The “Heritage” of the War on Drugs

Drug dealers suck the life out of a community. Look at what they’ve done to Southern Humboldt. Drug dealers use black market drug money to drive honest working people out of their homes, which they then convert into dope houses. Meanwhile, middle-class professionals, who could afford to live here, won’t, because they don’t want to associate with, and don’t want their kids to associate with, so many low-life, criminal drug-dealers. Who can blame them?

Even the non-profit environmental organizations that were founded down here, have all fled to Arcata and Eureka, where the economy still boasts some diversity, and black market drug dealers haven’t completely driven everyone else away. Ironically, even black market drug dealers, complain about black market drug dealers around here. Apparently, drug kingpins don’t like to see street-dealers working their neighborhood any more than anyone else.

Working people either camp out in the woods, or commute from Fortuna, for the privilege of serving rude, disdainful drug dealers, for little more than minimum wage. Retirees live in fear, behind locked doors because of drug-related violent crime, and because of the number of desperate drug addicts on the street. We all pay a high price for the black market cannabis industry in Humboldt County, whether we buy pot or not, and the concentration of drug dealers in our small community continues to increase because only drug dealers can afford to live here, and only drug dealers want to live in a community so dominated by drug dealers.

Despite all of the social problems that black market drug dealers create, and the enormous costs of those problems born by the community, our Board of Supervisors is totally hypnotized by the shady characters who sit in the gallery, fanning themselves with enormous wads of cash. As a result, the county spends the taxpayer’s money to punish the symptoms, while it serves the disease. Now that the county has bent over backwards to embrace these drug dealers, it seems their efforts have mostly been in vain.

The vast majority of Humboldt County’s black market growers have opted not to apply for a permit to grow cannabis legally under the county’s new regulatory guidelines. The Humboldt County Planning Department has only received about 2,500 permit applications, out of an estimated 10,000 illegal grows, and the deadline to file an application has passed. Our investigations reveal that many of the applications filed, have little or no chance of approval.

Many more permit applications were filed by tenants, rather than landowners. I imagine a lot of entrepreneurs have set up shop here, because Humboldt County passed an ordinance first, and they want to get into the legal cannabis market early, but I wouldn’t be surprised if these companies move elsewhere as soon as the opportunity arises. Being first probably means more to them than being here.

 

So far, only about 300 applicants have completed the process and received permits. I wish all of them tremendous success. However, that means that Humboldt County’s back-country still harbors thousands of black market growers who have made little or no effort to come into compliance with the law, despite the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors’ eagerness to court them. Clearly, the majority of Humboldt County’s growers prefer to serve the black market, and remain outside of the law.

We should have expected that. After all, most of these people got into this business because they couldn’t compete in the real world, without cheating, to begin with. They know that they don’t stand a chance in the legal market. The legal market has an entirely different dynamic than the black market. While the legal market is competitive and driven by consumer choice, the black market is more of a hostage situation maintained by draconian police-state law enforcement.

By now, most of the “Mom and Pop,” “Heritage” growers, that everyone was so concerned about, have sold out to greedy, out-of-control, greenrushers, or turned the keys over to their kids. As long as we continue to craft cannabis regulations to protect the interests of black market, so called “Heritage” growers, we preserve that heritage of violent, drug-related crime, environmental destruction and social problems that we’ve come to expect from the War on Drugs. Haven’t we had enough of that?

Instead, California’s cannabis consumers should insist that the State immediately license large-scale cannabis farms, in appropriate locations. Only a bumper crop of legal weed will insure that the price of cannabis falls far enough, fast enough, to relegate the black market in marijuana to the pages of that long, dark tome known as the History of the War on Drugs. We should have closed the cover on that book a long time ago, but let’s do it now, before it can do any more harm.

Remember! Every single time a black market grower goes out of business, because the price of marijuana dropped too low: A homeless family finds a place to live. Five local kids don’t grow up to become drug dealers, and the legal cannabis industry creates ten new jobs for people who make “value added” products, which in turn creates a hundred new jobs for builders, contractors and business service providers. The lower the price of legal, raw cannabis falls, the more it helps the economy, the community, and the environment.

