The Generous Spirit of Cannabis

I live on the dark side of the hill, on dry land, here in SoHum. That’s why I can afford to live here. We don’t have enough sun or water to grow weed, and we’re off the grid, so no greenrushers are clamoring for our place, but we love it here. We enjoy the shade in the summertime and we’re protected from the worst of the storm winds in Winter. It’s a nice place to live, but not for growing weed, so I don’t bother.

Humboldt County is probably the easiest place in the whole US to find weed. Practically everyone else around here grows way more than they need. You can smell it everywhere, and hardly a hubcap falls off of a truck around here without revealing a secret garden or stash of weed hidden behind it. I nearly tripped over half-a-dozen recently harvested plants in grow-bags, just yesterday, on the sidewalk in front of Ray’s in Redway. God knows how they got there.

 

Around here, cannabis usually finds me before I have to go looking for it. I’ve been paid for work in cannabis, traded art for cannabis, received cannabis as a bonus for a job well done and I’ve been gifted cannabis, but on occasion, I have had to buy cannabis, for my own consumption, here in Humboldt County. I thought I was approaching one of those times recently, when I found myself in a conversation with a couple of local land owners.

 

If you read this column regularly, you know that I don’t give land owners much reason to like me, and they both admitted that they don’t agree with everything I say in this column. One of them was explaining to me why he thought the black market really isn’t so bad. “It’s just friends helping friends” he told me. “Besides,” he continued, “No one around here spends money to buy weed because everyone’s got so much.”

I had to differ with him on that point. I told him that I occasionally buy weed, and that I was looking to buy some weed right now. He looked at me with a look of genuine concern, “Really, you’re out of weed?” he asked.

“Just about.” I told him.

“I’ve got a jar of weed in the car I can let you have.” He said, adding, “No one around here should have to pay for medicine.”

I accepted his generous offer, and conceded the point. Both of these gentlemen seemed genuinely concerned that I, or anyone, should have to do without cannabis. I thanked him for the gift. It warmed the cockles of my heart, and got me nicely stoned. I really appreciate it. I don’t mean to diminish this magnanimous gesture in any way. After all, it was his compassion, his weed, and his idea to give it to me, despite the fact that I have probably offended him many times with this column, but there’s something about this sentiment that, I think, every cannabis enthusiast understands.

There is something about the spirit of cannabis that wants to be shared, freely. Once cannabis comes into your life, you begin to understand why it is so important to people, and she encourages you to share. Cannabis is everyone’s best friend, and it just seems cruel to deny her to anyone, or even to ask for money for her. That’s just how she makes you feel. Even when pot sold for $400 an ounce, people shared their weed. We started passing the bong around instead of joints, but we still shared. In my whole life, I’ve only been offered a line of cocaine, once, but thousands of people have shared cannabis with me.

Here’s another example: I have another friend, who I really enjoy talking to. He has no home, no car, no phone and barely gets enough to eat most days. He doesn’t read this column because he has no internet access. He also expressed concerned that I might run out of weed, and has given me weed many times. It’s always excellent weed. He never asks for money for it, and always gives it with the same look of genuine compassion and concern, and with the same words, “No one should have to go without medicine, especially around here.”

 

That’s real class. When someone can endure that level of poverty and yet maintain enough humanity to be sympathetic and generous to others. That’s real class. It’s also classy to be generous and compassionate to people you don’t necessarily agree with, or even know that well, as was the case with the land owners I spoke of earlier. It speaks well of people around here, and it speaks well of cannabis, so I think we should celebrate that spirit of generosity that cannabis exudes.

This generous, magnanimous spirit of cannabis, inspired me to start working for legalization back in the 80s. No one, anywhere, should have to go without medicine, and if it weren’t for prohibition, no one would. That’s the message I got from cannabis, along with a vision of a world where cannabis was freely available to everyone, and cheaper than alcohol. It looked like the kind of world I wanted to live in, and that vision motivated me to work to end prohibition. Even though we haven’t quite realized that goal, it’s great to see the generous spirit of cannabis in action, in my community, and to be the beneficiary of it.

