The Greatest Puppet Show on Earth

This pandemic is a lot like a Grateful Dead concert in the ‘90s. You know that large sums of cash will change hands, a lot of people will take drugs, and sooner or later it’s going to kill the fat guy you love. You know that a Grateful Dead show will be a huge event. You know who will be there, and you know exactly what they sound like when they play together, no matter what song they play. This pandemic is the same way. We’ve heard this band before, and we didn’t like it at all.

This pandemic was brought to you by the same band who gave you the War in Afghanistan, both wars in Iraq, The War on Drugs, the War in Vietnam, and both world wars. Let’s call them “The Vanguard Group” because Vanguard is the largest privately held investment firm in the world, and they own everything. I mean everything.

A logo sign outside of the headquarters of the investment management company, The Vanguard Group in Malvern, Pennsylvania on May 24, 2015. Photo Credit: Kristoffer Tripplaar/ Sipa USA

They own the media, all of it, including NPR and PBS, through their so-called “philanthropic foundations,” like The Ford Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They own Big Pharma, Big Oil, and Big Ag, and they buy up internet startups that serve their interests as soon as they look promising.

They’ve been around for a long time. Many generations of Rothschild, Rockefeller and DuPont have played in the Vanguard group, and Bill Gates is their new keyboard player. There are a few other players too, but they have a very distinctive sound that can instantly trigger PTSD reactions in millions of people all over the world who have experienced them before.

These are the people who sold diesel fuel, from American refineries, to Nazi U-Boats, so they could attack Allied supply convoys as soon as they left the East Coast of the US. The same people who made poison gas for Nazi death chambers AND explosives for Allied bombs, and the same people who financed Hitler’s Third Reich, as well as the millions of Allied troops who died fighting them. They didn’t care much who won that war. The fact that millions of people died, at a time when people were becoming unruly, is all that really mattered to them. That’s how they work and nobody but them can put on a show like that.

That’s the kind of show you get from the Vanguard group. They also did the War on Drugs, and I remember that show well. I remember the lies and the bogus science, the fear campaign, the full-court press in the media to turn neighbor against neighbor, and to turn children against their own parents. I remember the huge budgets for cops and prisons while they cut social programs, and I remember that the CIA financed dirty wars in Central and South America while they fostered violent gang wars in neighborhoods all over the US by trafficking tons of cocaine into US Cities. If you lived through it, you’ll never forget it.

This pandemic is just like the War On Drugs if you just make some substitutions:

1. Substitute Tony Fauci for Drug Czar Bill Bennett as the Designated Liar. So we have a new guy who tells lies designed to scare the shit out of you. Back then they wanted you to be afraid of drugs, today they want you to be afraid of the virus.

2. Substitute “Cases” for “Arrests.” They quote this meaningless statistic endlessly, and use it to justify draconian new policies that limit our freedom. Undercover cops and sting operations have now been replaced by a PCR test that produces a lot of false positives, proving only that if you look for trouble hard enough, you are bound to find it.

3. Substitute Deaths and Hospitalizations for Overdoses, Gang Murders, Crack Babies etc. Dead people. Deaths, in a Vanguard Group production, are like the notes of a Jerry Garcia guitar solo at a Grateful Dead concert. Death is the essence, the character, and the defining quality of the Vanguard Group experience. Death is what makes the Vanguard Group who they are, and these periodic demonstrations of their unparalleled flair for killing large numbers of people dramatically, and with complete impunity, is why people listen to them.

4. Substitute Covid-19 for Crack Cocaine Both cooked-up in a lab and dumped on innocent civilians by the CIA.

5. Substitute Mandatory Vaccines in the Workplace for Mandatory Drug-Testing in the Workplace. Both aimed at producing a more compliant workforce and marginalizing free-thinkers. They established these mandates as an emergency measure, even though they are nonsensical and unnecessary, but they will try to make them stick, permanently. They sure got away with it in the War on Drugs.

Thanks to drug testing in the workplace it is still legal to discriminate against cannabis consumers, and now we are getting ready to fire our best nurses because they know better than to take the jab. The Vanguard Group doesn’t like America’s best and brightest, because we see right through them. The Vanguard Group wants only America’s most compliant and cowardly as their minions, and so you can expect that if they get away with this, they will continue to jab you with poison from time to time, partially to remind you of who is boss, but also to insure that you don’t burden the Social Security system for long after you cease to be productive.

Yes, this is definitely a Vanguard Group show, and when the Vanguard Group puts on a show like this, you get to see who works for them. Just watch the way they make Biden dance. They own him. They own the whole Democratic Party, and the WHO, as well as world leaders all over the globe. The Vanguard Group owns them, and they dance when the Vanguard Group pulls their strings. I remember being amazed at how well the Vanguard Group choreographed the War on Drugs, but this pandemic shows that they haven’t lost their touch. Quite the contrary. I think we’re watching the greatest puppet show on Earth.

