Vote NO on Measure O

I still remember how much you disappointed me, Humboldt County, when you voted for Measure Z the first time around. What a ripoff that was! Schemy SoHum dope yuppies got their puppet, Estelle Fennell to craft a ballot measure that would sucker gullible NoHum liberals into voting to make Eureka, Arcata, Fortuna and McKinleyville retailers, not to mention Humboldt’s working poor, pay for forty new Sheriff’s Deputies to act as bouncers and security guards for the phony businesses in Garberville that launder their drug money. That diabolically sleazy maneuver took Chutzpah, but that’s how SoHum’s dope yuppies decided to flex their political muscle.

You fell for it hook line and sinker, Humboldt County. Do you feel safer? Are there less drugs on the street? Have they eradicated the homeless? No! We have more violent crime, more murder, and more drugs, and the housing crisis has only gotten worse since Measure Z passed, but now law enforcement has gotten hooked on this money that we never should have given them in the first place.

If I told you that the solution to your affordable housing crisis, drug epidemic and general social dysfunction was to recruit high-school seniors ranked near the middle of their class, give them firearms training, lots of weapons, bullet-proof body armor and a license to kill, and then send them out to look for trouble in your neighborhood, you’d say I was stupid and crazy, but when Estelle Fennell calls it a “public safety initiative” somehow it seems like a good idea to you. You’ve heard the old saying: “If your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”? Well, what do you think every problem looks like if your only tool is a gun? Remember this the next time they tell you that more cops is the solution to anything.

I saw Sheriff Honsel and DA Flemming out begging you to vote for Measure O. They can’t tell you that they’ve accomplished anything with the millions of dollars that Measure Z dumped in their laps. All they can say is that they can’t live without it. What could they say? Could they say “Without Measure O we will be able to arrest, prosecute and convict even fewer of the murderers responsible for the many unsolved homicides in Humboldt County.” Is that even possible? As far as I remember, nothin’ from nothin’ still leaves nothin.’

In reality, This sales tax, Measure Z turned Measure O, was never about “public safety.” This little trip to OZ was a vicious and regressive tax scheme designed to make the poor pay for their own brutal oppression. If you recall, Measure Z was part of a strategic offensive conducted by the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors to drive poor people out of the county with a campaign of violence and harassment carried out by a small army of new cops. While encouraging voters to pass Measure Z, the Board of Supervisors also passed a number of cruel, draconian, and ultimately unconstitutional county ordinances designed to criminalize poverty.

One of these ordinances prohibits sleeping in Humboldt County unless you own a home here. Another prohibits people from asking for help. Measure Z was supposed to pay extra cops to enforce these stupid, cruel and unconstitutional county laws. Since then, these laws have proven unenforceable. Instead they have attracted expensive lawsuits that challenge their constitutionality, so now we pay cops not to enforce them, while we pay lawyers to defend them in court.

I think it’s funny that Measure Z, designed by pot farmers and business retailers in SoHum, to drive poor people out of Humboldt County, will now, as Measure O, just make Humboldt County a more expensive, and even less competitive place to buy and sell cannabis, or anything else for that matter. Now Measure O will make the pot farmers and retailers poor so they can see how much they like it. What goes around comes around, and it don’t get any more round than Measure O.

Bad people voted for Measure Z because they are bad people. We have more than our share of them here in Humboldt County, but too many good people voted for Measure Z because they were stupid and gullible and got hypnotized by the words “public safety.” In the spirit of civic responsibility and selfless generosity, they voted for Measure Z, which, much to their chagrin, then unleashed a wave of government sanctioned violence against the poor in Humboldt County. Don’t fall for that bullshit again! When politicians tell you that they are doing something because of “public safety,” you should know that they intend to screw you.

Politicians don’t give a fuck about “public safety.” “Public safety” is a fig leaf that politicians use to cover up something ugly. They passed Jim Crow laws for “public safety.” They made cannabis illegal for “public safety.” Mandatory minimum sentences and Rockefeller Drug Laws were all about “public safety,” and they always use “public safety” as the reason to violate your civil rights whenever you get mad enough about something to go out and protest. In political double-speak, “public safety” really means “police state.” A vote for Measure O is a vote for endless war against the poor, and endless subsidy for SoHum dope yuppies. It’s a vote for violence, oppression and economic apartheid, not to mention, the economic ruin of Humboldt County. You can’t afford to make the same mistake twice, Humboldt County. Please vote NO on Measure O.

The War on Drugs Lives On in the Minds of it’s Victims

For a place that’s been so defined by the War on Drugs, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by how deeply the people of Humboldt County have internalized the insanity of the Drug War. It was only a couple years after the helicopters stopped persecuting the pot farmers, that all of the growers came to a town meeting in Redway to demand that the County Sheriff send more cops down here to address our heroin and meth problem. They asked the same cops, who they knew were corrupt, and had terrorized their whole community for decades, the same cops who raided their homes and held their children at gunpoint, the same cops who tortured non-violent protesters by swabbing pepper-spray directly into their eyes, to do something about the fact that their own kids now use heroin and meth.

You’d think they’d realize that if the National Guard and 30 years of CAMP couldn’t stop them from growing weed, no amount of cops are ever going to stop their kids from shooting heroin. Besides that, after seeing so many of their neighbors, friends, family members and even themselves, busted, jailed and labeled felons because they grew, used or carried cannabis, you’d think they might not be so quick to demand the same violence against their own children, just because they prefer to use a different substance. You might think so, but you’d be wrong, because the insanity of the War on Drugs lives on in the minds of it’s victims.

Pot farmers have gotten used to deflecting. They like to say: “I’m just a Mom and Pop grower trying to put a new pair of tires on my old truck. Why don’t you go after the diesel grows, the guerrilla grows on public land or the big mountaintop removal grows, instead of me?” They deflect attention away from what they did, and on to people who do something worse, but even if you have a big diesel mountaintop removal grow on public land, you can still say: “Why don’t you go after heroin and meth, instead of me?” Now that pot is legal, and growers get abatement letters about code violations instead of paramilitary police raids, they still scream: “Why don’t you go after heroin and meth?” Cannabis criminals constantly scapegoat the hard drug industry to make their crimes seem less heinous by comparison.

