatican, the Borgias and the World Health Organization.

Bet he’s never assumed the position.

No, most of these guys look like the guys who acquired Microsoft stock about the time it got to be worth something, who couldn’t or didn’t get a foot in the door with lobbies and PACs, who wanted something a little edgy, a little different from a stint as a public defender, with all the legalese but with no real risk. Like one day, fresh back from Cancun or South Padre, they looked around and said “Hey, the trust fund is running a little low… but I hear advocacy pays pretty well!”  With that decided, they probably put the game on the flat screen, cracked another microbrew and called their escort service to have her deliver a quarter of whatever sounded funky and cost the most, that week.

I know that’s judging by appearances, but that’s the impression these guys give; a little hipper, a little smoother, with a little more on the ball than you and me, and in no particular hurry to take the fight to the wall.

Players. 

Insiders.

Imagine what working-class Joe thinks, watching people who don’t have the conviction to actually put themselves on the line, preaching to him about rights he sees slipping away every day as he tries to earn enough to eat and pay the bills, while they fly from convention to interviews to TV spot.

Think of the curious people who surf through our discussions and comment sections online, who read the illiterate frenzy and fantastic stream-of-consciousness ravings, the scam or sting ads to order drugs through the mail or internet, the profanity and the posing thug-lovers and the hundred other forms of human trash on display.  Why do these things stay up on websites for days?  The users no longer care about the integrity of the movement, because the leaders have no true personal involvement, and integrity is a luxury in the age of the backroom deal. 

How can we be accepted as being any better, when so little of what we show the world is any better?

Try to see us through the eyes of a church-going grandparent, living in what was once a small town now overrun by spoiled college kids and arrogant money, filled with lies but confronted again and again by people who seem bent on becoming the embodiment of every drug stereotype.

 What of the veteran, on the fence, living on a pittance from a government that would rather forget, just another forgotten face who sees just how little the talking heads at the top actually give a damn, be it the top of the Veterans’ Administration or of the reform movement, about the brothers and sisters in arms slain and incarcerated in this lost war.  Once the rally ends and the petition is signed, how many legalization crowds give a thought to the plight of those same veterans?  How many offer a word, a meal or a ride? 

Think of the hundreds of thousands who have not spoken, yet.

There are so many applications for hemp, and so many uses for cannabis and its extracts.  Let us not allow those potentials to be stolen by blind trust in our representatives, or by ignoring the eternal greed and treachery of Prohibition’s offspring, the pills-punishment-incarceration-and-rehabilitation complex.

The polls predict success and increasing acceptance, among people who cared to respond. 

That headline was true a week before Reagan won the election.  Two years later, Nancy and her celluloid cowboy rode into history by restarting a billion dollar drug war, while Oliver North was arming twelve-year-olds and establishing coke routes into the United States from South America. 

Victory is a certainty when it is written into both law and history books.  Until then, it is just a convenience of perspective.

Look at how the herd moves.  Decide if the direction we are headed is correct, and if the speed at which we move is satisfactory.

If not, do something. 

Yourself.

Write a real email, not a form letter, to your state and federal representatives.  If you are in D.C., go look up your congressman or woman and tell them what you care about.

Emotional social media posts change nothing in the real world, and waiting for someone else to look after your best interests is accepting that someone else will decide what those best interests are and where they lay.

For every victory, there is a cost.  Count on it. Your enemy does.  

Time to grow up and accept the terms of this fight, even if the smiling faces online don’t want to see the storm ahead.

The tide is turning, according to the people who get paid to tell you exactly that.

I still say, Question authority.  Any authority. 

Even the cannabureaucracy.

Even mine.

But remember who has been there, on the line, and who has not.

Tides go in and out, and a wise person does not build too close to the sea on the advice of those who have never sailed deep waters.

1 Picture = 1,000 words

Cannabis cures cancer.  Any questions?

For What It's Worth...

So it comes down to this: Cannabis is not a drug. 

Oxycodone and Valium and Zanex and Zoloft are drugs. 