Vax Nazis Suck, but Pink Floyd Rocks

Really, I don’t like to be the guy with the obtuse opinion, and I’ve got better things to do than spend my time explaining the obvious to a hostile audience in deep denial, but push has come to shove, and the vax nazis have gone on the offensive. Vaccine mandates and vaccine passports must be stopped. I cannot believe how many Democrats and liberals have fallen for the bullshit rhetoric about this pandemic and these experimental new drugs, and are willing to trade their own, and their neighbors, rights as citizens, and as sovereign human beings, for the life of livestock and lab rats. When I think of how many Americans died to secure and protect those rights through the years, just to watch you throw them away, for the false promise of protection from a disease that kills less than 1% of the people who catch it, I can’t just sit back and watch it happen. I have to say something.

When I see the media working diligently to turn neighbor against neighbor, as they tell us lies like: “This new wave of infection is driven by the unvaccinated.” and “the vaccine-hesitant are causing the virus to mutate” even though they have no science to back it up, and all common sense contradicts them, reminds me of the War on Drugs. Drug war lies ranged from: “marijuana makes colored men violent and rape white women.” and “marijuana makes Mexicans lazy and stupid.” to “crack cocaine is 100 times more addictive than powdered cocaine” and “the new marijuana is 40 times more dangerous than the old marijuana.”

This vaccine obsession should remind you of the War on Drugs too. The government lies. Don’t ever forget that, and when the government lies big like this, and the media falls in line, lock step, like they are now, you can bet it is a war, and you can bet that this war is not about what they tell you it is about. In all my life, I have never seen the government mobilize this kind of media dominance for anything except war (and those wars have never been about what they said they were about): The War on Drugs (protect Americas youth), the first Persian Gulf Way (liberating Kuwait from a bloodthirsty Saddam),9/11 and the War on Terror (Find Osama bin Laden), and the Invasion of Iraq (Saddam’s WMDs).

The War on Drugs. Do you remember that bullshit? Mandatory minimum sentences, drug testing in the workplace, zero tolerance, paraquat, CAMP, DARE, gang warfare, prison overcrowding, crack babies, millions dead, tens of millions arrested, millions more lives ruined, and three generations of activists had to devote their lives to walking this insanity back, and we are not even close yet. I want to remind you of the War on Drugs so that you remember just how out-of-hand things can get, if you let yourself believe that the government has your best interest at heart when it pulls shit like this.

This vaccine hysteria has gotten way out of hand. If you are one of those people who is beginning to turn on your jab-resistant peers, you really need to check yourself. I know that you hear the same story from every single trusted media outlet you turn to, and the story they tell is very simple: “Everyone must get vaccinated or we’ll never be able to take our masks off, or go to a concert or have a party again.” You can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t take a couple of jabs in the arm to make everything all better again, especially since everyone says the vaccines are “safe and effective.”

I’m sorry folks, but when was the last time you heard a drug commercial in the media that didn’t have a long list of side-effects read at auctioneer speed at the end of it. What makes you think these “vaccines” are any different? The CDC’s VAERS program reports over 10,000 deaths following the vaccine, and hundreds of thousands of severe reactions, some with long-term, disabling conditions like paralysis. I would feel awful if that happened to someone I had encouraged to take the jab over their own reservations, and so would you. The media, on the other hand, doesn’t mind lying to you at all, and doesn’t care whether you live or die. They are just weapons in a war, and this is another war against us all, just like the War on Drugs, only in reverse.

The CDC recorded more vaccine related deaths in the first five months of 2021 than in the previous 20 years combined.

In the War on Drugs, they lied to us about drugs to get us to stop taking them; today they’re lying to us about drugs to get us to take them, and if that doesn’t work they’ll make it hard to get a job, go to school, get a license, travel, and they will do their level best to stigmatize you and turn your friends and family against you. Since the truth is not on their side, these coercive measures are the only way to get people to comply, but it will breed resentments. These lies will break-up families, destroy friendships, and tear at the fabric of our society, and those are intentional objectives in this kind of war.

It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time, not that long ago, when most Americans had no experience with cannabis, let alone LSD. Back then, people believed whatever bullshit the government told them about these drugs because neither they, nor anyone they knew, had ever seen, let alone tried them. After this indoctrination, however, they sure didn’t want their kids getting involved in anything so sordid as illegal drugs, and they were on the lookout for signs of drug use in their neighborhood.