Alcoholics do the same thing. Half of the people in Humboldt County have an alcohol problem, and too many of them were born with fetal alcohol syndrome. Alcohol is, by far, much more of a menace to our community than heroin and meth combined, but you can have a problem with alcohol, and your family and friends will still love you, your boss won’t fire you, and you can still make the mortgage payment, because alcohol is legal, cheap and accepted by society. As long as you keep your shit together, you can kill yourself slowly with alcohol, and call it a normal American life. Still, alcoholics will say: “Sure I drink, and I got a couple of DUIs, but that’s nothing compared to people who shoot heroin and meth. Why don’t you go after heroin and meth instead of harassing people like me?”

I saw this at a Eureka City Council meeting last July. Of three individuals who stood to testify against our local harm-reduction needle exchange program, two of them wore clothing that advertised other drugs, while they testified. One guy wore a long-sleeve t-shirt bearing the logo of a local brewery, with the words “Never Straight” in big letters down both sleeves. That strikes me as either the slogan of a radical queer separatist group, or an alcoholic lifestyle. Since the shirt also proclaimed the name of a local brewery on the front and back, I assume the latter. He also had the bulbous red nose and beer belly to go with it. Wearing that shirt, he testified that syringe exchange programs, have turned us into a bunch of “drug addicted Peter Pans,” and demanded that the City of Eureka close down HACHR, a local charity that works to reduce the harm associated with drug use by providing clean syringes and overdose prevention kits.

Another guy who testified to end this program wore a green hoodie. On the back, a design featured a human skull, surrounded by a wreath of cannabis leaves with the words “Humboldt County” loudly emblazoned on it. Since cannabis has never killed anyone, I can only assume that the skull refers to the dozens of people who met a premature death in the black market marijuana industry here in Humboldt County. Those are the only deaths I know of linked to both cannabis and Humboldt County, and we have plenty of those. Just a couple of weeks ago, someone left two of them in an SUV at the end of my road and set it on fire. I don’t know if the design intended to celebrate this kind of violence or to commemorate it, in the way that other war veterans commemorate the terrible wars they’ve fought in. Either way, the design speaks to the human toll of the War on Drugs. Apparently, he hadn’t looked carefully at it before he put it on to go address the city council.

Everyone, it seems, feels the need to scapegoat someone who does something they think is worse than whatever it is that they do.  Then they demand harsh punishment for the scapegoat, and when the problem gets worse, they demand even more harsh punishment for the scapegoat.  That’s how it goes with prohibition, the more cops you throw at it, the more money there is to be made from it, and the more of it you see on the streets. It’s a vicious cycle that plays out again and again, and it works with any drug.

Since cops can no longer go after people for weed, they focus on heroin and meth. Now that cops focus on heroin and meth, we see an explosion in heroin and meth use, so we ask the cops to focus even more attention on heroin and meth and the problem gets worse. It’s crazy, and it’s a craziness that destroys our community while it makes cops and drug dealers filthy rich. Those are our kids who use these drugs, and it’s our money that pays for all of this craziness. You’d think we would have learned our lesson by now. You’d think.

A New Approach to the Problem of Homelessness

This past Tuesday, the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors took up the topic of whether or not to declare a shelter crisis in Humboldt County. At least 20 people came, mostly from the HSU Homeless Students Alliance to ask the Supervisors to recognize the well established fact that Humboldt County does not have nearly enough housing to accommodate its residents and workforce, and that emergency measures should be taken to address this problem.

The HSA is just the latest group to ask the Board of Supervisors to make this declaration. Concerned citizens and organized groups like AHHA have been pressing the county about this for years. The Humboldt County Human Rights Commission, after listening to dozens of hours of public testimony on the subject, has recommended that the Board of Supervisors declare a shelter crisis multiple times. The Board of Supervisors has repeatedly ignored them all.

The Board of supervisors didn’t have any problem taking swift and decisive action to address homelessness, when they thought they could do it by passing radical, draconian, and unconstitutional laws designed to criminalize poverty. Clearly the problem was serious enough that they thought it warranted infringing on all of our constitutional rights, but, alas, this punitive approach failed miserably, yet again.

When this policy of unbridled police state fascism failed, the county jumped on the “Mormon Miracle” called “Housing First,” but even the Housing First consultants, who the taxpayers pay to advise our Board of Supervisors, have told them that there isn’t enough housing in Humboldt County to make Housing First very effective. In reality, all Housing First does in Humboldt County is take housing away from working families, and give it to disabled individuals. We need housing for working families, and for disabled people, and we need it all to be affordable.

We have well established organizations with plans and working models, all home-grown, designed to solve our housing problem here in Humboldt County by creating affordable housing that works for the people who need it. They have made dozens of presentations and attended hundreds of meetings about it. This past Tuesday’s BOS meeting was just the latest. What did the Board of Supervisors decide to do about this serious problem at Tuesday’s meeting? They decided to form an ad hoc committee, which allows them to waste everyone’s time and money for another couple of years without doing anything constructive.

If they could have solved this problem by punishing people, this problem would have been solved years ago. We love to punish people here in Humboldt County, and our Board of Supervisors will eagerly implement our most sadistic impulses and write them into law, but we really hate to do anything that makes life easier on people. Most of us are too small-minded to see beyond our own petty resentments, insecurities and greed, and too well programmed by corporate propaganda to think for ourselves. We don’t mind working two low-wage jobs, just to pay the rent, so long as the people who don’t work that hard, sleep out in the rain. We’re literally just that stupid.

Even without a significant racial divide, Humboldt County gives Mississippi a run for the money in the field of bitter small-minded hatefulness. Honestly, I have never heard hatred and bigotry expressed more openly and frequently, against anyone, anywhere, in all my life as I hear it here in Humboldt County, against the poor and homeless. It is, by far, the ugliest thing about Humboldt County, and all of the media outlets here pander to that ugliness and promote it. It’s shameful.

Unfortunately, the American Genocide, extractive industries, and the War on Drugs have brought out the worst in people here in Humboldt County, and attracted the worst kind of people to Humboldt County for longer that anyone can remember. It shows. It shows in ugly attitudes, bitter resentment, and heartless insensitivity to the suffering of others.

We’re not getting anywhere by reasoning with these people. For them, reason is just a tool for getting their own way. They’ll say anything. Lying is second nature to them, and lying to themselves is first. They’ll make sure that the new ad hoc committee on homelessness does nothing but waste time and money for another year or two, while dozens of people die needlessly on the streets of Humboldt County.

