The North Coast times-eagle., July 01, 2003, Page 9, Image 9

PAGE 9
NORTH COAST TIMES E A G L E, JULY 2003
REEFER MADNESS
BY MICHAEL McCUSKER
My drugs of choice are red wine and marijuana. One
is legal, the other is not, and I have not heard a rational reason
why. There is no logic that one should be benignly supported
while the other makes criminals of its users and producers.
My Sicilian grandfather made wine “for the Church"
during Prohibition, and kept a few bottles for himself which could
have got him arrested — but marijuana was legal then. Eighty
years later I can legally drink the wine but if I intake some bud I
am subject to jail. Does this particular reversal of laws regarding
my favorite recreational drugs make any sense?
Friends have been arrested and charged with growing
marijuana, invaded by squads of drugbusters who claim to act
on telephone tips that marijuana was growing in their homes or
their outdoor hemp farms spotted by helicopters. Why shouldn’t
they also attack grape vineyards and arrest the vintners of wine?
I love wine. I believe the wheel is overrated; discovery
of the fermentation of grapes is among the greatest of human
achievements. So also is the cultivation of cannabis in its infinite
varieties. The wheel might have sent humanity off on its course
of exploring the mechanical universe; acidulation of grapes and
harvests of cannabis have been indispensable to the exploration
of intellectual and spiritual cosmos. (In vino veritas; in cannabis
vertigo.)
Next only to sex, sipping a glass of red wine and puffing
on a joint are ambrosia. Yet these two superb human pleasures
and expanders of intellect and often of love are falsely wrenched
apart. The wine is stamped with public approval and cognoscenti
appeal. Marijuana is stained with depravity and its users are
portrayed as irresponsible lawbreakers condemned to become
addicted to heavyweight narcotics.
Perhaps it is time for those who like a little smoke of
euphoria or the taste of galactic brownies to speak out against
these distortions of truth and the spurious injustice of laws that
punish pleasure. Our ancestors, who were not allowed many
pleasures either, had to wrest liberty from kings and tyrants
and from powerful institutions that grew up in their place. If we
do not want these hardwon liberties to go up in smoke we had
better wake up, quell our trembling and refuse to be denied our
pleasures and privacies or we will have neither.
The War on Drugs so blithely heralded is nothing more
than a cynical assault on our civil liberties by a government
that would increase its power by dissolving the bonds that hold
us together. Public hysteria is whipped up against a few
euphoric chemicals that like food or sex are dangerous only
when gluttony overcomes moderation. The society is infected
with fear, in particular its vulnerability to crime which is
associated with drug use instead of social conditions which
produce both the obsessive consumption of drugs and the
lucrative market for them. The smarmy pieties of political
ayatollahs decry the use of drugs while in classic hand/tongue
duplicity, pocket payoffs to keep the trade profitable through
legal oppression.
The big money is the real addiction. It has made bribe
junkies out of the nation's lawmakers and many of its enforcers.
Spacing out once in awhile is not what is enervating our decay­
ing society: Corruption, the crazy compulsive pursuit of cash and
power regardless of source and heedless of the pricetag are the
historical indicators of societal decline. The pursuit of wealth by
any means fair or foul which leaves even greater numbers of
people impoverished and wrecks the productivity of a society
is the true sign of decay and decline. It is usually then, when
everything starts falling apart, that large masses search for
opiates to escape their crumbling lives.
Overuse of anything is dangerous. Coffee, hamburgers,
butter and sugar are known killers. Alcohol not only addicts
millions, it is a direct cause of the automobile fatalities of
hundreds of thousands more; alcohol also is responsible
for violent behavior (even my beloved wine) that results in
countless beatings and deaths of wives, children, friends and
strangers. Cigarettes kill more slowly, more certainly, but I have
yet to hear a tobacco company acknowledge responsibility for
the lingering often agonizing deaths of the very people (about
400,000 a year, which is one out six persons who die annually)
who provide its wealth.
Moderation is the genius of Shangri La — moderation
in all things pleasurable, philosophical and political. American
culture is instead founded on excess. The United States, aside
from its passionate addiction to money and shopping, is also the
world’s largest consumer of addictive chemical substances. The
usual blame is placed upon a malaise of spirit of the seekers of
chemically-induced nirvana, not the incessant values of rapacity
and greed of the society itself. Money, sex and drugs have been
the American corporate dream since the advent of hucksterism.