On the other hand, that’s why I find it so offensive to see dispensaries that look like banks or high-end jewelry stores, or cannabis companies that rely on snob appeal to justify high prices. Every attempt to market cannabis as an expensive luxury for the well-to-do, flies in the face of the spirit of cannabis herself. Instead of making cannabis classy, they make her into a whore, to profit from the love she gives so freely. There’s nothing “classy” about that at all. It’s just ugly and shameful.

Humboldt “Farmers” Go to Sacramento

Recently, a group of area dope yuppies visited the State Legislature in Sacramento to lobby lawmakers on behalf of local marijuana growers.

While addressing their representatives at the State House, these cannabis cultivators wore green T-shirts emblazoned with the words, “I am a Farmer,” which I suppose, served as their excuse for wearing T-shirts.

Surrounded by business suits and power ties, these alleged “farmers” explained how important prohibition-era profits have become, not just to them personally, but to the numerous BMW and Harley Davidson dealerships around the state, not to mention ski resorts, gun dealers and real estate agents in Costa Rica, to name a few. “Who else pays $200 a yard for dirt?” They asked, adding that “California’s cannabis cultivators are the ‘suckers of last resort’ who have kept the state’s economy moving forward by buying enormous amounts of stupid crap while the rest of the state just tightened their belts and suffered through the recession.”

They reminded lawmakers that local businesses in Humboldt County rely heavily on black market cannabis profits. First, a lot of Humboldt County “businesses” operate as “fronts.” These “fronts” allow cannabis cultivators to launder large sums of cash without actually serving anyone’s needs. The remainder of Humboldt County’s businesses pay exorbitant rent prices, because of the high demand for commercial space for indoor marijuana cultivation, and have trouble finding help, because people can’t afford a decent place to live because of the high demand for residential space for indoor marijuana cultivation. As a result, most Humboldt County businesses cater to drug dealers who can easily afford the ridiculously high prices, while they ignore the needs of the rest of the community. Despite the poor job they do of serving the community’s needs, these businesses all pay taxes.

Of course, meeting people’s needs is the last thing anyone at the State House cares about. At the CA State Legislature, it doesn’t matter if you are a lawmaker or a lobbyist, a department head or a dope yuppie dressed as a farmer, everyone wants something, and everything costs money. The State Legislature essentially acts as the pimp for the state of California. Anyone who wants to fuck the people or rape the environment, legally, in the State of California has to pay them for the privilege. The State House is where they negotiate the price and terms.

Marijuana prohibition was just such a deal, struck between powerful corporate interests and corrupt government officials, and they’ve screwed the American people with it for almost 80 years.  Today, the American people have had enough, and they demand change. Right now, state legislatures all over the country are wrestling with this one question: How can they preserve an economic system forged by the War on Drugs, while phasing out the criminal penalties for drug possession and sales.

It’s like the transition between the Vietnam War and Reagan’s Cold War. The public demanded an end to the Vietnam War, and the draft, but not an end to military spending. No one liked spending billions of dollars on nuclear weapons, but people weren’t rioting in the streets about it. The Cold War preserved the profits of military contractors who would have otherwise had to find productive work in a peacetime economy. The people still got fucked, but at least they stopped screaming and squirming so much.

That’s what’s going on in Sacramento right now. It makes sense that Humboldt County’s Drug War profiteers should join the negotiations. Cops, prison-guards, lawyers, and drug dealers all want to continue fucking us over, and now Wall St. investors want a piece of the action too. It’s a feeding frenzy for social parasites.

They all know that without a multi-billion dollar eradication  effort, the price of marijuana will drop to $0, as this hearty weed quickly colonizes every vacant lot, ditch and roadside in America.

Wouldn’t that be great? The time has come to make it happen. All we need are seeds. That’s why it is so important for everyone who cares about cannabis, and wants to see it free and legal, to grow seedy pot. To hell with the State House, and to hell with greedy dope yuppies.  We’ve waited for them long enough already. Now it is time to free the weed, and spread the seed, because we’re sick of the greed.