We should stop wasting our time with them. Instead, I think we need to take a more revolutionary approach to homelessness. Instead of appealing to the better nature of people who clearly have no better nature, we should focus directly on providing the needy with the tools they need to secure for themselves, a home, and a brighter future here in Humboldt County.

Instead of appealing to the rich and insensitive to come together as a community, we should arm the poor and oppressed to enable their liberation. For $200 we can put a quality firearm in the hands of a needy homeless man. For $1 we can put a bullet in that gun. With a gun and some bullets, we can give homeless people the tools they need to claim their rightful home here in Humboldt County, the same way early settlers did when they first discovered this beautiful place. That is, by killing, and enslaving the people who already live here.

A lot of our homeless Vets have military training. Providing them with guns and ammunition would give them the opportunity to put that training to use here in the US, and they could train other homeless people how to work together to launch successful tactical assaults. Together, they could overcome any obstacle and rise above their current economic condition, even without the support of Humboldt County’s “Old Guard” or new rich.

Every cop we hire here in Humboldt County costs the taxpayers more than $100,000 a year, and hiring more cops has completely failed to address the problem of homelessness in Humboldt County. The Kevlar vests and semi-automatic weapons our cops carry cost a pittance by comparison. We could save a lot of money, and solve the problem of homelessness once and for all, if instead of hiring cops, we just gave the guns, ammunition and armor to to the people in the street who need them to secure their little piece of Humboldt County and participate in this proud Humboldt County tradition.

Even if we can’t raise the money locally, I’ll bet we can find foreign governments who would be happy to help us out. I know this isn’t a new idea, but I don’t think it has ever been given a fighting chance to succeed in the US before. We could be pioneers here in Humboldt County, with this new approach to solving the problem of poverty and homelessness. They’ll call it the Humboldt Revolution, and it will change the way the world sees poverty in America. It’s got to start somewhere. Why not here?

Drug Education

I love science. My grandfather taught science and made sure I had ample early exposure to it. I collected fossils, did the experiments in my chemistry set, built model rockets and kept my deceased pets, snakes and turtles mostly, preserved in alcohol for later dissection. My room looked like a science lab.

I read science too. I hated story books as a child. I cannot describe how disappointed I was in any adult who pointed me towards the children’s section of the library. I’d take one look at the bright primary colors and the smiling anthropomorphic cartoon animals and think to myself, “How stupid do they think I am?” before heading to the science section and jumping into stuff that was way over my head.

As a teenager, they fed us a lot of government propaganda under the guise of “drug education.” Everything they told us about “drug education” seemed fishy to me. Clearly, the government did not want me to try drugs, but equally clearly, the message came through that a whole lot of American citizens thought drugs were worth breaking the law for. The cops that came to my school to convince me to say “no” to drugs, instead, convinced me that cops were small-minded gullible people who understood little besides power, authority and violence.

Drugs remained just as mysterious to me after “drug education” as they had been before, so I became curious. I’d heard the expression “experiment with drugs” and the idea appealed to my young science-nerd mind. At the time, even alcohol was alien to me. My parents didn’t drink, except for, perhaps, a glass of wine with Thanksgiving Dinner. By this time, I knew a bit about the scientific studies on the effects of psychoactive drugs, partially through my own reading, but largely through the state sanctioned curriculum taught to me in public schools.

Among the other propaganda, these curricula included quite a bit of science, and often cited the cruel, gruesome experiments conducted on laboratory animals by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. They made us watch graphic emergency room footage of a heroin overdose and showed us color photographs of all the nasty infections you could get from injecting drugs. Back then, Aids was just a chocolate flavored snack people ate to help lose weight.

They showed us how scientists measured alcohol impairment in volunteer test subjects, and of course, we saw graphic footage of traffic accidents involving drunk drivers. I don’t remember a lot of what I learned in school, but the gory drug-ed stuff, like the image of that poor unconscious kid, turning blue and foaming at the mouth while the ER doc cleaned out his abscessed vein, really stuck with me.

So did a short essay by Timothy Leary, included, oddly enough, in a state sanctioned drug education workbook. The authors of the workbook chose to illustrate this essay with a photograph of a distant and despondent-looking teenage girl, looking up at you from the floor, where she sat, back up against the wall, leaning against an open, dirty toilet, surrounded by dismembered manikin parts. The photo could have been left over from a Frank Zappa album cover shoot. Anyway, in the essay, Leary described his experience with LSD and what he meant by “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

I didn’t really understand what he meant, or what about the experiences he had, that he found so appealing, but clearly, here was a Harvard professor who sacrificed his career to endorse and promote an illegal drug. I didn’t understand why, but his enthusiasm, and urgency came through. As a counterpoint to Leary’s essay, we heard an audio tape made by a young man, purportedly under the influence of LSD, immediately before he took his own life. They told us a lot about marijuana too, but mostly they tried to scare us away from marijuana by associating it with all of the other illegal drugs, and reminding us that we would get arrested and thrown in jail if we were ever caught with any.

I don’t want to lead you to believe that my early interest in drugs was driven entirely by scientific curiosity and the public education system. When I was twelve, my parents went through a long, messy, traumatic divorce that concluded, when I was 15, with my mother marrying a guy I did not get along with, and my dad moving away. At twelve, I thought that only an idiot would take drugs, but by the time I turned 15, I wanted to try them all.

I’m sure there were other factors involved in my decision, including hormones. My attitude towards girls made a similar 180 degree switch during those years as well. I also realize that living through your parents divorce is a pretty normal part of growing up, these days, and plenty of kids endure far worse trauma than I went through, but I also know a lot of adults who have way worse problems than I have.

For whatever reason, I began taking drugs. I took them of my own accord, by myself, without peer pressure, usually while doing little other than observing the effects of the drug with more or less scientific curiosity. I wanted to know what drugs did, and why people found them so attractive. I began with the drug most easily available to me, model airplane glue. I already had some in my room. At the time, the model industry was switching to fume-free, citrus-based plastic model glue, but the old fumy stuff worked better, and I still had some.

Sniffing glue felt good for about 3 minutes, but left me feeling sick for the rest of the day. Still, the effects were dramatic and interesting enough that I persisted for a time. At school, the first real illegal drug I scored was a black barbituate capsule called a “carbitrol.” I remember having coordination problems and feeling very sleepy when I took it. I did not understand the appeal of this drug at all. Eventually, I came to realize that many popular drugs effect how people feel in social situations, and the effects of these drugs, like alcohol for instance, were quite boring to observe, alone, under more or less clinical conditions.