Cannabis is addictive. Like power and money and sex and chocolate, Assassin's Creed and Halo and Oprah, the Home Shopping Network and Jersey Shore and NCIS are addictive. Going through rehab is something thousands of juvenile cannabis consumers do each year, earning private rehab centers millions of dollars in the process and guaranteeing healthy bonuses for administrators and equally healthy stock dividends for investors, many of whom are judges and government officials.  

However, checking into a rehab center does NOT prove that anyone is actually "addicted", since the alternative is often to have uninvited conjugal visits from a your fellow inmates and the trustees during your year in state lock-up, the fist inside the glove of judicial compassion dispensed to those who fail to recognize their addiction to the evil weed.  

Ironically, one of the conditions of release is often rehab, so they get you coming or going, in the end.

Cannabis and its cousin hemp have probably been the subject of more government disinformation, more cultural frenzy, more religious hyperbole and more unjust persecution that any other plant in history, bar none.  To paraphrase a statement once made about Appalachia, there is more known about cannabis that is not true than any other plant on earth.

Cannabis is a plant, one with an incredibly long history that winds throughout most of the nations on earth, making it pretty distinctive in that one detail alone. Various parts of the cannabis plant have been used by people the world over, throughout history, to build houses, make paper, weave clothes and make rugs.  It has been smoked and eaten as an intoxicant, prescribed as an analgesic and has been included in hundreds if not thousands of herbal medicines for over seven thousand years- all without a single recorded fatality.

Right now, there are some incredibly important people in my life who could benefit from open, unrestricted, unprejudiced research into the medical properties and applications of this amazing, misunderstood plant. A man who admittedly used it strictly for recreational purposes, a man who still reached the highest office in this land, says that the Federal Government will not persecute the users and possessors of this plant in two out of the fifty United States, Colorado and Washington, as the Federal government waits to see how the will of the people plays out and reels back from grassroots efforts that have resoundingly rejected recent politically-expedient legislation.

But the rest of us are on our own. The former cannabis user on Pennsylvania Avenue refuses to order the DEA to reschedule a drug that is classified as having no medical benefits despite the paradox that the government he heads holds two medical patents on drugs incorporating elements of this plant. 

Despite the fact that even the most conservative polls show that well over 60% of the country wants a change in the dialogue and focus of the Drug War, the man elected to lead our government in interpreting and obeying our collective will instead refuses to shift the focus of the DEA to stopping the flow of methamphetamines and oxy-/hydrocodone along the East Coast and throughout the Southwest.  Between three and fifteen people die each day from each of these drugs, and the associated costs in terms of property destroyed and law enforcement is counted in the millions.  But well over half of the budget of the Drug Enforcement Agency still goes toward the harassment, arrest, and imprisonment of people who simply choose another system of healing, another perspective on life or another vector of recreation. 

Supported by a Congress whose integrity has long since been compromised by large contributions from major pharmaceutical companies and other special interests, former Choom Ganger Barack Obama refuses to restore the right of American farmers to grow hemp, the non-intoxicating cousin of cannabis indica that is a historic cornerstone of American agriculture, having grown on the farms of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln; a crop that turned the tide durring World War Two as farmers were urged to "Grow Hemp for Victory!"  

Hemp actually has as much if not more medical potential than its THC-rich cousin, due the high levels of cannabinoids and cannabidiols, compounds that are opening new doors to natural healing every day, as we recover knowledge long-lost to prejudice and ignorance.  Hemp is an incredibly hardy, versatile crop that could single-handedly reverse the fortunes of hundreds of small farming communities and thousands of small farms and farm families. In this continuing Prohibition, Obama is continuing a tradition established by both Democrat and Republican Presidents before him back to Richard Nixon... promising America freedom and liberty, and leaving her wrapped in chains.

We are less free than the colonists before the revolution, less free than the citizens of this nation before the Civil War.

How long do we watch our loved ones suffer and our nation decline because we cannot get past this one simple point? How long do we turn a blind eye to raids, beatings, and shootings right here on our own soil, while we are distracted with wars decades in the planning, misled from the pulpits and inundated with canned events carefully staged and in some cases even orchestrated by our intelligence communities, the media, the politicians and the puppet masters behind them who pull the strings of stock market and public opinion?