Science, the New Religion

 

As an introduction to part two of this Thanksgiving Science Spectacular, ask yourself “Do I trust science, or do I believe in science.?” If you are not quite sure you understand the question, please read on. Even if you are sure that you understand the question, take a few minutes to see if you can digest this turkey of an essay.

 

 

Science, the New Religion

 

 

I love science; I really do. I never cared much for literature, but I have always loved science. I think we can learn a lot from science, and I think we could learn a lot more from science, were resources in this world allocated differently, but no matter how much we learn from science, we completely fail to learn our lesson.

 

 

The lesson we never seem to learn is: What we are doing is not working. Things are getting worse, not better. We’re failing as a culture, and the consequences of our failure are enormous and life-threatening.

 

 

Every year the evidence of this fact grows. We’re wrecking the planet. Our way of life, how we conduct ourselves as human beings, is totally out of sync with the carrying capacity of planet Earth. At this point, the evidence could hardly be more stark.

 

 

We know there’s hardly any fish left in the sea. You’ve heard the old expression, “There’s plenty of other fish in the sea.” well it ain’t true no more. With the human population topping 7 billion, there’s plenty of other potential mates, if you are a human being. That’s true enough, but for fish, not so much. Science set us straight on that.

 

 

Scientists also pointed out the dead zones in the ocean, where algal blooms fueled by agricultural runoff, suck all the oxygen out of the water, so nothing else can survive there. Scientists explained why an island of plastic trash bigger than Texas formed in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Scientists found PCBs in the blood of wild arctic polar bears, and told us about the mercury concentrations in fish. Scientists created, and then warned us about, persistent organic pollutants like dioxin, benzene and the whole brave new world of unpronounceable organochlorines like DDT. Scientists have informed us about the ongoing and accelerating acidification of the world’s oceans, and even told us what’s driving it, which seems to be, in fact, global warming.

 

 

And how about that global warming. Those scientists had to work overtime to convince us of that, didn’t they, but they finally did. We can now say with confidence that human activity is warming the planet, and changing the makeup of the Earth’s atmosphere in ways likely to negatively effect the health and well-being of damn near every human being on the planet, let alone the wildlife.

 

 

Don’t I wish they would let the wildlife alone, but they don’t. Scientists tell us that the human population continues to explode like bacteria, displacing habitat and driving countless species of plant and animal into extinction. Countless, because scientists don’t even have time to discover and name a lot of these species before they get wiped off of the face of the earth forever, in our never ending quest to replace lush, incomprehensibly complex natural ecosystems with simplified, impoverished, dysfunctional, man-made environments that only function to serve an expanding human population, and poorly at that.

 

 

And scientists have informed us that the expanding human population leaves in it’s wake, an ungodly, I mean holy fucking shit you cannot even imagine how much, amount of waste. Toxic waste, bio-accumulative waste, non-biodegradable waste, radioactive waste, carcinogenic waste, mutagenic waste, medical waste, human waste, solid waste, airborne waste, water soluble waste, take your pick. We’ve got it all, and we’re making more every day. In a billion years of life on Earth, there was never a thing called waste, until about 10,000 years ago, when our culture was born. Waste is our invention, and it takes a lot of science to produce the tremendous variety and abundance of waste that we discard each year.

 

 

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see it, and in fact, rocket scientists often don’t see it, because they are so damn busy building rockets, but the science is pretty fucking convincing for anyone who wants to look at it. We’re making a terrific mess of things here on planet Earth. Another thing that the science is pretty clear about, is that that we could have never made such a terrific mess of things without the help of an awful lot of scientists.

 

 

To be fair, it wasn’t so much science that wrecked the world, there’s nothing wrong with learning about the world. It was that bastard technology. Science is a beautiful woman; technology is her pimp. Technology uses science to turn tricks. That is, technology is always looking for ways to use science to manipulate and exploit the world, for the purpose of making money, winning wars, or both. Yes, science is a whore, and so are most scientists. They work for whoever pays them the most money, and they do what the customer wants. What the customer wants, generally, is to extract more money from the Earth and it’s inhabitants. There’s nothing noble, beautiful or altruistic about that.