I smoked my first marijuana through a pipe I made myself from an aquarium air line valve and some hardware I stole from my step-father’s workshop. I couldn’t believe how harsh it felt, and how much my throat and lungs burned from it. I could hardly imagine effects that would make it worth doing again, and I didn’t feel any psychoactive effects at all, that first time, but I figured I must be missing something, so I persisted. Finally, on my third attempt, I felt the full, psychoactive effects of cannabis. It felt great, almost overwhelming, but positively vibrant, in a way that no amount of objective science, or anti-drug propaganda, could have prepared me for.

I continued to explore the world of psychoactive drugs and soon discovered LSD. LSD also had dramatic and interesting effects, so I took it often. I took LSD until I understood exactly what Timothy Leary meant by “Turn on, tune in and drop out,” and I understood his enthusiasm and urgency. I found marijuana and the psychedelics to be, by far, the most interesting of the illegal drugs, and I pursued my study of them enthusiastically. I quickly discovered that marijuana fit nicely into my daily life, while LSD was a much more draining ordeal, that usually involved losing a nights sleep.

Scientifically, both cannabis and LSD have dramatic psychoactive effects that the user feels very strongly, but that cause few, and relatively superficial, changes in behavior and physiology that scientists can measure objectively. The objective studies I read, of the effects of LSD, prepared me not at all for what I experienced when I took it myself. For instance, the study that examined the effects of LSD on cat behavior, found no specific behavior that cats only did under the influence of LSD, and only a few behaviors that scientists could measure as increasing or decreasing under the effects of LSD.

Objective science yielded very little insight into why LSD effected people so dramatically, and why people like Timothy Leary, who took it themselves, rather than feeding it to lab animals, felt so strongly about it. To this day, most of what we know about the LSD experience comes from direct, observational experience, and objective science has gotten little better at explaining it.

Today we have MRI machines that can measure crude differences in brain activity between high people and people who are not high, but MRIs don’t explain why some people have religious experiences that change their lives, while others become paranoid, anguished and suicidal. I’ve had both types of experience, as well as several others that I found totally inexplicable, but absolutely fascinating, but back then, it was time for me to choose a major in college.

Since these experiences happened in my mind, I thought Psychology would be an appropriate field of study. I very quickly discovered that psychologists had, quite artfully, excised the mind from their field of inquiry, and had defined “psychology” as “the study of behavior” so as to fully embrace the methodology of objective science. In Psychology classes, once again, I found myself reading studies that measured crude behavioral changes, objectively, and offered little insight into people’s lived experience.

I took several psychology classes and learned that, for all of it’s objective science, the field had yielded very little insight into the nature of mental illness, nor done much to improve the condition of mentally ill people, but had made great strides in predicting and influencing consumer behavior. I found it very curious, and rather disappointing, that scientists who were so eager to attach sensors and electrodes to every inch of our bodies, and sample all of all of our bodily fluids, apparently had no interest at all in studying the contents of our perceptions, scientifically.

No one seemed interested in studying direct experience, and there didn’t appear to be a way to do it objectively. That is, according to the scientific method that had been drilled into my head, over and over again, since I was a small child. Then, in my college catalog, I spotted an interesting elective in the Philosophy Dept called “Phenomenology” with Dr. James Buchanan. Phenomenology is the study of perception and direct experience. I had to buy five books for the class, all of them translated from German, none of which would I have found penetrable without the absolutely riveting lectures of Dr. Buchanan.

Dr. Buchanan deftly explained the shortcomings of objective science and how objective science distorts our view of the world. He explained why physics and chemistry have advanced so much faster than biology, medicine and psychology, and he very clearly explained the difference between a machine and an organism. Dr. Buchanan explained why objective science had been very helpful in learning to build machines, and why it was totally inadequate to understand organisms. Then he taught us the phenomenological method of scientific observation. I promise I won’t bore you with it.

It changed my life. The following semester, I took Dr. Buchanan’s Existentialism course, which I found just as riveting, and over the summer I did an independent study project with him on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. After that, I dropped out of college and started a band.

I didn’t start a band because I thought it would make me rich and famous; I started a band because I didn’t want to perpetuate a culture that systematically debases life by objectifying it. Instead, I wanted to work on building a new human culture, organically, from the ground up, based on the shared experience of people working together in small egalitarian groups. A band seemed like a good way to do that.

I still love science, especially ecology and wildlife biology, but I understand the limits of objective science, and I understand the poisonous cultural myth that uses objective science to push us down the road of maximum destruction and harm. I’m still interested in building a new human culture from the ground up, but, unfortunately, I don’t meet many people who found drugs as educational as I did.

Making Pun of Pot

I’m sick of news stories about marijuana where the whole story seems written around puns about getting high. Aren’t you? I thought legalization would put an end to that shit, but no. Just the other day I heard this on the radio:

“The recently passed initiative to legalize the recreational use of marijuana seems likely to spark up a controversy with law enforcement as the buzz created by Proposition 64 leaves county and state officials dazed and confused.”

Why do they do that? Why can’t they report a story about marijuana without somehow inserting their derogatory stereotype of stoner slang? What if they covered other news stories that way?

The cops took a shot in the dark, and another unarmed African-American man died at the hands of police last night. Officers raced to the scene of a suspicious character complaint, where 27 year old Leroy Jackson was gunned down on sight. The complexion of this case mirrors a string of recent police shootings which Chief Clinton Swinehart insists were “unfortunate but necessary.”

Or how about:

The Dow went poo today, losing over 200 points in an across the board sell-off.

Or maybe:

The president stood erect at the lectern and delivered the hard truth to the American people.

Do we need that? Do we need a subtext of juvenile wordplay to distract us from the news? If they don’t do it on other stories, then why do it in stories about marijuana? Do writers and editors really think that stories about marijuana are so insignificant that it is OK to subvert them just to show-off how clever they can be with words?

Just wait. When the Trump administration starts executing journalists, us pot smokers will have our revenge. “Well, we can write him off!” or “Hey, it looks like they strung-up another stringer,” we’ll say to each other with a chuckle, between tokes, huddled in our darkened basements, while we wait for the radiation to clear.

Close to a million people get arrested for marijuana every year in the US. Almost a million people are still in prison for for it right now. Even in California, it’s still legal to discriminate against pot smokers, and to drug test employees for cannabis. Workman’s Comp claims still require a drug test, at the time of the injury, and testing positive for marijuana will disqualify you, even though the test does not, in any way, indicate impairment.