When they finally did catch their own kids with cannabis, they did just what the government told them to do. They called the cops, on their own kids. Later, in the DARE program, they got kids to rat on their parents and friends, for smoking weed, and then the government destroyed their lives. Millions of lives were lost or destroyed because gullible Americans believed the bullshit they saw on TV. They turned on people in their own community. They turned on their friends, and they turned on family, because they believed what they saw on TV.

This lead to bitter resentments, estrangement, and rebellion. Families suffered, communities foundered, and a counter-culture emerged that rejected this intolerant mainstream ideology, and proudly celebrated cannabis and psychedelics. Within that counter-culture that celebrated cannabis and psychedelics, there emerged a new kind of music that defied all the accepted norms of pop music. This music just didn’t make sense unless you were high on drugs, Hendrix’s feedback, the Dead’s Space, and Zappa’s Freak Out immediately come to mind. On the other side of the world, Syd Barrett’s notorious consumption habits and subsequent collapse, as well as his Zippo-lighter slide-guitar on Astronomy Domini forever marked Pink Floyd as counter-cultural celebrants of psychedelics.

Pink Floyd has several “songs” that really don’t make much sense unless you are really high, and I love them for that. I feel that this kind of music connects to something primal within us. There are no lyrics that you can write that can liberate us from this culture, but there’s a feeling in this music that is deeper than words, and when you tap into that feeling, it tells a whole other story. Roger Waters once described this song as “a poignant appraisal of the contemporary social situation” I’d say that’s more true now than ever. Here’s my cover of the Pink Floyd song “One of These Days” played on electric bass, tin can violin, Omnichord and voice. I hope you like it!

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.

We See The Dead in Kutna Hora, Czech Republic

A couple of weeks ago we were lucky enough to see The Dead in Kutna Hora, Czech Republic.  I’ve never seen The Dead in Europe before, and I had no idea how popular they are here.  I found it really inspiring to see at least 40,000 deadheads all gathered together in the same place.  It was a unique vibe, unlike any Grateful Dead concert I’ve ever attended.  Deadheads at Kutna Hora are a lot quieter, and more peaceful than American deadheads, but American deadheads definately have better drugs.  I didn’t even catch a whiff of kind bud, and nobody offered to sell me doses in Kutna Hora, even so, seeing The Dead in Kutna Hora was an experience I will never forget.

A New Mass Shooting Meets the Same Old Mass Stupidity

I missed the story about the latest school shooting because I don’t follow the news. Please spare me the details, but I know that one must have happened because I suddenly hear people talking about gun control again. It’s funny how Americans have become conditioned to respond to every tragedy by volunteering to give up their rights. Kids OD on drugs, so we sign up for prohibition and sacrifice our privacy in the War on Drugs. We see poor people on our streets, so we write off our right to free speech with anti-panhandling ordinances. By the same Pavlovian conditioning, every time somebody goes berserk with a gun, Americans line up to write the 2^nd Amendment out of the Constitution.

Partially because of government propaganda, partially because of media brainwashing, and partially because of denial, many white middle-class liberals still believe that the government works for them, even though, in reality, most of them work for the government. The government, on the other hand, actually works for the rich, who use it to control the rest of us, but they do it in such a way as to convince the middle-class that it was their idea, because, of course, the rich will make the middle-class pay for it.

Middle-class people don’t have many ideas of their own. Instead, they let the rich fill their heads with a few carefully selected memes, endlessly repeated and dutifully conveyed by the media. By the time most people become middle-class, they’ve already sublimated years of conditioning in school, and they’ve learned to do what they are told without thinking about it much. That’s why every stupid middle-class liberal has the same stupid idea at the same time. That’s not thinking; that’s drooling, just like Pavlov’s dogs. The truth is, middle-class people have forgotten how to think for themselves, and instead, have learned to regurgitate whatever predigested pap the rich feed them through the media.

Meanwhile, the rich have created the greatest arsenal of lethal weaponry ever assembled on Planet Earth, and they use it to kill anyone in the vicinity of anyone who might dare stand in their way, with complete impunity. The rich spend a trillion dollars a year, of the middle-class’s money, to upgrade and improve this arsenal every year. The rich now have more bombs, guns, tanks and war-planes at their disposal than the rest of the world combined, and that arsenal is designed, built and maintained at-the-ready, by trained, well-paid professionals, who have learned not to think for themselves, but to do what they are told, because, of course, they make up most of the middle-class.

Stupid white liberals ignore the massive and rapidly growing, pile of bodies murdered by US, state and local governments, which they dutifully serve, lack the courage to oppose, and remain in denial about. Instead, they let the rich use them as ventriloquist dummies to turn these terrible tragedies into political footballs in a sleazy, underhanded attempt to undermine my right, and ability, to defend myself and my home. In so doing, they also distract us from the economic inequity, media manipulation and social dynamics that drives the phenomena of mass violence in our society in the first place.