With the economy and public confidence still at an all-time slow, why are we attacking- sorry, "sending in advisers and training freedom fighters"- in yet another Middle Eastern country, setting the stage for incrreasing involvement and another decade or so of killing hundreds if not thousands of our sons and daughters, and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, spedning billions of dollars we don't have to defend rebels who mostly hate us and who admit to using the same weapons from which we are supposedly trying to defend them? 

If defending people from an unjust government is the goal of our military, they have work to do a lot closer to home.  As far as I know, Syria isn't selling meth, running guns and putting 12 year old hookers on the streets of America, unlike some of the people so recently armed by Eric Holder and his boss.  Maybe those are more worthy targets for an application of our military might.  

Wouldn't putting the family heads of the cartels and the officers and thugs of the dictatorships and regimes six feet under strengthen border security and stabilize the region directly attached to the United States?  Wouldn't encouraging democracy and improving economic conditions in Latin and South America increase literacy, reduce birth rates, decrease illegal immigration, reduce federal law and INS budget needs, reduce the flow of guns and drugs in both directions across the border, and encourage tourism and businesses on both sides?  

Why are we attacking old people, veterans, and sick people in this nation, killing seniors who refuse their medications and imprisoning patients who seek their own answers, rather than respecting their choices and giving them the tools to avoid a lifetime of addiction and half-measured treatments?

Why is cannabis the ONLY thing the American Cancer Society won't try to use in its "Fight for the Cure"?

Why allow research labs to try to find a way to CAUSE avian flue to cross over into humans, but deny researchers the right to investigate the properties of cannabis and hemp, and the ways in which THC, CBD, and CBN could be used to improve the quality of life, to heal and cure?

Why must cannabis users die so that corporations and police unions can live?

Forward- The Day of the Raids

Angry.

Meth is rampant in Washington State.

Drunk driving is rampant in Washington State.

Political corruption is rampant in Washington State.

Police corruption is rampant in Washington State.

The taxpayers spoke and do you know what the cops of Washington and of Washington, DC said to us?:Fuck you. We do what we want.

The last I heard, cops were supposed to be public servants.

The taxpayers spoke and do you know what the doctors said to us about obtaining our meds: Fuck you. Do it MY way or suffer. 

The taxpayers spoke and the politicians said to us: Fuck you. We will do whatever we want to you whenever we want-with YOUR tax money.

How did the citizens of Washington State get this way? Complacent with being abused? Complacent with being told how to live?

Complacent with having their own tax dollars used against them?

WHAT HAS HAPPENED?

How many people think that the politicians are going to create the jobs needed to get Washington State back on track by January 1, 2014?

The politicians can’t create any jobs while the taxes from our disability and unemployment checks go to pay their salaries. They’ve shipped our jobs away and refuse to replace them.

So when we try to survive by being healthier with MMJ they STILL try to shut us down.

They are wrong and they have to go.

Then we have the corrupt dispensary owners who turn on their neighboring dispensaries because of greed. They don’t give a shit about their patients.

[TimesOfMalta.com]

At the top of all of this are the fake patient advocates who have been pretending to be friends with the patients in order to collect data that is used to deprive them of their medicines — to make them suffer.

When people cannot have their chronic pain medications or end-of-life medications they become angry, depressed, and bedridden.

When people cannot have their meds, they cannot work, properly raise their kids, help their elders, help their churches, or fight for social justice; this is exactly what the politicians want in order to stay in power.

How dare these people try to take away our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

Washington citizens are retreating into booze, prescription pain meds, and methamphetamine at astonishing rates.

How do these people sleep at night knowing that their perverse need to control other peoples’ lives is ruining entire cities?

[The Feronia Project]

It’s time for these people to go. It’s time to call the special election necessary to relieve these people of their jobs.

In the meantime, this is what you do:

Start having neighborhood meetings. Learn to grow your own. Rely only on word-of-mouth referrals and trusted sources.