The War on Drugs is serious shit. It’s no joke. It kills people and it destroys people’s live. How do they not see that? How do they not see the violence? How do they not see the racism? How do they not see the oppression, but never miss an opportunity to roll in some half-baked puns about stoners getting high. I think it’s about time those reporters opened their eyes and took a proper gander at what they’ve become, because it isn’t pretty.

Drug Dealers I Have Known

One of the things I despise most about the War on Drugs is the people you have to associate with to find weed on the black market. I’ve spent a lot of time in my life hanging out with people I would have rather not known, in order to buy pot. When I was in high school, I used to get weed from a guy who lived in a run down farmhouse behind a gas station. He seemed like a cool guy, and I wanted to like him. I thought the colorful bantam chickens that ran around the yard, and that he cared for, made him more endearing.

At the time, I thought cock fighting was as arcane and anachronistic as bear-baiting. Then, one time, I visited his place, and he made me wait, to watch him spar two roosters. He put the two roosters on the ground in the corner of the barn. They immediately became aggressive and attacked each other in a flurry of feathers and kicks. Within a couple of minutes, one of the roosters had punctured the other rooster’s lung with a kick of his hind foot spur. The injured rooster coughed and spat blood.

The guy separated the two birds before the injured bird died, but not before killing my buzz, and my appetite. This was the only guy I knew who sold weed at the time. The last time I visited him, he had the ugliest dog I had ever seen, chained to a tree in the front yard. The dog barked ferociously. He told me it was a “pit bull.” I had never seen one before. I hoped I would never see one again. By this time, he still sold weed, but was more into coke, and he was the first person to offer to sell me cocaine.

After high school, I got my own place, a room, in Akron OH, near Akron U, and started my first cannabis garden. I’ve mostly grown my own weed ever since, but, like most people, I’ve had to move several times, or for other reasons found it impractical to grow at times.

For a while, I bought weed from an older biker in Akron. His place was almost a drive-through. You had to get out of your car and go knock on the door, but once you stepped inside it was strictly business. You told him what you wanted, gave him your money, and he pointed you towards a microwave oven, in which sat a bowl of quarter-ounce bags of weed.

I wanted to like the guy, because he had weed, but his priorities were all wrong, from my perspective. He had a brand new big TV, front and center, but only a shitty stereo, in the corner, and no good records. Artwork on the wall featured almost naked, unnaturally top-heavy women posing on unnaturally clean machines. This, despite the fact that he shared the home with his wife and school age daughter. It seemed like a pitiful situation to me. He had a brand new Harley, while I walked to work to my job as a busboy, and I gave him at least a quarter of my weekly earnings for a while. Still, I felt sorry for the guy.

There was a time when I got weed from gaunt, hollow, hard-looking man who visited my home. He would invariably arrive wearing a long-sleeve flannel shirt, unbuttoned, and would use one hand to hold the bottom of the T-shirt he wore underneath, up, forming a pouch over his sunken belly. He’d come in, look around furtively, sit down, and then open up that pouch into his lap, revealing a jumble of prescription bottles, plastic baggies and cash.

He always seemed disorganized and paranoid, and tried to up-sell me on narcotics and coke. He told me how fun they were. I never felt tempted. He seemed to like those drugs himself, and to me, he did not look well, and he did not seem fun. I remember being eager for him to leave. He seemed to think the cops were after him, and I sure didn’t want them to find him in my place.

Then, for a little while, I got weed from a guy who lived with his wife and three kids, in a two-bedroom apartment in a subsidized housing project. We hung out in one of the bedrooms, which had been converted into a sick, hip-hop recording studio fully decorated in Gangsta. One room, packed full of high-tech gadgets and dripping with bling, abject poverty crying in the next room. It creeped me out.

 

Not everyone I got weed from was that bad, but those are the memorable ones. Mostly, the pot dealers I knew were simply more acquisitive, materialistic and conventional than I am. They like weighing things on scales, and measure values in grams, ounces and pounds. I feel silly performing weird religious rites over a commodity, so I hardly ever weigh the pot I grow and I value other things, like character, hard work, and creative originality more than stuff.

To be fair, I did, for a little while, get weed from a delightful, and inspiring guy I knew in Boston. I don’t consider him a drug dealer, because I had to give him money, up-front, before he could go and get weed for me. He was a classically trained musician, who had played oboe in the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra for a while. When I knew him, he made his living by busking in the Boston T, playing dixieland jazz on the saxophone.

He was an old guy, when I knew him, but I found him delightful company, and we always had plenty to talk about. He was spry, witty, and animated, and loved to paint. He always impressed me with his sensitivity, intelligence, and compassion. He was a fantastic player who loved what he did. Still is, and does, I hope. His band occasionally played fancy shindigs for the Boston elite. “Squares” he called them, really. He’s the kind of guy that made marijuana famous, and he’s as good as it gets on the black market.

I bought California sinsemilla from all of these people. This is what the black market looks like, and if you grow weed, these are your distributors. It’s ugly, and it’s dangerous, and it’s not exactly the kind of place you want your kids to hang out. There is nothing cool about being a drug dealer, and most of the drug dealers I have known, have not been very cool people. We need safe access to marijuana at prices that put the black market out of business. It’s time to legalize marijuana and end this creepshow once and for all.

The Cannabis Casino

Last week I wrote about how our failure to address the housing crisis will ultimately force the emerging legal cannabis industry to move elsewhere in search of a reliable workforce, and about why smart growers are getting out of the business now, while the getting is good. One commenter at LoCO, who has since deleted his comment, said he was getting out of the marijuana business, and lamented that after 20 years in the cannabis industry, he had little to show for his efforts. Another commenter expressed shock and wonder that someone could work in the black market marijuana industry for so long without making more money. This commenter obviously had no experience in the marijuana industry.

 

The truth is, most people who try to make a career of growing marijuana, fare poorly. Growing pot is more like gambling in a casino than working a job. Legal businesses rely heavily on a stable legal system that supports their activity. From criminal penalties for shoplifting to a court system that upholds and enforces contracts, legal businesses only remain reliably profitable, because the threat of government enforcement keeps everyone honest. The black market marijuana industry enjoys no such support, and is made, largely, of people who specialize in evading law enforcement. No one plays by the rules, treachery, deceit and thievery are common, and violence is trump.

