Pot Stories for the Soul, page 16
Barry and the Burning Question
MICHAEL SIMMONS
White House Drug Czar General Barry McCaffrey announced the Institute of Medicine’s report on medical marijuana at the Community Coalition Center in South-Central Los Angeles on March 17, 1999. The two-year, million-bucks IOM study has something for everybody, from red-eyed legalizers to grim-faced antidrug warriors. The drug czar gave an overview of the study and opened up the floor for questions from the press.
Yours truly, though tired of debating what ought to be a nonissue but has continued to report on it because medical marijuana is about sick people , leapt to his feet and breathlessly reiterated the study’s conclusions:
“Two and a half years ago you said there’s no evidence that shows that smoked marijuana is either useful or needed. According to the science in this report, more patients found that oral THC, or Marinol, which was once heralded, is more disorienting than smoked marijuana, which we’ve been told by advocates for years . . . that smoked marijuana does supply relief for certain patients . . . that there are benefits for easing anxiety, i.e., getting stoned . . . for some patients, such as the terminally ill, long-term risks are not of great concern . . . the adverse effects of marijuana are within the range of effects tolerated for other medicines . . . that there’s no proof of immunosuppressive . . . no conclusive evidence that marijuana is carcinogenic . . . ”
As I sputtered on, the vein in the generalissimo’s temple began to protrude and he cut me off.
“I can read the report. If you will, please ask the question.”
I laughed, apologized, and continued. “What I’m saying is that the report seems to support everything that medical marijuana advocates have been saying for the last two and a half years and yet at the very end there’s this obtuse statement: ‘Until a nonsmoked, rapid-onset cannabinoid drug delivery system becomes available, we acknowledge that there’s no clear alternative for people suffering from chronic conditions that might be relieved by smoking marijuana, such as pain or AIDS wasting . . .’”
“Please, if you will, get to the question,” repeated the czar, gently but firmly.
I resumed, undaunted. “Until a rapid-onset nonsmokeable delivery system is developed—of course, there are vaporizers that exist—but until a system is developed that makes everyone happy, what happens to the patients who are sick, dying, are in jail or awaiting trial, who say that smokeable marijuana is the only thing between them and pain or suffering and life or death?”
I’d never seen a general dance until McCaffrey waltzed around my question. “What I need to do is stand firmly behind the report. Go read the report and take from it what the authors’ conclusions are—we support them.” He went on to call for more cannabinoid study and to deny that marijuana is medicine. He also generously emphasized that the smoking of marijuana for any reason is “a legitimate discussion in and of itself. I think democratic societies ought to be able to talk about whether they want to have smoked marijuana available. But it’s a separate issue.”
I actually agreed with him on the last point, but I was frustrated. “You didn’t answer my question. What about patients who say that smoked marijuana is the only thing that works for them and saves their lives?”
He deferred to Dr. Don Vereen from his own Office of National Drug Control Policy. Dr. Vereen basically said that anecdotal testimony is not science. After answering a few more queries from reporters, McCaffrey headed to the exit.
I chased after him and once again repeated my mantra: “The patients and doctors who say that smokeable marijuana . . . ”
He was clearly not going to respond. “I’ve already answered that question. NIH, FDA, American Medical Association will examine this report, and it opens the line to scientific inquiry.”
In a proverbial puff he was gone, my question remained unanswered, and in spite of the enormity of the IOM report, sick people are still subject to handcuffs, prison time—and even death—for using the oldest rapid-onset cannabinoid delivery system known to humankind.
[Originally published in High Times in 1999.]
Police and Politicians Foil Proposition 215
LANNY SWERDLOW, RN
How has California descended into such depraved lawlessness that the feds have come in to restore order? This is not like Alabama where the feds intervened to end desegregation—it is more like the 1894 Pullman Strike when the U.S. government sent marshals and troops to break the strike and destroy the unions.
The lack of objection by state officials to the federal government acting like a raging bull in a china shop with its heavy-handed efforts to close medical marijuana collectives is a disgrace. Considering that little effort has been expended by the Obama administration on the fraud and multiple violations of federal laws by Wall Street bankers, the intense focus on wiping California’s legal medical marijuana collectives off the face of the earth is puzzling at best.
Until you understand who is behind this and how it got started.
In November 1996, California voters passed Proposition 215, which allowed the use of marijuana medicinally. The police did not like this law. At a meeting in December 1996, organized by then-Attorney General Dan Lungren, law enforcement met, not to work to implement the law passed by the voters, but to undo it.
They didn’t do much for the first eight years other than arrest a few patients and shut down some large grow operations. Their actions keep marijuana pretty much underground just like it was before 1996.