 

 

So, even though we have plenty of scientists telling us that we’re making an enormous mess of things, we have a thousand times more scientists focused on finding new ways to fuck things up even worse. Scientists dreamed-up nuclear power and convinced us it was safe. They did the same thing for deep water oil drilling. Scientists figured out how to get oil and natural gas out of shale, and gave us fracking. Scientists are turning life on Earth into patentable intellectual property by playing Russian roulette with a gene gun, and other scientists are working on new strategies to sell you this stuff, even though it’s killing you. Scientists are doing all kinds of crazy shit, and most of it is not helping the situation one bit, and they are all getting paid to do it.

 

 

Still, we are so infatuated with this beautiful woman we call science, that we hardly notice that she’s robbing us blind, lying to us and stealing our future. Even when science tells us the truth: that we are rapidly replacing our global life support system with poison, we don’t say, “Oh my god, look at what we’ve done.” Instead we say, “Wow, that looks like a serious problem, we had better get some more scientists working to solve it.” That’s what I mean when I say “We fail to learn our lesson from science.”

 

 

We don’t trust science, or take what it tells us about the world seriously, so we don’t learn anything from science. Instead, we think that no matter how bad things get, science will save us. We don’t believe science, we believe in science, which is a very different thing. Belief in science is not a rational conclusion based in fact, it is a religious belief founded in faith.

 

 

Very little evidence supports the idea that science solves problems, but we have plenty of evidence that science has created bigger problems than we know how to deal with. Still, we speak of science with reverence. Science has become our religion. Even people who know nothing about science, believe in science, and think it’s going to save us.

 

 

Ever since science convinced us that our other religions were just a collection of quaint stories and superstitions, we’ve treated science as our savior. That’s why we throw so much money at science. We don’t want to know more about the world we live in, we want scientists to save us.

 

 

Well there’s your science fix for today. Remember, the truth will set you free, but religion, even the Church of Science, is the opiate of the masses. Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Snip Snip Snip

Snip Snip Snip

Well it’s harvest time in Humboldt County again, and if you listen closely, you can hear the frantic snip snip snip of Fiscars clipping away in almost every house in the county. As is usual in October, we are enjoying some of the most beautiful weather of the year, and probably the last of the nice weather before the rains come with a vengeance. Alas, all many Humboldt County residents will see for the next several weeks is a pair of scissors and a seemingly endless stream of buds and nuggets for them to trim, style and coif.

As far as I can tell, this practice of carefully grooming every single bud was born here in Humboldt County, and it has to be one of the silliest developments in the whole ridiculous history of marijuana prohibition. In the Old World, they process raw cannabis, which grows wild, into hashish. Making cannabis into hash, even hand-rubbed hash, is a much more mechanical process that the careful, concentrated scissor work that has become the norm here in Humboldt County, and completely mechanical hash-making technology has been around for centuries.

Here in the New World, marijuana herb has always been more popular than hash, but in Central and South America, where most of North America’s marijuana came from, historically, marijuana farmers use a much less labor intensive method to bring their product to market. These days people poo-poo the quality of that old brown Colombian weed, but personally I think it was better for all of us than the pricey, pampered, pedigreed weed that Humboldt County is famous for.

Back in the ’60s and ’70s, we all smoked cheap, seedy brown pot from South America and thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Some of it was better than others, but it all got us high, and we all had plenty of it. We shared it with our friends. We passed lit joints to complete strangers, and smoking marijuana spawned a a huge social movement.

We give LSD a lot of credit for the youth revolution of the ’60s, but marijuana, specifically, cheap imported marijuana from Colombia, Panama, and Mexico had a much bigger influence on our culture than LSD ever did, because it was something we shared, and because it was cheap enough that most of us could afford it. Not that LSD wasn’t a bargain too, and not that we didn’t share that as well, but the LSD experience was overwhelming, solitary and completely personal. Marijuana, on the other hand, as a raw herb, required a bit of preparation, smoking became a social activity, and we got high on marijuana together.

Back in those days we used double-wide rolling papers because most of us had never rolled a cigarette before, and it took a while for us to get the hang of it.