Some people hit the jackpot in casinos, but most end up losing money, or at best, breaking even. The same is true of the marijuana industry. It may seem counter-intuitive, but the same marijuana industry that brings so much money into Humboldt County, also produces unbearable poverty for far too many of the people who work in that industry. There are no stable, good paying jobs in the marijuana industry. Instead, people gamble with their lives.

Here’s something that happens every day, all day, all over the country. It happened recently to a couple of young friends of mine. They got invited to come out here to work on a pot farm, and to trim the weed at harvest time. They both put in a lot of hard work in the hot sun all Summer, weeks and weeks of 16 hour workdays spent trimming weed, and many cold November nights sleeping in soggy dome tents in the rain. By the end of last year, they had saved a good chunk of money, but they knew they could make even more, if they used the money they earned here, to buy marijuana at Humboldt County prices, take it home with them, and sell it at the prevailing price there.

Unfortunately, they got pulled-over by a cop in a state with less progressive marijuana laws. The cop arrested them, confiscated their weed, and took their money. They spent a week in jail, had to have their parents bail them out, and hired a lawyer. Not only did they lose a year of their lives and everything they earned, they still have to pay hefty fines, legal fees, and spend a year or more on probation, at least.

For a while last winter, in their scissor delirium, they thought they were doing pretty well. They went out to dinner once or twice at the Benbow Inn, bought some expensive scotch at the Redway liquor store, and donated money to KMUD. Now they’re broke, in debt, and have a criminal record. This year they’re back to try again, but they are worse off than when they started.

Something like that story has happened to almost a million people every year, for almost 50 years now, including about 800,000 last year alone. Just because the marijuana industry brings a lot of money here, that doesn’t mean that most of the people in this industry do well at it. Some do, but a whole lot more have the perception that they are doing well, for a short period of time, just like gamblers in a casino, and that feeling makes gambling, and the marijuana industry, addictive.

CAMP raids ruined a lot of people’s lives, for decades, even if they never got arrested. If you managed to put together a good year or two, and used the money to put a down-payment on a piece of property, build a house and put in a grow, you probably thought you were doing pretty well. Then, just as your plants approached maturity, helicopters showed up and CAMP smashed your whole operation. As a result of the raid, you lost a whole year’s income. Because you didn’t have the income, you missed your land payment, so you lost your land, the big down-payment you made, all of the annual balloon payments you made before they busted you, and the house you just built. This has happened to hundreds of people here in Humboldt County. Some people have sold the same piece of land, four or five times, to four or five different ambitious young growers, and gotten higher prices each time they sold it because of improvements made by each successive alleged “new owner” before foreclosure.

Cops aren’t the only hazard in this business. Mold, woodrats, mites, deer, elk, gophers and ripoffs can all ruin a crop almost as fast as CAMP. Then there’s fire. Lots of people lose their crop in wildland fires. If the plants themselves don’t burn, they might die because no one could get into the evacuation zone to water them.

One friend of mine was doing pretty well. He had acquired land and was building a house. At harvest time, he used the unfinished house as a drying shed for his crop. While drying, some of the weed fell onto a portable propane heater which started a fire that consumed the crop and burned the house to the ground. It devastated him.

 

Nobody has insurance in this business, and setbacks like this can take years to recover from, if they don’t crush your spirit completely. Some people never recover from setbacks like these. Instead, they fall into alcoholism and/or hard-drug addiction, which become setbacks themselves, which lead to more setbacks. After a few such setbacks, most people are pretty well screwed.

Damn near everyone in Humboldt, it seems, is on probation, parole, or has a felony conviction in their past, and our drug addiction rates are through the roof. Far from making us more prosperous as a community, the marijuana industry has become a trap that produces gross income inequity, devastates the natural environment, and unleashes an epidemic of economic refugees while it makes us feel ever more dependent upon it.

Yes, the black market marijuana industry accounts for a lot of the money that comes into Humboldt County but it also accounts for a lot of the homelessness, poverty and drug addiction we find here too. Like a casino, the War on Drugs makes a few lucky people rich, while it swindles the rest of us with games of chance where the odds are stacked against us, and like a casino, it doesn’t really produce anything, except poverty, social problems, and money. Would you care to place a bet on the future of Humboldt County?

A Meeting About “the Greenrush”

I attended the “Greenrush” meeting Beginnings in Briceland. It turned out to be a great opportunity to see your neighbors, meet some government officials, and watch four hours of your life evaporate away. The Civil Liberties Monitoring Project hosted the meeting to air complaints about the expansion of mega-grow pot plantations in Southern Humboldt, and because those folks up in Bridgeville got to have a meeting about it, so we had to have one too.

Of course, the mega-grow plantation owners didn’t come to the meeting. They didn’t send a manager, or even a spokesperson. They were too busy growing pot, and making money, to care. Instead, it was all the people who have been complaining about them, including yours truly, as well as 2^nd District Supervisor Estelle Fennell, Undersheriff Honsal from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department, Adona White of the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, Jane Arnold from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and Senior Planner from the Humboldt County Planning Dept, Steve Lazar.

It’s still weird to hear pot growers demanding stricter enforcement and more surveillance, but that’s what I heard. People were outraged that the Sheriff wasn’t busting these giant grows we can all see on Google Earth, when they used to look at every ridge in the county, every year, with a magnifying glass and a fine-toothed comb, pulling-up every single pot plant they saw. Undersheriff Honsel told us that since the Feds stopped picking up the tab, the Sheriff doesn’t do much marijuana eradication anymore.

Instead, Honsel referred us to the people sitting at the table beside him, Adona White from NCRWQCB, Jane Arnold from Fish and Wildlife, and Steve Lazar from the Planning Dept, and told us that they would lead the enforcement of the new regulations. All of the people from the various state and county agencies kept telling us, “We’d love to bust these bad guys, but we need you to file complaints against them first. Then we’ll send them a letter.”

“Oh great, a letter.” we all thought. Our neighbors carry machine guns and run international organized crime syndicates, and you are going to send them a letter. We know how mobsters work. Mobsters bribe public officials, but they kill informants. All of our state and county agencies would love to start negotiating with these new “clients,” if they haven’t already, and they’re happy to do it over our dead bodies. They can’t wait to try out these new shakedowns, I mean “regulations,” and they love to let the public do their legwork.