It’s time to demand an end to the violence, environmental destruction and crime that black market drug dealers bring to our community. Cannabis consumers deserve safe, reliable cannabis products at reasonable prices, and communities everywhere deserve to be rid of the crime, violence and corruption that black market drug dealers bring to every town, including ours. Humboldt County’s black market growers have demonstrated that they prefer the company of criminals to building strong community. They think they can hide their depravity behind a new downtown facade, bury it beneath ball-fields at the Community Park, and drown it out with obnoxiously loud music festivals, but their contempt for cannabis consumers, the community, and the environment, as well as their eagerness to milk the War on Drugs,to the bitter end, reveals their true colors.

Three Facts That Prove Everything We Know is Wrong

Here I offer three indisputable facts, that everyone already knows, that thoroughly indict our culture and way of life. If we trace the roots of these facts, they lead us, invariably, to the foundation of Civilization, our own culture, a relative newcomer in the pantheon of human cultures. We, civilized humans, like to think of Civilization as some kind of evolutionary leap forward for humanity, as a cultural advance over more “primitive” cultures, and even as an indicator of the superiority of human intelligence over the rest of creation. These three facts should disavow us of these beliefs, once and for all, along with everything else we think we know about how to live in the world.

People outside of our culture, the precious few uncivilized, indigenous people left in the world, see civilization as something else. They see civilization as a heartless killer, an enslaver of people, a poisoner of water and a raper of the land. They see civilization as a terrible plague, and a disease of the mind. It’s about time we recognize the acuity of their assessment. Here are three facts you already know that prove it.

Fact #1, Overpopulation You must have heard about this. For most of human history, the Earth’s population of human beings grew, like that of most other large animals, very slowly, related largely to our expanding range. Then, about 10,000 years ago, coincident with the birth of Civilization, human population exploded at an exponential rate, and our global population began doubling in ever shorter time-spans. The Earth’s population recently doubled from 3 to 6 billion people in less than 40 years. We’ve since surpassed 7 billion on our way to 11 by the middle of the century, barring a catastrophic population collapse of some kind.

Of course, at some point, a catastrophic collapse becomes inevitable. That’s the problem with exponential growth. You can’t have exponential growth, forever, in a finite world. This exponential population growth pattern is a unique characteristic of our culture. No indigenous cultures share this characteristic. In the 10,000+- year history of civilization, this population problem has caused much bloodshed and suffering, and we can expect it to cause much, much, more in the future. Attempts by civilized people to solve this problem, throughout history, have failed miserably, despite all the latest technology.

Today, we think it will be easier to colonize Mars than control our own exploding population. That’s how intractable our population problem has become. Of course, you knew this already, and there’s nothing newsworthy about it, but it says something about how we, as civilized people, do things. Overpopulation stresses social cohesion and brings out the worst in people, but overpopulation takes it’s biggest toll on the environment. Which brings us to…

Fact #2, The Environmental Crisis Even if you live under a rock, you’ve heard of this. Al Gore has a new movie about it. Thanks to the endless “awareness raising” efforts of myriad environmental organizations, pretty much everyone knows that “the environment” needs help. Everyone knows about global warming, even if they deny it. Not everyone knows that we’ve lost half of the world’s biodiversity since 1970, and that species are going extinct at a rate of 100 to 150 every day. Not everyone knows that this is the highest rate of extinction in geological history, since the Cretaceous Extinction Event that wiped out the dinosaurs more than sixty million years ago. You know about the environmental crisis, but the truth about it is even worse than you know.

Not coincidentally, the Environmental Crisis also began about 10,000 years ago, with the advent of the farming lifestyle in the Middle East, considered to be the birth of modern civilization. Early farmers deforested huge swaths of land in the Middle East to grow wheat and barley, which quickly exhausted the fertility of the thin soil. They then abandoned the fallow, depleted land to erosion and continued to slash and burn their way through abundant forest rich with fish and game. That’s how they turned “The Fertile Crescent” into the Sahara Desert.

Now ask yourself, “Why did the people who founded our culture, and gave birth to Civilization, burn millions of acres of wild, abundant forests, unleashing plague after plague of pests, to grow wheat and barley, thousands of years before the invention of bread?” What do you think they did with all of that barley and wheat? They made beer out of it. Beer! Which brings us to the third fact you already know about.