We learned to use a card and an album cover to separate the herb from the seeds, and we picked the stems out manually. South American growers left the work of processing marijuana to the consumer, and I don’t remember anyone complaining about it.

Cheap marijuana from South America got us to stand in a circle and talk. LSD never did that. There’s something particularly intimate about sharing a joint with half-a-dozen people, and before long, we started blowing each other “shotgun tokes”, which is almost like french kissing, but with smoke instead of tongue.

In this way, abundant cheap marijuana fostered social cohesion, cultural identity and real communication, all of the precursors necessary to build a social movement. LSD never did that either.

The South American method of marketing marijuana kept the price low, and put the work of processing the herb in the hands of the consumer. We weren’t just taking drugs, we learned new skills, broke down cultural barriers and built a movement that had as much to do with music, art and politics as it did with ingesting drugs.

Marijuana was empowering that way, while LSD was simply overpowering.

Today, marijuana is different. It’s just another consumer commodity. California growers produce sinsemilla from clones, completely eliminating seeds from the equation, and a small army of trimmers supply all of the alienated labor to prepare the herb for smoking.

All that’s left for the consumer to do is take the bud out of the bag, stuff it in a pipe, hold a flame to it and suck. We were all born knowing how to suck.

We’re not learning anything here, except that if you want marijuana, you better have a lot of money. That really sucks!

High prices and alienated labor have ruined marijuana. High marijuana prices make alcohol look more attractive. Anyone can afford to get drunk, so alcohol becomes the poor man’s best friend. That’s not a good thing. I mean, that’s really not a good thing, and we all pay an enormous price for it.

Marijuana used to be as cheap as beer, cheap beer. Poor people could afford it, but rich people liked it too, and only poor people knew where to get it. Cheap, plentiful South American marijuana literally saved lives and brought us together as a society, and cheap, plentiful marijuana still has the power to turn our culture around and save the world.

I believe that we are in the midst of an epic cultural battle between alcohol consciousness, and cannabis consciousness, and that the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Both capitalism and prohibition emerged out of alcohol consciousness. Overpopulation, environmental destruction and a hierarchical society are the hallmarks of alcohol consciousness. Most people, I fear, do not realize that all of civilization was triggered by the invention of beer, because, alas, most people don’t read my blog, but those of you who do, know this already. Yes, every aspect of our sick culture, including capitalism, prohibition, and the police state, has been shaped by 10,000 years of alcoholism.

Marijuana culture, on the other hand, is much more ancient, and is not marked by overpopulation and environmental destruction, but by love, understanding and respect for all living things. It sounds corny as hell, but it’s true.

Marijuana can save the world, but that will never happen as long as marijuana remains enslaved by capitalism, greed and prohibition.

Marijuana doesn’t need to be dolled up like a whore, without a leaf of dignity, and packed into a see-thru ziplock bag, for people to want it. In fact, everyone wants marijuana, whether they know it or not, and marijuana wants to grow wild and free. It likes to move in to disturbed patches of soil, and once established, it comes back year after year. Only the police state keeps it from taking over, and who needs that?

There’s nothing wrong with seedy, shaggy pot. I don’t mind picking the seeds out of my smoke. It may seem like a chore, but seeds offer the promise of more marijuana to come.

Buds full of seeds means more marijuana everywhere, and plenty of good seedy, shaggy green buds for everyone, free for the taking, like blackberries. That’s what marijuana should be. Free medicine, free herb, free stems, free seeds, free roots if you want ’em, all together, and altogether free. That’s the fair market price for marijuana, and that’s the fair market price for love.

Think about that as you snip, snip, snip away at those seedless sinsemilla buds you put so much time, energy and money into. Pimpin’ your ladies ain’t makin’ the world a better place. Quit dressing your pot like a whore and set it free.

Start yourself a patch, and let it take care of itself. Give it some water now and then, and you’ll enjoy plenty of good sweet smoke year after year, and have plenty to share with your friends. Keep an old album cover around, and get a shoebox for the seeds. Now put down those scissors and let’s party!