In order to make sense of this whole legalization process, you need to understand what politicians mean when they talk about “a well-regulated industry.” They don’t mean “regulated in such a way as to protect the environment, provide workers with a safe workplace, and insure regional economic stability.” When a government official talks about “a well regulated industry” he or she means that all of the bribes and payoffs that used to get paid under the table, have now been institutionalized as above-board fees and penalties.

 

As the spectre of legalization threatened to expose the corruption at the core of our local economy, the Board of Supervisors worked furiously fast to codify new licensing and fee structures to keep the economic ball rolling. Because Humboldt County acted so quickly to adopt these new regulations, big growers everywhere now know that they can grow big here, and if the county comes after them, they’ll send a letter, instead of 60 trigger-happy cops.

These new regulations have made Humboldt County look appetizing to a whole new category of speculators, gamblers, and weasels working both sides of the law. They pay ridiculous prices for real estate and then totally blow it up with clear-cuts, massive water-sucking light-dep operations, loud generators, bright lights and too much truck traffic. That’s what we mean by “Greenrush.”

The forest has become an unregulated industrial zone as operators race to suck the last gulps from the teat of prohibition while they position themselves to come out on top in the legal market. The stakes are high. No pun intended. The competition for domination of the emerging legal cannabis market is fierce, and Humboldt County has become the battlefield.

That’s why it looks like a war zone around here. Our hillsides are cratered by pot plants instead of bomb blasts, massive convoys of dump trucks, cement mixers and earth-moving equipment crisscross our watersheds while desperate refugees survive in make-shift camps. The War on Drugs has given us all PTSD, and now that the government has finally conceded defeat, growers have gone on the offensive, and they’re fighting each other for market-share. This last battle in the War on Drugs may be the most deadly yet for Humboldt County.

At the meeting, they told us that they can only work with the growers who want to come into compliance. At the moment, about 2% of cannabis growers are actively working towards compliance, which means that about 98% of the marijuana growers in Humboldt County continue to supply a robust nationwide black market that doesn’t take names, ask for licenses or collect taxes. Undersheriff Honsell told us that most Humboldt County growers grow for the black market because: “That’s where the money is.” Duh!

Essentially, they told us that as long as the black market for marijuana remains profitable, we should expect the unregulated destruction in the forest to continue, and accelerate. In the meantime, the Board of Supervisors has proposed a new excise tax on every licensed pound of legally compliant medical cannabis, just to make sure that those cut-and-run greenrushers get a little more time to plunder the forest, while licensed legal growers pick up the tab.

They told us to be patient. In five years or so, this will all be over. By then, everyone will be in compliance and there won’t be any more black market. That’s what they told us. They didn’t bother to tell us that all of the salmon would be dead in five years, along with the local cottage cannabis industry, poof, gone, extinct forever. They didn’t tell us that real estate agents are getting fat as ticks off of this ruse, right now, by inviting every drug dealer in the country to come here to ruin the community, saw down the forest and suck the rivers dry. “Please be patient,” they said. “In five years, it will all be over.”

Yeah, that’s what we’re afraid of.

The Big Lie Called “Public Safety”

Last year, Humboldt County instituted a a new regressive sales tax, Measure Z, that unduly burdens the poor in Humboldt County. This year, the county intends to pass a new ordinance that will infringe on our civil rights. Apparently it wasn’t enough to just send more cops out to harass the poor, which Measure Z funded, they now find it necessary to invent a new crime, for which the poor can be prosecuted. Still, no one wants to pay taxes, and no one wants to give up their rights, so how do our County Supervisors generate public support for these measures? That’s easy. They lie.

County Supervisors used the same lie for both Measure Z and this new proposed “aggressive solicitation ordinance.” That is the lie called “public safety.” Remember “public safety?” That was the lie the Federal Government used to justify marijuana prohibition too. “Public safety” is one of those big lies that fascists have used repeatedly throughout history to restrict civil rights, suppress dissent and control the public, and that’s exactly how the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors use it today. Don’t believe for one second that the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors gives a rat’s ass about public safety. All you have to do is watch Estelle Fennell drive to know that public safety is the very last thing on her mind.

“Public safety” sounds like a good thing. Who doesn’t support public safety? We outlawed fireworks, so we wouldn’t have so many forest fires. We outlawed driving while intoxicated so we could cut down on the number of traffic fatalities and we mandate seat-belt use for the same reason. Those are some ways that legislators have addressed public safety concerns through legislation. We can argue whether or not these laws work, but “public safety” becomes a big lie when politicians use it, not to save lives, but to steal our money and take away our rights.

I readily admit that Humboldt County is a dangerous place to live. We face many threats to public safety here in Humboldt County, some natural, some man-made. We’re prone to earthquakes, fires, floods, tsunamis and mudslides, all of which have a long, devastating history in Humboldt County, and we can rest assured that overwhelming natural disasters will remain a predictable part of our future. We could probably save a lot of lives by spending some money now to prepare for the inevitable. In a real disaster, it would really help to have plenty of bed space in emergency shelters, and it would help even more to have people with experience running an emergency shelter, who know what to expect when disaster strikes.

Just think of the lives that could be saved in a natural disaster, if we had a full-time emergency shelter in Southern Humboldt. Think of how many people need help in times of personal emergency, and how much good it would do for the whole community to have an emergency shelter serving people in crisis as a way of preparing for the major natural disasters that will inevitably impact all of us in the future. That’s what a policy designed for “public safety” might look like. You won’t see much of that in Humboldt County.

Now ask yourself: When was the last time an “aggressive panhandler” killed anyone in Humboldt County, by panhandling too aggressively? I don’t think it has happened yet. I’m sure we would have heard about it on the news. Not one single death by “aggressive panhandling” in Humboldt County in as long as I can remember. I don’t ever recall hearing about a single injury, not even a bruise, caused by “aggressive panhandling” anywhere in Humboldt County, have you? The “public safety threat” posed by aggressive panhandling is entirely imaginary. We can only imagine how an aggressive panhandler might possibly threaten public safety, because we’ve never had a single aggressive panhandling related injury in Humboldt County in as long as anyone can remember.

On the other side of the coin, reckless drivers, like Estelle Fennell, kill and injure dozens of Humboldt County residents every year. Out-of -control drivers on the Briceland-Thorne Road constitute a serious threat to the public safety of the citizens of Southern Humboldt, but none of the money from Measure Z goes towards traffic enforcement West of Redway. Instead, the cops cruise around Redway and Garberville harassing poor people all day, poor people who do not own cars or drive cars, have not committed any crimes and do not pose any threat to public safety.