Find every journalist and alternative media outlet you can and scream off the rooftops what has been done to you. Drop any doctor that has supported this nonsense in favor of pro-mmj doctors.

File Referendum Measure petitions. The last day is July 27, 2013.

http://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/initiatives.aspx

The citizens of Washington State did everything that was asked of them and were knifed in the back.

Now go underground, increase your numbers, make a plan of attack, and come back out swinging. 

Put them ALL out of work in 2014. They must have forgotten that the citizens outnumber the cops and politicians.

It is now time to remind them.

~ Anna Dawn Garland

• • • • • • • • •

Editor’s note: This post was taken from Steve Elliott's Weedblog at tokesignals.com  Dispensaries across the Puget Sound area were raided by federal DEA agents on July 24.

No Place Like Home

The sink is leaking.  The tub drain stopper doesn’t work.   The toilet leaks.  The gutter pours more water on our doorstep than the storm does when it rains.  There are no screens and the walls and floor were filthy when we moved in.  

The landlord and his son are a pair of tragic comedians without meaning to be so, displaying more stupidity and ineptitude in one day of “maintenance” than I have witnessed in twenty years on construction sites.

But the floors are hardwood, a mix of local pine and cherry, mismatched, but swirled with gorgeous grain.  Our apartment is actually part of state history, an old classroom in what was one of the first schools for Negro children in Petersburg.  From the back window the Allegheny mountains roll away to the northeast, where blossoms of sarvis, redbud, apple, cherry, peach, and locust have begun to touch the dark grey-blue hills with color.

Another city, another epiphany of beauty in the midst of the rush and confusion, the grinding impatience and frustration, the endless waiting and sheer nonsensical hilarity of this thing called life.

There’s no place like home.

I must be thinking out loud again, because Cindy smiles that incredible smile and says one of those things that take my breath away.

“As long as I’m with you, I am home.”  She looks down at slender, graceful hands, one balancing a book, and nods as Dire Straits swings like sultans in the background of our tiny apartment.

 

“When we were out west, we talked about ‘home’, or-” she smiles and looks up at me over her glasses, “-’back east’ as you started calling it when we were trying to settle in.”  

Twin vertical lines appear between her eyes as those dark windows focus back over the last two years, and clouds drift over that sunny smile. 

“But we’ve gone so many places without finding a ‘home’, no matter how hard we tried.  Then we came home, but it wasn’t home, ever, not in the way we wanted it to be.”  She sighs, pushes hair away from her eyes.  “We’ve met so many people and lost touch with most of them and we kind of made ‘home’ where ever we both were.” 

Another smile, and she looks down at her hands again, my slender brown Madonna, curled like a cat in a rocking chair made in Nicaragua, wrapped in a black cotton khaftan from the opposite side of the world. 

“I like it that way.”

As do I, my love.

Thousands of miles of displacement, to so many places, doing such an assortment of things in a determined effort to make a home, the lessons learned and truths witnessed in a quest that never coalesced into that elusive prize have changed all the rules, perceptions and definitions. 

We’ve lived (as ‘extended houseguests’) in luxury and dwelt in the definition of austerity (a 12 by 24 foot studio apartment in a decaying hotel), fought rush hour traffic and bedbugs and black mold, crack head neighbors and ossified bureaucracy, camped in metropolis and on the edge of the wilderness, on moss and snow and sand and grass.  We’ve pulled cactus spines and lichen and a wide assortment of spiders from our persons, clothing, bedding, and tents, learned to sleep with the sound of trains and freeways and coyotes and bears snuffling through camp, and eaten more rice and beans than some locals in Nogales.  

We’ve memorized the basic street layout, rush hours, public transit, trash services, bad neighborhoods, recreational opportunities, area and zip codes of five major metro areas and a dozen outlying regions in which we routinely traveled, volunteered or camped.

We survived crossing the continent aboard Greyhound Bus Lines, twice, and if I ever find myself aboard another Greyhound, I will know that I have indeed died and gone to the deepest circle of Hell.