Drug Treatment Doesn’t Solve the Housing Crisis

I know we need drug treatment options here in Humboldt County, and probably a corporate chain-store methadone clinic is better than nothing, but I can’t help but think that this new Aegis clinic is what they plan to give us instead of affordable housing. Not that long ago 2^nd District Supervisor Estelle Fennell toured homeless encampments in Southern Humboldt with law enforcement. Afterwards, when she spoke to the press, she didn’t say, “Wow, look at all of these people living outside, I guess we really need more housing here in SoHum.” Instead, she said something like, “It sure seems like a lot of the people living outside in the rain and cold have drug problems, I guess we need more drug treatment.”

We got the same story from the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission. All year we asked the HRC to pressure the Board of Supervisors to declare a shelter emergency so that we could create some safe, affordable housing, and address the growing problem of vigilante violence against the poor and homeless here in SoHum. After more than a year of hounding willfully ignorant and purposefully dense politicians and political operatives about this, I finally got a call from HRC Commissioner Lance Morton to come talk about solutions.

So I make another special trip to town to meet with them, to talk about these alleged “solutions,” and the first words out of his mouth were, “We’re going to have drug treatment on demand!”

None of us had asked for drug treatment on demand. We went to all of those stupid meetings to demand that something be done about housing. We asked for affordable housing. We asked for tiny house villages. We asked for low-cost campgrounds and we asked for shelters. We also asked for respect for our human rights, and equal protection under the law, but instead, they bring us a methadone clinic.

None of my friends have problems with hard drugs. None of my friends can afford hard drugs. All of the heroin and Oxycontin addicts I know live in houses, and most of them own land, or their family owns land. My friends don’t need drug treatment; we all need affordable housing. None of us have very good housing options, and a lot of us have simply learned to do without.

Again and again we take our grievance to the Board of Supervisors and County Government. We explain the situation until we are blue in the face, and they look at us like they live on Mars and have no idea what we are talking about. After a couple of years of this, they come back and say, “Oh, we see what you mean, but you must be high on drugs if you think we give a fuck about your housing situation. Here’s a corporate chain-store methadone clinic for you.”

For us, Aegis will be just another shitty job that doesn’t pay a living wage. For the drug-addicted gentry of Humboldt County, however, who managed to support their hard drug habit for years, by growing cannabis and selling it on the black market, they can now get methadone treatment, close to home, at the taxpayers expense, through MediCal. Aegis will be an out-patient treatment center, and the only people likely to benefit from out-patient treatment are people who have homes to go home to, after treatment. How convenient! Politicians provide treatment options for addicted dope yuppies, while they heap the stigma of addiction on the poor and homeless. It doesn’t get much sleazier than that.

I found it both disingenuous and insulting to hear HRC Commissioner Lance Morton promote this new treatment center as a solution to the housing crisis. I’m sick and tired of of having my time and energy wasted by willfully ignorant politicians and political operatives who refuse to care about the real needs of poor and working people within this community. I’m even more sick of the heartless greed, punitive hostility and outright violence from the segment of our population who put those assholes on the Board of Supervisors in the first place.

The ugliness on display when someone throws a Molotov cocktail at a man sleeping in the doorway of a church, is a thousand times worse than the pitiful image of a poor man sleeping out in the cold. A poor person sleeping in the doorway of a church says “a man needs help.” Poor people sleeping outside, everywhere, says something else. It means there’s been a disaster, an earthquake, fire, flood, or economic upheaval. We had an economic upheaval. We’re beyond that now.

Today we have people sleeping everywhere, and we pay highly trained and heavily armed warriors to harass and evict them from anywhere they try to hide. Besides that, a segment of our population is not satisfied with the level of violence that our law enforcement officers meet out against them, so they form vigilante gangs that beat crippled old men to death, and set people on fire while they sleep. This is something else entirely.

Today, in Humboldt County, we’re looking at something like Apartheid, or an occupation, or Jim Crow. We’re looking at something much uglier than a natural disaster, and a thousand times uglier than a poor man who needs help. Here, the fascist business-class sends well financed, heavily armed warriors to beat-down and intimidate bedraggled, disorganized, traumatized, and addicted human beings who have committed no crimes, but have nowhere to hide and lack the strength to fight. These poor souls have no idea how to respond to the situation they find themselves in, and their only weapons against this oppression are the garbage and feces they leave behind and their own appearance.