The cops themselves pose a serious threat to public safety. We have some of the most violent cops in the state. The Eureka Police Dept leads the state in police shootings, and the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Dept is famous for torturing locked-down non-violent protesters by swabbing pepper-spray in their eyes. This we know for sure. Complaints and allegations of police abuse have only multiplied since then, and the EPD still refuses to turn over dash-cam video from an 2012 incident reported by Thadeus Greenson in the NCJ. Cops around here remain largely above the law which makes this threat to public safety even more insidious and dangerous.

But wait, there’s more.

Dead bodies turn-up every month or so around here, and most of these deaths appear to be connected to the black-market marijuana industry. Hash labs explode every week or so, maiming and killing residents and destroying homes all over Humboldt County, and at least a dozen people, probably more, mostly young people, die in black-market drug deals every year in Humboldt County. Hundreds more die violent premature deaths in the black-market marijuana industry across the country every year in the process of selling Humboldt County marijuana. Not only does Humboldt County’s black-market marijuana industry dramatically impact public safety here in Humboldt County, we have become a public safety menace to the rest of the country.

Speaking of black-market drug deals, we have some of the highest drug addiction and drug overdose rates in the state. We consume the equivalent of 14 Vicodin tablets every day, on average for every man, woman and child in Humboldt County, and that doesn’t include all of the heroin, meth and cocaine we consume. Drugs kill hundreds of people in Humboldt County every year. The deadly combination of an entrenched black-market coupled with our culture of addiction, poses, by far, our most serious threat to public safety here in Humboldt County, and the bright red cherry at the top of this public safety crises sundae is Hepatitis C.

Humboldt County has been recognized as the most prolific breeding-grounds for Hepatitis C in the entire USA. The Hep-C epidemic threatens to overwhelm our public health system even without a natural disaster. Despite new treatments, complications of Hepatitis C claim tens of thousands of lives across the country every year.

Welcome to the heart of the Hep-C generation, and you are welcome for that brief rundown of genuine public safety concerns that the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors could be working on at this very moment, were they not so busy lying to you, stealing your money and shutting you up. So, the next time your County Supervisor or your local newspaper tries to convince you that we need this new, unconstitutional, free-speech stifling, fascist police-state style “aggressive solicitation ordinance” in Humboldt County for “public safety” you will know, without a shadow of a doubt, that they are lying to you.

Seed ’em for Freedom

The other day, I found myself stuck behind two, empty, 25 yd dump trucks, returning to Redway, waiting for two more 25 yd dump trucks, full of soil, to clear the one-lane bottleneck in the middle of the redwood grove between Lower Redway and Ruby Valley on Briceland Rd. Between the four of them they completely engulfed that remarkable fragment of ancient forest in a thick cloud of diesel exhaust. Ah, the smell of a Spring day in the forests of Humboldt County.

I must have passed two dozen trucks, of various sizes, loaded with soil, or components thereof, in my sixteen mile trek into town. It reminded me of fire season, with soil trucks instead of firetrucks. You can literally watch our roads crumble beneath their weight. Meanwhile, the forests echo with the crass flatulence of chainsaws, bulldozers and ATVs all day, and the endless roar of generators, that fuel the UFO-like glow of brightly lit greenhouses, all night.

This is crazy! I love marijuana as much as the next guy, but it’s not worth destroying the planet over, and it’s not worth destroying Humboldt County over, either. It’s just pot, for God’s sake. If it weren’t for prohibition, you could hardly give the stuff away. If our pot had seeds in it, weed would be sprouting up everywhere by now, and everyplace in the country would have its own variety, adapted to the local environment and local tastes.

Pot doesn’t need special soil. I once found a fully mature sinsemilla plant growing in the expansion groove of a sidewalk in downtown Akron, OH. Thousands of people must have trampled on that plant over the course of the Summer. No one watered it, fertilized it, or mulched it. No one brewed tea for it, dusted it’s roots or sprayed it with neem oil, and no one strung lights over it, turned a fan on it or put a heater near it. It grew there, all on it’s own. Why? Because pot used to have seeds.

Weed should be as common as blackberries, and as full of seeds. No one should ever get shot over it, go to jail for it, or fork over a days wages just to enjoy a taste of it. By the same token, no one in their right mind would bulldoze a forest, trash a truckload of plastic film and sink a lot of money into soil and amendments, thinking they were going to get rich off of it, either. Our entire cannabis industry is built on the lunacy of prohibition. It was born crazy, and it’s only gotten crazier.

We shouldn’t build on prohibition. We should end prohibition. We shouldn’t white-wash the black market. We should end the injustice of it and let nature take its course. We can replace the trucks and the soil and the generators and the lights and the pollution and the growers and the dealers and the cops and the lawyers and the prison guards and the laws and the prisons and the money with the gentle motion of the breeze and a card on an album cover. Pot for the people, period. Anything less is a graceless scam that needlessly destroys habitat, generates pollution and creates poverty.

A lot of people around here have no appreciation for this place at all. They measure everything in dollars, so they know the price of everything, and the value of nothing. They know that the price of marijuana is high, all over the country, right now, and the risk of going to jail for growing a lot of it here in Humboldt County, is low, and that was all they needed to know about Humboldt County.

Salmon streams and old-growth forests don’t interest them one bit. Deer, bear, raccoon, skunks, gophers, rats and mice all fall under the category of: “pests,” and the rest of the community of life is just “roadkill,” dead stuff that got in the way. For them, regulations serve no purpose. To them, regulations are nothing more than bureaucratic “red tape” to be avoided, resisted, and opposed politically, rather than complied with, and because of them, regulations will not protect wildlife, preserve habitat or even insure our rural quality of life. Regulations won’t stop this madness. Regulation created this insanity in the first place, and new, more or better regulations will only make things worse. This is a concocted problem with a natural solution.

If you love living in the forest, and you’re sick of the green-rush, grow some seedy pot this year. Let a patch of your favorite seed-stock go feral on your land. Seed ’em for Freedom! Seed ’em for Freedom, because it’s the only way we’ll ever really put prohibition behind us. Seed ’em for Freedom to put cannabis in the hands of the people who need it the most, and wrench it from those who would rather destroy the world first, and Seed ’em for Freedom because seeds are life, and life knows what it’s doing.