We have the run from east coast to west dialed, down to the day and the dollar; miles per gallon (25), miles per hour (65-75), hours per day (8-12), miles to destination (4027.6), power drinks, water, coffee and snacks in the cooler, everything it takes to cook, camp, and conduct the basics of daily life packed into a 4-by-5-by-7-foot space behind the cab and an endless supply of topics to discuss, even after all these miles and what is hard to believe has only been five years since I met this amazing woman and began the process of detachment and surrender that led to this Journey in the first place.

And now we find ourselves home, but without a home.

We have found shelter, and for that I am truly grateful as the storms of spring bring the heat and insects of summer.  I can see that Cindy has blossomed over this past year, making an amazing assortment of jewelry, hiking for miles in some pretty astounding terrain, on full days even I found to be a test, setting and surpassing personal goals in her climbing and keeping a positive energy through so many trials.

But I know she is tired.  As am I; tired, a little road worn, slightly disillusioned, and low on enthusiasm for sacred cows and cliché perspectives.

Well it’s rainin’ out in California

And up north it’s freezin’ cold

And this livin’ on the road

Is getting’ pretty old.

Or is it believin’ in just livin’, that’s such a hard way to go?

We’ve fought with the apathy of bureaucracy, the inner demons of anger and control and depression, battled together against Cindy’s Multiple Sclerosis with natural medicines augmented by lots of love and laughter and adventure, with good music, great food and an assortment of books for the rest days.  Our journey has led through an amazing cornucopia of natural wonders on public lands, stumbling across a vast, lost history that slumbers along the byways, tiny milestones of our heritage unseen in the race to the horizon.

We have shouted in too many deaf ears, listened to too many false promises and danced to the tune of too many repetitive, predictable rationalizations.  Too many people filled with envy for what they see as our 'leisure' (instead of determination and sacrifice) to live a dream the envious would not dare follow.

The perception may exist that we are ‘homeless by choice’, that Cindy could have remained here and stayed in standard treatment and I could have found work in the Valley, at the mill, retrained for employment, et cetera.

That conceit suffers from two fatal flaws: the first; that I could sit idly by and watch the woman I was falling in love with slowly die from the experimental drugs and narcotics that did nothing to treat her disease, only to mask its effects.

The second; that we would long remain free and outside the walls of a federal penitentiary given the zeal with which the war on Americans known as the Drug War was pursued by RUSH Task Forces and other acronym-laden police arms of Prohibition.

We had to leave, quite simply, so that we could remain free long enough for Cindy to heal.  Here in the East, disinformation and prejudice about medical use of cannabis has been deeply ingrained in people that routinely use opioids without a thought, people who are admittedly addicted to their assorted anti-depressants and pain relievers, who regularly vote for harsher penalties on cannabis users.

But the availability of medications for fighting Cindy’s disease and for use as a general sleep aid, performance enhancer (forget Red Bull and Viagra!) and guaranteed effective-every-time analgesic turned out to be just a foot note in the adventure, albeit a welcome one.  Thanks to our friend Sheri Erickson, Cindy was introduced to lion’s mane extract, a natural fungal extract created by Fungi Perfecti, the company owned by Paul Stamets, one of the world’s leading researchers into the uses of mushrooms and fungus in ancient cultures and as modern medical alternatives.

With regular ingestion of cannabis s and lion’s mane extracts, the change in Cindy’s health and functionality was revolutionary.  If this had been a product produced by one of the large medical companies, we would be on every talk show in America and writing the book and screenplay by now.

Instead, we kept track of the changes, as her nerves regenerated and the spasms in her legs and arms stopped.  The burning and tingling under her skin at the slightest pressure faded, as surface sensitivity, long overwhelmed by the static of overload, slowly returned.  She woke up better and faster, functioned more clearly, and showed improved memory, energy and reflexes. With the cannabis, she was able to eat and rest on “bad days” or after extreme exertion, usually recovering in two days instead of the week it had taken when we first met. 