That’s that’s all that’s left of humanity. That’s all that hasn’t been bought off or taken over by vicious, insatiable, fascistic greed. That’s what’s so ugly about what we see going on here in Humboldt County, and around the country, for that matter, and that’s why it’s so hard to look at it. Seeing desperate people on the streets reminds us of how much of our own humanity we’ve already sacrificed to participate in this whole exploitative system. This system kills us inside, but we can’t face what it’s doing to us, our planet, and our children’s future, so we take our resentments out on anyone who can’t, or won’t, get with the program.

We’ve constructed a perfectly exploitative culture that consumes our lives and destroys the planet, but instead of resisting, and standing up to it ourselves, we help the fascists wage war against humanity, profit from that war, and jeer at, beat down, and fire-bomb our broken brothers and sisters while the fascist system grinds them to dust. That’s a special kind of ugly, and it is definitely the ugliest thing about Humboldt County. Nobody wants to see that, and nobody wants their kids to see that, but here in Humboldt County, we have no shame.

McGuire Brings Us the “Taco Bell” of Treatment Centers

We’ve done pretty well, here in Humboldt County, at keeping the big chain stores at bay. Arcata has an ordinance against them, and public outcry keeps Walmart cowering in the back of the mall. Obviously we value our local culture, and our local economy. However, our State Senator, Mike McGuire has gone ahead and invited a new big chain store to open a franchise here in Humboldt County, and he expects us to be happy about it.

At a recent “Opioid Crisis” themed town meeting, Senator McGuire announced that Aegis Treatment Centers would be opening its 32^nd drug treatment clinic here in Humboldt County. Clearly we need more drug treatment here in Humboldt County, but do we really need the “Taco Bell” of treatment centers? Has Aegis been offered incentives to locate here in Humboldt County? Were those incentives also offered to the Open Door Clinic who has been treating everyone’s medical needs here for decades? What about our local health care districts, or Redwoods Rural Health Center? Were they offered incentives to offer drug treatment locally? Do we need a big company from out of town to suck money out of our community, just so we can have a methadone clinic in Humboldt County?

If you think I’m kidding about the “Taco Bell of treatment centers,” you should look into Aegis for yourself. Aegis pays low wages, overworks it’s staff, and has a very high turnover rate. The employee reviews of the company that I read shared a few common themes. Nearly everyone complained of the low pay, many mentioned the high case load, and most complained about the lack of opportunity for advancement. Even employees who rated Aegis highly, said that it was “a good place to start,” but not a good place to work long-term.

Patients complain of inflexibility, impersonal, constantly changing staff, and many complain that Aegis likes to keep people on Methadone, because it’s more profitable to maintain someone on methadone than it is to help them quit opiates altogether. We’ve been treating narcotic addiction with methadone for decades, but it has never worked very well. I’m not sure we’ve ever had an outpatient methadone clinic in Humboldt County before, but couldn’t we do this better ourselves?

A couple of weeks ago I interviewed Dr Amanda Reiman, who lives in Mendocino County, for my radio show, Monday Morning Magazine on KMUD (Nov 13, 8-9am archived at http://www.kmud.org). Dr Reiman has done some very interesting research into the therapeutic benefits of cannabis within the harm reduction drug treatment model. Dr Reiman has found that cannabis helps people quit hard drugs, and cannabis helps people who use hard drugs, use less hard drugs. This is a significant breakthrough in addiction treatment, and here in Humboldt County, we should be on the cutting edge of cannabis aided addiction treatment research. That sure won’t happen at an Aegis methadone clinic.

Dr Reiman works with a treatment clinic in southern California called “High Sobriety,” which uses cannabis alongside other forms of treatment. Why shouldn’t we have our own, homegrown, cannabis enhanced, drug treatment clinic here in Humboldt County? We need more and better drug treatment here in Humboldt County. We have plenty of people who need help. We have plenty of cannabis, and we have the peace, quiet and serenity that people need to heal.

We have an epidemic of addiction and overdose deaths here in Humboldt County that we must address, and if there’s one thing we should know by now, it is that we will never arrest and jail our way out of this problem. The people who are addicted to drugs in Humboldt County are our neighbors, our friends, and our kids. We don’t need to give them criminal records, and we don’t need to farm them out to some assembly line methadone clinic for the rest of their lives.

We have a unique population, and a unique set of circumstances here in Humboldt County, and I think we need a unique, homegrown approach to drug treatment. Research into the therapeutic potential for cannabis in drug treatment should be a high priority because we desperately need more and better drug treatment options. We need every tool in the toolbox to help the people of our community recover from the War on Drugs.

If there is one thing we can learn from Aegis, that is, that there is money to be made in drug treatment here in Humboldt County. Besides that, you can bet that people who use cannabis to quit hard drugs, will find that cannabis helps them stay clean, too, and people who used Humboldt Cannabis to get clean will probably use Humboldt Cannabis to stay clean. The potential for brand loyalty is enormous. This idea will make people rich. You’re welcome.

