[Previous entry: "Get the Sanctometer"] [Next entry: "An NPR mind in a Fox news world"]

07/07/2005: "Some people just can’t Fake a Toke"

Just this month I took a trip out to the sunny left coast. The trip started in the hippy Mecca of San Francisco. This is not a trip report, but for those who really want to know, I had an awesome time. At one point I was sitting in a park writing, and a tourist took a picture of me! Yup this Minnesotan had become part of the local color in San Francisco, I really got a kick out of that. Of course the cigar should have been a tip off, no one in California smokes anymore. At least not tobacco.

When I got to the city on the Bay, and looked up some friends, that was one one thing that I noticed right away. People were much more open about their pot smoking. Now marijuana has not been a significant part of my life style for over 30 years but still, this did catch my attention. Person after person explained to me – marijuana is essentially legal in California. All you need is a doctor to sign the form that says that he has no objection to you using the drug.

This makes a lot of sense to me. In a country where you can’t even fly across country without being offered alcohol, caffeine, sugar etc. Where morphine, cocaine, and Viagra can be prescribed by any physician, a doctor should be able to suggest the mighty herb. There is no question about its beneficial effects for all manors of ailments, physical, emotional, and digestive. I personally have seen the benefits when dealing with the nausea that accompanies chemo therapy and AIDS.

It felt like I was I a foreign country. I even talked to people who were augmenting their income by growing pot for sale to the distribution co-ops. Right now the price was artificially high, and most agreed that this could not last, but for the moment, it is a nice tidy source of additional income. All of these people insisted that what they were doing was virtually legal.

A few days after I returned the Supreme Court dealt a blow to the medical marijuana movement. It seems that the Bush administration believes that the Federal Government should stay out of your life, unless you need an abortion, want to get married or want to smoke pot. Could there be powerful financial interests that wants to keep pot illegal? Just who’s tune are the politicians dancing to, and why?

It seems that within a few days of the Court decision several marijuana co-ops were “raided” in California. I put raid in quotes, because it seems kind of strange to raid a place that is a public storefront with its product displayed on it shelves like brands of soap or dog food.

I have since talked to several California friends about what is going on, and they are convinced this is just a blip. Legalization, they say, is as inevitable as …. as ……as republicans taking us to a war for oil.

There have been people trying to get a medial marijuana city charter proposition on the ballot in Minneapolis, or get something to happen on the state level, but the Democrats as well as the Republicans have stymied them. I have to admit, I have not spent much time on this cause, but my mind is changing. The current ‘war on drugs” is not making our city safe, on the contrary, it is fueling organized crime in much the way that prohibition did in the 1930s.

The jails of the United States contain more people per capita then any other country in the world. Is it time to reconsider putting people in jail for smoking a little herb? I think so. Let me know what you think.