Her Multiple Sclerosis episodes became infrequent, then virtually non-existent, beyond some occasional tiredness, usually on bad weather days when the titanium buried throughout her body ached in time to her arthritic spine and knees.  On those days, it was hot cannabis tea for breakfast, or pancakes with special butter, or the simple expedient of a deep lungful or two of some Indica strain that would level the boom on the pain.  Brownies or Ronin’s Rational Pasta Sauce for lunch, when the chef definitely exposed himself to the dangers of second-hand smoke, and then whatever milady might need til it was time to call it a night.

We went on websites and chat rooms and forums and shared this miraculous transformation on Facebook and Blogger.  No one wanted to know, beyond the people who already knew, who had relocated to cannabis-friendly states to avoid going to prison for being sick.  Our families operated in a frenzy of avoidance, trying at any cost to steer around the topic.  The cure for several of the most devastating diseases on earth, including cancer, had been found, and no one wanted to talk about it.

We gathered in, tightened down, cut away the dead weight and honed our art.  Life assumed a simple rhythm of rest and work, sleeping and eating, reading and sending emails and news, gathering and recycling the tons of aluminum and glass scattered along the highways of this country, tending to assorted chores during irregular forays into town, exploring the incredible array of mountains and canyons, forests and rivers in which we found ourselves traveling and camping.  Packing gear and making snacks, mixing energy drinks, to rise early and drive or hike out after it on some sweet chunk of stone either unknown or just unoccupied, or not, sharing the dawn with whatever other hardy souls have come out to greet the sun, stringing ropes and setting gear, clipping bolts and pulling until your flesh surrenders to the distance between desire and mortality.  Listening to the deep silence as it seeps into the inner spaces of your heart and stills the raging seas.

We have watched with the rest of the country as our elected representatives have lied and stolen, cheated and lost control, destroyed and covered their tracks, justified tyranny with security, wrapping their sins and errors in the flag, as did those in whose shadow they stand, in whose tracks they have walked.  Without the daily distractions of milk for the cat, vet appointments, kids’ plays, house payments, an ailing water heater, road work on the daily commute, office politics as usual, or reality TV, we’ve absorbed more than our share of raw data as our leaders have dismantled the country’s most basic and sacred safe checks and institutions, and as sensible people have supported demagogues whose only interest lay in the mirror.

We cranked out new lines and old, repaired and hiked trails I’d laid a decade ago, ate lots of citrus and local red chili burritos, camped under the stars of Apache Leap and talked about what America was becoming, from where we stood. 

In the west, where there was progress towards ending the pointless war on cannabis, we dealt with shady dispensaries, shifting city ordinances and political games between corrupt law officials and over-zealous supporters of legalization.  Meanwhile, knock-off oxycodone and hydrocodone and high grade methamphetamines were pouring in courtesy of the cartels. 

In the gorgeous desert where we camped and climbed, a huge multinational mining operation was threatening, no, actually, they were promising to destroy or render unusable land of incredible significance to both national and climbing history.  Resolution Copper was looking to save a few pennies on the ton for the vast wealth they were digging out from under the gorgeous plateau of Apache Leap, by using practices that no American mining company could legally employ, and they were (and still are) doing so with the support of Congress members who had sworn to defend this country and its interests and ideals.  Recreational users had fallen to infighting and squabbling over old feuds, and the classic areas had been beaten to dust as the tide of development and involvement simply turned away, leaving Queen Creek and Devils Canyon to their own fates. The advocacy groups which claim to represent climbers had only this year put a field operative in place, after this issue has gone on for most of the last decade.

It made you want to ask people what they were smoking, because cannabis does NOT make you that stupid.

Meanwhile, back in the city, in microcosm of the rest of the nation, pro-cannabis advocates tried to reconcile thug-lovers and trustafarians with Baby Boomers and middle-class grandmas, much the same way a man might attempt to herd cats with a badminton racquet, while the people who made millions waging the war on drugs just kept pushing the same old stereotypes and disinformation we had seen in the east.

It got old.

Damned old.