Fact # 3, Alcoholism Alcoholism is a debilitating disease that destroys the life of the alcoholic, and creates dysfunction within the alcoholic’s family. One-hundred alcoholics, and their dysfunctional families create a dysfunctional community, and a hundred beer-soaked generations of dysfunctional community is what we call “The Birth of Civilization.” Alcoholism is so deeply entwined with our culture that Civilization could rightly be called “Alcohol Culture.” If you doubt this, I recommend a Discovery Channel documentary titled “How Beer Saved the World.” In the video, they assume that Civilization is a great thing, but they outline the hard evidence for beer’s role in it pretty well.

Alcoholism requires a lot of work. It’s hard to keep that thirst quenched, and alcohol culture quickly devolved into slavery, as evidenced by great monuments like the Sphinx and the pyramids of Ancient Egypt. The workers who built the pyramids were paid in beer, and people willingly sold themselves into slavery for it.

We’ve all seen what alcoholism does to people. We’ve all seen what alcoholism does to families. We know that alcoholism is an enormous social problem, but try to imagine how much alcoholism has twisted our culture, from the beginning. You knew alcoholism was a serious problem, but, like the environmental crisis, it’s worse than you can imagine.

An alcoholic lifestyle will never be sustainable. Alcoholism creates an imbalance that no technology can overcome, but which requires constant technological innovation to mitigate. Alcohol culture compensates for this imbalance by constantly expanding, and in it’s relentless expansion, Civilization exterminates and enslaves every sustainable indigenous culture it encounters along the way. That’s the “civilized” way of doing things.

Let these three facts sink in. Take some time to think about them. Then, take a look at President Trump. Take a good long look at Donald J Trump, because Civilization is a machine that consumes the lives of billions of people, and wipes out over a hundred species of plant and animal every day, in order to produce Donald J Trump, and people just like him. We’ve sacrificed damn near everything natural, beautiful and alive in the whole world, so we could have the Trump we deserve, before we keel over and die from the overwhelming toxicity of our own sick culture.

We’ve hit rock bottom, folks. Face it. We need to sober up, now, or we are going to die. Forget the Democrats; they can’t be trusted. Forget the Constitution; it never worked. Forget democracy; it gave us Trump. Everything we know is wrong. Our culture, Civilization, is the product of hundreds of generations of alcoholic dysfunction. We need to get away from that alcoholic mindset altogether if we want to survive. It’s not going to be easy, and we’re going to need help, but we have got to do it, and we’ve got to do it now.

 

The remaining traditional indigenous cultures of the world remind us that human beings can live in a sober and respectful way, and that some still do. We’re not flawed creatures. We were born into a sick culture, and traumatized by our alcoholic ancestry. Indigenous people can show us how to live in the world, without enslaving it, and ourselves, to an insatiable thirst for more. But first, we need to admit that we have a problem.

Fake News

I hear a lot of talk these days about “fake news.” Fake news, especially on the internet, has become the latest scapegoat for our national dysfunction. Personally, I don’t see fake news on the internet as a problem at all. I don’t expect information on the internet to, in any way, reflect reality. The internet is where lost souls go to watch their lives evaporate. It is a crass and ugly place built on a foundation of deception, exploitation and surveillance. Only a fool would expect to find the truth on the internet.

Besides, any good storyteller knows that the truth of a story is not in its factuality, but in how deeply it resonates with the listener. In this way, fake news can be instructive. Fake news tells us what people want to hear, and what they are inclined to believe. That’s more than we will learn from any factual news story.

 

Objective journalism is a myth, and even factual news stories conceal much more than they reveal. There is always more to know, than you can possibly know, about anything. Journalists focus on bringing you accurate details of current events, as they unfold, but the significance of the events lies mainly in the larger context in which they unfold, which is far beyond the scope of a news story. I really don’t think “the News” is the problem at all. The real problem is that we pay way too much attention to “the News”, and not nearly enough attention to what is happening to us, our friends, and the world around us.

The problem is not a shortage of facts. Everyone has access to plenty of verifiable facts, too many, in fact. Increasingly, we use the media to hide from the facts of life, rather than learn about them. We spend more time absorbed in factual, but irrelevant, information, than we do living in, and learning about, the real world. The more we replace reality with “the News”, the more addictive “the News” becomes, and the more it bestows a comforting, but illusory, feeling that we understand how the world works, despite its dysfunction.