For the dream weavers to absolve responsibility by placing guilt
on the buyers of the mesmerizing visions is pure mendacity.
Drug Free America? How absurd! No more pharmaceut­
ical compounds? Prozac banned? Prohibition once more of
grape vineyards and hops fields? The arrest and conviction of
tobacco farmers and their government lobbyists? You’ve got to
be kidding.
This nation consumes more drugs of infinite variety and
purpose on a daily basis than the rest of the world combined.
Our real problem is not the drugs we ingest, or our reasons
for requiring or desiring them, but our capacity for acquiescing
to zealots who corrupt the public tolerance with hysterical
exaggerations, proclamations and demands that we deny our
pleasures of flesh and flora. (H. L. Mencken once defined
Puritans as those who are disturbed that someone somewhere
is having a good time.) We allow people to have power over us
who assume we are collectively as stupid and avariciously
deceitful as they are — and so far in regard to the trampling
of our civil rights in the Drug War we have not shown them
much reason to doubt their misconceptions. We permit these
pathological simpletons to intrude their gross appetites for power
upon our forms of relaxation and bliss.
As a result we are separated not only by class, sex and
race but also by our choices of pleasure. We are separated by
intimidation and edict. We are compartmentalized, broken into
segments of suspicion and fear like three-person communist
cells. Instead of rallying to our friends and neighbors who are
assaulted by improper police invasions of their homes and
selves, we shun them in fear our own vices might also be
investigated if we demonstrate support or solidarity. The War
on Drugs (in alliance with the War on Terrorism) balkanizes us.
Perhaps you have not noticed the squelching of contrary
views to the War on Drugs, the fearful disinclination of public
protest to the government’s juggernaut against civil liberties
disguised as a moral crusade against drug use. Several years
ago Oregon was almost among the most progressive states
regarding cultivation and personal use of marijuana. But the
big guns of suppression, who kept the matter off the ballot by
improperly disregarding initiative signatures several times,
mounted large and expensive (not to mention ample use
of hysteria and misinformation) campaigns to defeat allowing
cultivation of the evil weed for personal use.
The incongruous irony is that Oregon like other states
is catastrophically afflicted by the policies of transferring the
remainder of the nation’s wealth to those who already have
most of it, which leaves the rest of the people without much
although they are expected to make up the public deficit.
Oregon's salvation from the adversity can very well be the
hemp agriculture that is considered the state's most abundant
and lucrative crop. Tax revenues from open and legal cultivation
of marijuana would catapult the state to among the richest.
Instead the controversy about how to raise money
centers on sales taxes (which state voters have nixed nine times
so far) with not even a mention of legalizing marijuana and
utilizing its immense potential as a cash crop. The lack of
imagination and rigid prejudices of the state’s legal, political and
piety cliques not only indicate a perversity of self-flagellation but
seem unperturbed about financing state ministries and public
services with gambling, alcohol and tobacco revenues.
Thousands of Oregonians are criminals only because
they prefer marijuana to the legally sanctioned abuse of alcohol,
and as a result their freedoms and personal lives are in jeopardy
simply because they enjoy the celestial hemp more than (or
alongside) the intemperance of whiskey or wine. The repressive
atmosphere surrounding the right to choose one's own poison
has sent scurrying out of view the very people who could
preserve their liberties and freedom from harassment and jail
by openly insisting the electoral process (which has more or
less failed because they seem too optimistic about public
awareness to effectively wrestle the drug lords of alcohol and
tobacco) exemplify their point of view. Dr. Frederick Oerther,
long a strong voice for legalization of marijuana and candidate
for governor of Oregon, said when arrested for cultivating
marijuana for his personal use, “I see a light at the end of the
tunnel, and it is the Bill of Rights burning."
So what shall we do? Sit on our fannies in fear and
helplessly watch our friends disappear until at some point, for
some reason, we are also victims of an increasingly repressive
government, or shall we finally rise up and tell the ministries of
fear and repression to go to hell?
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