We had built trail, hosted events, and fed the homeless on a pittance, and we watched organizations and communities with millions in resources and massive PR machines pretend that they had no grasp of how to deal with obvious problems and realistic solutions.  Government and the advocacy groups clearly did not want to find solutions when they make a career out of searching for them, and the puppets who fund both deny the strings that jerk them around. Government officials tasked with providing volunteers with tools and missions are too burned out, under-funded, or unmotivated and clueless to have anticipated the next sunset.  Climbers were too caught up in the next Rendezvous, climbing DVD, pub crawl or gym session to do more than post on Facebook when we tried to share the truth, too focused on ‘the scene’ in exotic locations to find time to explore the wonders right at their doorstep.

We prayed, we meditated, we tried so hard, and in the end we simply stopped giving a damn on a lot of levels.  The price of making this our new ‘home’ seemed too high; crime, bureaucracy, wasted work and money while the real needs went unanswered, and the endless headache of dealing with hundreds and thousands of people going about the business of hating their very existence. 

Far worse were the givers.  Most of the people who seemed interested in our stories or offered any kind of job or help were like bad fairies out of an old Grimm tale; they either stung like scorpions out of sheer kindness, or we could not get rid of them, and/or they were mad as bloody hatters. 

We kept digging for those precious nuggets; loving the adventure and yet dumbfounded as our assorted friends donated to, supported, and promoted the stories of much better funded people who were doing the same thing we were, living on the road, but doing so with a film crew and corporate sponsors, without building trail or replacing hardware or putting up new lines, without the complications of Multiple Sclerosis, an empty bank account, and no fall-back to which one could retreat if things went astray.  Hot chicks in a new truck with a shiny Airstream are apparently more of what ‘soul climbing’ is about than two people in their fifties living out of a 6 x 8 foot tent, nursing a twelve-year-old truck across the country on a wing and a prayer.  

As we traveled, and in the many camps we had set, Cindy made some truly fine jewelry from native stones we found on our hikes, for which I created a webpage which was showered with praise and attention and Facebook ‘Likes’ by people who then turned around and bought their birthday and holiday gifts from strangers with a good sales pitch.

Faith is a gift we receive, if we are blessed, at a young age.  Losing it is a terrible battle, sometimes, or the stroke of a bolt out of the blue.  Trying to recall the exact moment at which you first felt that loss is like trying to catch hold of the retreating tide; it rushes away… it all rushes away.

But I stop, and put out my hand, and Cindy looks up from her book and smiles as I touch her cool skin, putting a finger in her book to close it as she reaches out to cover my hand with hers.

“What?”

And I know, again, how we have made it, so far, through so much, and how there always seems to be something to hold on to. 

Love.

Love levels all preconceptions of  your own heart, or what it can take, how many times it can break, and heal, and rise up to beat on. Love lifts the glory of the morning mountains and rolling clouds out of the rain, finds the tiny flowers that thrive along the shore of the flood, silences all of your laments against the song of a billion billion stars in a desert sky. 

Love fills an empty belly better than food, holds back the chill of night better than the warmest wrap, casts light into depths no lantern can plumb.  Love finds courage when the battle is long since lost, strength when there is no further to go, laughter to greet the arrogant advance of despair, and hope, to rise up, each one of us, all broken anew and remade, to try, once again, to forge dreams into days. 

Love is hearth and home in the midst of the wastelands.  Love is the unique note, echoing forever between two people, struck at the right time and in the right way to resonate, just so, a harmonic only they can taste, but which fills the world and souls around them with light and laughter.  Love connects families across the miles and beyond this veil of tears.  Love is the unspoken knowledge that true friends remain friends, even through the silence of years.

The bittersweet truth is that you cannot go home again, for ‘home’ is a shadow on the grass, a moving shape in the clouds, a whisper on the winds.

Home is not where the heart is.  Home is what the heart is.

We traveled thousands of miles to return to the place where it all began, only to find that the place we sought was gone with the winds that had first taken us away.

The sink is dripping.  The tub drain stopper doesn’t work.   The toilet leaks.  The gutter pours more water on our doorstep than the storm does when it rains, and it looks like rain. 

No worries.

We have enough love to weather any storm.

With love, there is no place like home.