We watch “the News” as though some new fact will come into existence that changes our lives forever, when in reality, we just need our daily fix. We act as though we could make sense of the latest terrorist bombing, or school shooting, if we just had more reliable information. The more an event upsets us, the more we stay glued to the screen. We want to know more. We look it up online. We read the back-story. We become absorbed in sensationalized stories of senseless violence that have no bearing on our daily lives at all.

At the same time, “The News” reminds us that we are governed. “The News” reminds us that we are expendable. “The News” reminds us that the interests of capital trump all other interests. “The News” reminds us of who is in charge and how the system works. “The News” convinces us to sacrifice our own health, security, and quality of life, for the sake of “the economy.” “The News” crushes our spirit and steals our soul. That’s what factual news does. Compared to that, fake news seems almost beneficent.

We expect too much from “the News.” “The News” won’t save us. We’ve let mass media replace our own thoughts, with their programming, for far too long already. We don’t need more facts; we need new ways to think about them. Journalists really don’t have much to offer in that regard, except distraction.

That’s why I don’t bother you with the facts. You know the facts. I just tell you what I think of them. When you see the truth in what I have to say, it doesn’t change the facts, it changes the way you see the facts. We don’t need more facts, we need more perspectives, and we won’t get that from “The News,” fake or otherwise.

Welcome to the Zombie Apocalypse, Music for Instruments Made from Found Objects and Recycled Materials

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been learning to play, and composing music for, a collection of idiosyncratic musical instruments that I built from found objects and recycled materials. I find tinkering with these little gadgets very relaxing, and doing it encourages me to think about music in new ways. I’m not sure that playing these new homemade instruments makes me a better musician, but listening to them has made me a better listener.

These days, we find ourselves swimming though a soup of slickly produced high-tech earworms designed to reach out and grab the listener right from the first note. The music business is highly competitive and musicians work very hard to grab an audience and hold their attention. This tends to make listeners lazy, and does for listener’s tastes, what junk food does for a kid’s palette.

As in most of life, what works for business does not necessarily serve the needs of the people. Music is a form of communication. We call media, “media” because it mediates our communications. Instead of hearing each others music, mostly we hear expensive, sterilized pap, made by professionals, for corporations. The internet has reduced music to a commodity sorted by genre, or tailored to your tastes by their special proprietary algorithm. Just what you need, a whole bag of cheeze doodles for your ears.

Music has an important role in culture, but for music to effectively communicate new cultural ideas, people have to listen, and listeners need to hear something outside of their comfort zone once in a while. Active listeners, constantly search for new, different and adventurous music to listen to, while passive listeners happily endure a familiar genre of music all day, and measure it’s quality largely by how well produced, and reproduced, it is. We need more active listeners. Active listeners are more inclined to seek out the music of their peers, rather than the corporate media products designed to fill the space, but empty the music of context.

Listening to any music, well played or not, derivative or original, reminds us of the miraculous acuity of human hearing, and the overwhelming power of silence. Listening to challenging music affects the mind in the same way that entertaining challenging ideas does. Listening to challenging music is good exercise. It stretches the imagination, focuses the mind, and allows for a kind of communication that conveys ideas and emotions though rhythm, timbre, pitch and melody. Active listening is always rewarding, whether you’re re-enjoying familiar music, exploring new music, or just listening to the sounds of your surroundings.

I’ve assembled a collection of instruments you’ve never heard before.

They’re not much to look at, and they sure don’t sound like a Stradivarius, but they do, in a way, represent, and celebrate, the abundance of our time.

Now that the planet has been laid to ruin, we inherit a wealth of waste.

Never before, at any time in history could an average person find, free for the taking, so many exotic materials, from high-tech polymers and plastics, to high-carbon steel, aluminum, brass, lead, and half-a-dozen other metal alloys.

We find these exotic materials in the most bizarre shapes and forms, all around us.

 

We call it “garbage.”

 

At the same time, traditional instrument making materials, like rosewood, ebony and ivory, have all become rare, endangered, and threatened with extinction. As these materials disappear, the music those instruments spawned rings hollow. How sad will it be to hear a piano in a world without elephants?

The repertoire of traditional instruments is as exhausted as the natural resources necessary to create them. We’ve heard it all before.