Turn Around the SoHum Slide

What a difference a couple of years can make. Suddenly, SoHum seems to be sinking. The Mateel is broke. KMUD is on the brink, and the business district in Garberville has a hockey player’s smile. No one has moved into Paul’s bookstore since he got evicted. No one has moved into the previous location of Paul and Kathy’s bookstore, in Redway, since their previous eviction almost a decade ago, but getting back to Garberville. The restaurant at the North end of town seems to be the latest gap in our grill. The House of Burgess Restaurant is now closed, and empty. Across the street, the ice cream shop, Treats, has been closed for a couple of years now. The big theater next to it hasn’t shown a movie since 2016. Across the street again, the bank in the next block of Redwood Drive is closed, and everyone else seems like they’re just barely hanging on.

The Chamber of Commerce keeps organizing street parties, and they’ve made feeble attempts to revive Arts Alive, but Garberville’s illicit sparkle is gone. The bling, has blung, leaving just another poor small rural town with a big drug problem. Weed has lost it’s intrigue, along with it’s profit margin, reducing the whole sexy outlaw industry into little more than hard, boring, farm work that barely pays the bills. Say goodbye to the Napa County of fine marijuana, and say hello to the new Southern Ohio of the West Coast.

The easy money is gone, and growing marijuana gets closer to honest farm work every day, and honestly, honest farm work sucks. I’ve done it. I respect the people who do it, but I hope I never have to do it again. I’m not a farm guy. I don’t mind growing my own weed, so I can get high while I do my thing, but my thing is not farming.

I think that if we, here in this community, can be honest with ourselves, most of us will realize that we are not farm people. The people who I met when I first moved here, were not farmers. They grew pot, but they also painted, made pottery, played music and made art. They didn’t move here with a burning desire to grow the very best marijuana in the world, and a shitload of it. They moved here to get away from the rat race. They grew cannabis to pay their bills, and to buy time to pursue what they loved, be it quality time in nature, their propensity for other drugs, or their own art, music or craft. They called it “The Cannabis Grant.”

I’m sure that some of the people who grow cannabis around here, do it because they love growing weed, and they never get tired of it, because growing weed is what they were born to do. That’s not most of us though. Most of us were looking for a way to avoid long hours of hard work. Growing marijuana was a way of stealing your life back from the man. People grew marijuana so that they could enjoy a comfortable lifestyle without selling themselves into corporate slavery. Growing pot was stressful, and it wasn’t easy, but it didn’t consume your whole life.

Today, most people in the business are working themselves to death on a non-stop light-dep treadmill to hell. The artists and writers and oddball misfits who grew marijuana to buy some autonomy and freedom are getting squeezed, and for people in the industry, growing marijuana is rapidly becoming just another shitty job. This is not the time to let your talents and your dreams languish while you toil away your life in Humboldt’s ganja fields. Get out while you can. You have better things to do.

Don’t measure your success in dollars, because dollars mean nothing. Measure your success in happiness; measure it in time spent doing what you love. Whether it’s playing the guitar, talking with friends, painting, hunting, fishing, gardening, working on cars, writing, partying or fucking, nothing you can buy will ever make up for what you lose by giving up what you love. When you deny your own talents and proclivities that way, you rob the world of your creativity, which makes the whole human experience that much less interesting.

When a lot of people deny themselves what they love, for an irresistible monetary incentive, it deadens the whole community, because people who deny themselves what they really love, for money, die inside. They die inside, and they become resentful of anyone who has the courage to live their dream and do what they love. This community resentment gets translated into words and actions that beat people down spiritually. Here in SoHum, we find ourselves caught in a spiral, where the lower the price of weed falls, the harder we work. The harder we work, the more resentful we become, and the more resentful we become, the more we beat each other down.

Our whole economy is built to beat people down, and to force them to abandon their dreams and sell themselves for money. Capitalism needs people who are dead inside, because people who are dead inside buy more crap, take more drugs, go to the doctor more often, and do what they are told. When you sell yourself for money, it’s like surrendering without a fight. It is the most debilitating kind of defeat, and no amount of financial success can mitigate that loss.

The strength, and future, of SoHum does not lie with the cannabis industry. The strength and future of SoHum lies with the many talented and creative people who are getting the life squeezed out of them in the cannabis industry, and are being beaten down spiritually by a resentful community. One of the things that makes cannabis so attractive is the creativity it can release in the user, but one of the worst things about the cannabis industry is all of the creativity it squashes with never-ending hard farm work.

As a community, we need to recognize that the cannabis industry will employ fewer people in the future, and a lot of those people will be low wage workers. Most of the honest jobs in our local economy pay low wages. If we can figure out how to create housing and establish businesses that cater to the needs of people with low wage jobs, and make life easier for people at the lower end of the pay scale, we can create an environment where people feel less pressure to stick with an unsatisfying job, and more freedom to try something different. The more we can do to help release the creativity that is already here, the faster we can build an attractive local culture and a vibrant, diverse and resilient local economy. Honestly, it’s about time.

No Technological Solution

We live in an age of rapid technological development. Our lives change in response to each new invention, but does technology really make our lives better, or do we consistently sacrifice our quality of life and ecological sustainability to support and encourage new technology? Through science fiction we explore our fear that one day super-intelligent robots will enslave humanity, but in reality, we’ve been slaves to technology since the invention of the plow and the aqueduct.

Our steadfast, unwavering commitment to technology has only deepened our addiction to it. Our minds have become so dominated by technology that we’ve learned to think of ourselves as machines. We use mechanical logic to convince ourselves to ignore the strong emotional signals our bodies send us about what has become of our lives. Dissatisfaction with a technological lifestyle can lead to a lot of emotions, like anxiety, despondence, depression, rage, etc, that can be difficult to comprehend, especially if you try to be logical about it. When that doesn’t work, we can diagnose these uncomfortable feelings as a mental illness, and treat your condition technologically, with drugs.

Only sound mechanical logic, untainted by primitive emotions can be considered truly sane in our modern high-tech culture. Could super-intelligent robots possibly enslave us more completely? We’ve turned humanity into willing servants of technology, desperate to sacrifice the planet, and our remaining time upon it, to produce that mythical super-intelligent robot in the vain hope that it will somehow save us from ourselves.

That’s the truth behind our madness. We have a vague sense of dissatisfaction, depression and dread about it, but we no longer have any way of understanding those feelings. Logically we know that we must press forward, because the next technological advance can change everything, this time, for the better, we hope. In the meantime, we’ll amuse ourselves with every new toy that comes along.

There are no super-intelligent robots in our technological future. Technology won’t destroy us by becoming smarter than us, technology will destroy us by making us dumber than it. Technology will completely eradicate human intelligence, if it hasn’t done so already, leaving nothing but crass consumerism and marketing statistics in it’s wake. As we’ve watched the ascendancy of technology in rapt amazement, our culture has devolved, and been reshaped to serve corporate capitalism. Based entirely on crass consumption, we inhabit a completely dysfunctional, totally destructive and universally traumatic culture that exudes toxicity in every form, but hey, don’t we have some cool toys?

Technology won’t save us. Technology is killing us and making us wish we were dead. Mechanical logic is not intelligence, and thinking logically is not intelligent. Logic has no vision, and logic has no heart. Logic does not rule the universe and logic does not dictate how we should live our lives. Logic is a human faculty useful in constructing contraptions and traps, and now we’re caught in one, but there is much more to human intelligence.

Real human intelligence is concerned with building culture, not machines. How you live, how you treat other people and how you raise your kids matters a hell of a lot more than what kind of machines you have. We probably could solve some of the intractable social and ecological problems our mindless devotion to machines has created, by looking for cultural, rather than technological solutions, but I’m not even sure we know how to use those muscles anymore.

Technology has failed us. The myriad array of electronic gadgets at our disposal only distract us from the bitter truth about our wretched condition. If we do, somehow, save humanity from self-induced extinction, we won’t do it by fleeing our own pollution to infest another planet with our poisonous technology; we will do it by rebuilding a life-affirming culture here on Earth.

SoHum’s Community Values

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Southern Humboldt Community Values Conference at the Mateel Community Center in Redway. As soon as I heard about this event, I knew I had to attend. I knew I had to attend because:

1. I wanted to see who in Southern Humboldt cares enough about community values to show up to an event at 9:00 am on a Sunday morning in April without the lure of alcohol or music. I wanted to meet those people, and…

1. I genuinely care about community values.

These days, people endure enormous economic stress. Economic stress compromises, corrupts and crushes values, as well as the people who cling to them. This economy grinds values into garbage just as efficiently as it does redwood trees, rhinoceroses or the rest of us. If you value anything more than money, I think it more important than ever to remind yourself why, and to draw strength from that knowledge. If we share values as a community, we can share that knowledge, and reinforce those values, to make our community stronger and more cohesive. Really, I understand the importance of community values, but I also understood the motivation for this conference.

The Southern Humboldt Values Conference was sponsored by an organization called SHC, which supports and lobbies on behalf of cannabis growers. They had the idea to use Southern Humboldt’s “community values” as a marketing tool, to help them promote and sell their branded cannabis products. They constructed the conference so that no matter what happened, at the end of it, they would have a list of value statements that they could then distill down to a logo that they could slap on product labels and use in advertising to convince cannabis consumers that their pot was worth more money than pot grown elsewhere.