New high-tech computer-based instruments don’t do a lot for me either. The more software you interact with, the more those software programmers become collaborators on your music. These programs always suggest ways of working, if not sounds to use, and it’s no accident that a lot of artists who use these programs tend to sound similar. These programmers collaborate with you, but they don’t collaborate individually. They make the same suggestions to a whole generation of young artist. Far from freeing musicians from their own musical limitations, music software allows corporations to mediate, and monetize the composition of music, in addition to the production, promotion and distribution of it.

So, from the ruins of the industrial revolution, in an unmediated act of creativity, I’ve assembled an ensemble of unique musical instruments, and composed some music for them that I hope reflects my time and place in history. I call it “post-industrial chamber music.” I hope you’ll take the time to listen to it. You can hear the entire album, or download it for free at: https://johnhardin.bandcamp.com/album/welcome-to-the-zombie-apocalypse

Feelin’ the Love

A few months back, I offered to lay off of the criticism, if I saw positive steps taken to address the housing crisis in Southern Humboldt. I offered bonus points if it happened before annual influx of trimmigrants. It didn’t. 2016 was a brutal year for people out on the streets in Southern Humboldt. Several people died in makeshift encampments last year, under suspicious circumstances, and a few elderly homeless people were badly beaten on the streets of Garberville over this past Summer and Fall. However, now that Winter weather has arrived, Peg Anderson and Yashi Hoffman have organized a severe weather shelter for people with nowhere warm to be on the coldest nights of the year.

Peg and Yashi brought together a coalition of people who care, including the Presbyterian Church in Garberville, the Baptist Church in Redway, David Ordonez a big-hearted guy I know from the SHARC club, and I don’t know how many other volunteers, to make it happen. Separately, none of them could do it all, but when Peg and Yashi got them all together, they were able to make it happen. Without them, we would have no emergency shelter at all in Southern Humboldt.

They had to start from scratch, since the Veterans Hall, Sohum’s traditional severe weather shelter, is out of commission due to mold, and Paul Encimer, the guy who organized the shelter at the Veteran’s Hall for many years, was just evicted himself, from his bookstore at the North end of Garberville. Peg and Yashi bring an entirely different energy to the situation, that people can feel in their hearts, and in their stomachs. Peg and Yashi have literally fed this community for two generations, through Chautauqua, the natural foods grocery store they ran, until recently turning it over to the next generation.

Peg and Yashi have certainly earned whatever leisure time their semi-retirement allows them, and no one forced them to step up to the plate here. In fact, I’ll bet a lot of people discouraged them from even trying, but they decided to do it anyway, and they did it together. That’s cool. Actually, that’s love, but love is cool with me, and a lot of people are feeling that love, on these cold nights, like we’ve had over the past week or so. Be sure to thank Peg and Yashi for that, and for any heart-warming feelings you get from this uncharacteristically positive post.

I also want to mention a very charming group of young people, including Jasmine Rene Stafslein, Shakti and their friends, who prepared care packages for people on the street, and distributed them over the holidays. That was a very thoughtful gesture, that I’m sure was very much appreciated. They made the effort to wear bright colors and to be friendly and cheerful as well. I think that’s really love too. Shakti even invited me to join them.

I hate to see my friends struggle so hard to survive, and I help when I can, but I’m much more interested in punishing the middle-class for their smug, indifference, their hostility towards the poor, and their greed. That’s where the juice is. We”ll run out of planet long before I run out of material on that front, which is why the work I do here matters. The middle-class must be stopped.

Too many heart-warming stories like this, about good people helping one another, would kill this column, and undermine what I’m trying to do here. When middle-class people start treating poor and working-class people like human beings, they make my job as a social critic more difficult, and less necessary. It’s simple really. My criticisms only sting because they are true. The less true you make them, the less they sting. The less they sting, the less anyone notices, and the sooner I have to find something else to write about.

On the other hand, people need to see an example of what good people are like once in a while. So here you have a couple. Do you want to see more? If you, or someone you know, is doing something to bring this community together, to make it more livable for working people, and more survivable for the poor and vulnerable, let me know, and I’ll write about it.

Go ahead. Try to put me out of work. Just be forewarned that stuff you do to help your own kids, doesn’t count. They’re your responsibility anyway. Also, stuff you do that protects, or raises your property values, doesn’t count either. I don’t want to hear about your parks or your schools or your goddamn hospital. I only want to hear about things that people do, out of the kindness of their hearts, to make life easier, and better for the people who have it the hardest in this community. In the meantime, I have plenty else to write about in 2017.