Basically, the Southern Humboldt Community Values Conference was a scheme, dreamed up by pot growers, to cash-in on anyone left in SoHum who cares about anything but money. You didn’t even have to care that much. At the conference, all you had to do, to express your values, was to show up and give them lip-service. You didn’t have to live them, invest in them, or practice them; they just had to sound good to you on a sober Sunday morning in April.

About 30 people showed up to participate in the conference, and another 10-15 straggled in late, missing most of the process. In other words, more than 99% of the SoHum community had better things to do. When you consider that at least a few of the participants were motivated by the potential ad campaign they hoped to create, you would have to admit that “community values,” on their own, are not a big draw in SoHum, but now that we’ve done the hard work of establishing our “community values,” what shall we do to instill them in the rest of our community?

For instance, one of the value statements we generated was some word-salad gobbledygook about how much we love the natural environment. All of the value statements we generated at the conference came out as such convoluted and poorly written sentences that I could not summon the energy to write them down. I found it embarrassing to have even participated in composing them, and I would have been even more embarrassed for anyone to see them written in my notebook. I do recall, however, that this word-salad value statement about how much we love the natural environment, contained the phrase, “we honor the cycles of nature.”

That sounds good, right? I’m down with it. I think we should honor and respect all of nature, including human nature, so sure, if we can at least get “the cycles of nature” into our community values statement, that’s great. At least “honor the cycles of nature” implies that nature is alive. As I recall, the rest of that value statement referred to the natural environment in terms of how we consume it, using words like “scenic beauty” and “peace and quiet,” but we all agreed on, and adopted, “honor the cycles of nature” as part of our cherished community values, while we ignored other values like eloquence and clarity entirely.

OK. Now we’ve had this conference, and we’ve established that honoring the cycles of nature is a stated, adopted and cherished Southern Humboldt Community Value©. Shouldn’t we make it clear to all of the people around here growing light-dep and mixed-light cannabis that they have gotten out-of-step with our community values? Will SHC refuse to allow light-dep or mixed-light product to be labeled with the “Southern Humboldt Community Values©” label?

I mean, it’s bad enough that light-dep and mixed-light growers waste panda plastic by the truckload, create noise and light pollution that disrupts wildlife behavior, and that they pollute and destroy critical habitat here in SoHum, but none of that conflicts with our newly adopted community values. On the other hand, light-dep and mixed-light growers definitely cheat the cycles of nature, for profit, which is clearly not in accord with our stated community values. Should we tolerate this heinous affront to our shared community values here in Southern Humboldt?

Often community values conflict with economic opportunity. People who believe in community values, will uphold the values of their community, no matter how ridiculous they seem, or how much they cost, in terms of missed economic opportunities, because it’s more important to most people to be a part of a community than it is to be rich and alone in secret. That’s the paradox of community values in Southern Humboldt. Here in SoHum, we have a whole community of people who have decided that they would rather be rich and alone in secret, than uphold community values.

Humboldt’s growers should realize that the people who buy their product are all expected to uphold community values, every day, even if they work for minimum wage, which a lot of them do. Even the poor and homeless are constantly reminded to uphold community values, so I doubt that anyone will be willing to pay much of a premium for it in their marijuana. Think about how many marijuana consumers have been kicked out of school, discriminated against in the workplace, and persecuted by law enforcement, because they smoke marijuana, and how much that has cost them in terms of lost income, pain and suffering, and then think about how much these people have paid for weed over the years, because of prohibition. How much chutzpah does it take to imply that there is anything like “fair trade” going on here?

Besides the gobbledygook about the natural environment, we had one value statement that involved respect for counter-cultures, and talked about accepting refugees from all wars, but within it, we included the phrase “we speak in code and privacy is key.” That’s very important to remember when dealing with people in Southern Humboldt.

Nothing you hear, here in SoHum, really means what you think it does. When they say “community,” in SoHum, they mean “growers.” When they say “our diverse community,” they mean, “Some of us grow headband; some of us grow blue dream, and some of us grow OG, but the people who work in our grocery stores, at the bank, or even on our own farms, don’t count.” “Privacy is is key” means “you’ll never find out what we are up to unless we get busted for it.”

The truest, most relevant, and elegantly stated value statement of the entire conference came, near the end, from a cheerful, bright-eyed young woman who obviously knows this community well. She said, “It’s kinda like we all killed the same person and we’ve all been covering it up.”

That’s pretty close to the truth. Since the casualties of the War on Drugs number in the millions by now, it would have been more accurate to use the plural form of the noun, but after a long day of torturing the English language, I really appreciated the honesty and eloquence.