In 2004 came Senate Bill 420, which allows patients to associate collectively and cooperatively to cultivate marijuana. Although there is much disagreement as to just what it actually means, it did give patients some kind of a legal way to obtain their medicine.
Collectives formed with many choosing to operate a store as their method of distributing the medicine to their members. This makes sense, as stores are how this country gets the vast bulk of goods distributed. When the police saw stores opening up, they were mortified and sprang into action.
The California Chiefs of Police Association issued a white paper in 2009 falsely maligning collectives as agents of crime and degradation. It came complete with a sample ordinance with the novel idea that cities could locally repeal a state law, such as allowing patients to form collectives, by banning its implementation under their zoning ordinances.
Throughout the state, police went to city councils and county boards, and, using the white paper as proof of the problem, inundated them with false stories of crime, youth degradation, and neighborhood deterioration.
Not used to having their police lie to them, elected officials, out of concern for their communities, enacted the bans on medical marijuana collectives that the police wanted.
Collective operators and patients fought back. State law allows patient collectives, and many believed a state law cannot be undone by banning it. With no regulations in place and patients needing a legal source of medicine, collectives began opening up all over the place.
Police were now totally mortified, as their worst nightmare was happening right under their noses. A thousand or more marijuana collectives using stores as their distribution system had opened throughout the state. As far as the cops were concerned, it was marijuana legalization with a doctor’s recommendation.
Cities, cops, and patients took their disagreements to court with mixed results for all of them. Cops are not used to losing or even compromising. They got tired of waiting and, with having lost more court cases than they won, called in their biggest gun—the federal cops. Yes, they called them in. The Los Angeles Times reported the following in an October 2011 story about the feds intervention: “[U.S. Attorney Andre] Birotte said the new strategy was not triggered by any specific event but was inspired by a stream of complaints from California law enforcement officials.”
People are upset by giant corporations and billionaires controlling our government. Frankly, cops controlling government is even scarier. For police to work to overturn a law enacted by the voters, especially on the taxpayers’ dime, is disingenuous and dangerous.
The residents of California have seen the extreme measures the police will go to to get their way as they witness the invasion by the federal government to arrest, prosecute, and jail the state into submission.
Along with medical marijuana patients throughout the nation, I believed Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign when he said, “What I’m not going to be doing is using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state [medical marijuana] laws.”
It was his statements that led many to campaign and work for his election. It was his statements that led medical-marijuana advocates to believe that if he was elected, he would allow the states that have enacted medical marijuana laws to go ahead with their programs—the kind of the social experimental laboratory that states are supposed to be. Along with thousands of others, I took Obama at his word and to the best of my ability went about the convoluted process of providing patients with legal marijuana. I invested my savings, and, even though I knew it endangered my freedom, I trusted him.
If he had not made these promises during the campaign, I doubt if many of the people who opened collectives would have done so. I know I wouldn’t have. Because I believed in the “change” candidate Obama promised to implement, I now find my life upside down, unbearably stressful and threatening to my physical, mental, and financial health.
I had pinned great hopes on President Obama and was emboldened by Attorney General Eric Holder’s memo issued in 2009 stating that the feds would steer clear of states that had passed medical marijuana laws. We took the memo as a partial fulfillment of Obama’s campaign pledge that he was not going to be “using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state [medical marijuana] laws.”
I was now confident enough to help form a medical-marijuana collective that utilized a unique farmers’ market model of medicinal-marijuana distribution capable of providing over six thousand medical-marijuana patients with marijuana safely, reliably, locally, and more affordably. Now I, like other operators, am under attack by the feds. I’m facing a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for distributing marijuana to qualified California patients as well as bankruptcy since the IRS does not allow any business expenses to be deducted on our taxes.
I just don’t understand why President Obama has decided to be an all-out drug warrior by sending the feds in. He didn’t have to—and I don’t buy that the invasion was beyond his control. If he can end the war in Iraq, he can end the war in California.
Sixteen states and the District of Columbia have legalized medicinal marijuana, and that represents close to a third of the population of the United States. Obama has cast himself as a problem solver—as a president who brings people together to iron out differences so there is no need for fear or violence. He will send emissaries or even go himself all over the world to promote self-determination and to try to prevent conflict.
Here in California, it is President Obama who is causing the fear and the violence, or at the very least not ending it when it is within his ability to do so.
Whatever problems we are having in California with our medical-marijuana laws, we are perfectly capable of solving them ourselves. We do not need any federal help and we certainly don’t need it in the form of federal law enforcement coming into our state threatening landlords with seizure of their property and state and local employees with arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment for implementing their state’s medical-marijuana laws.
The big question is why did he authorize the federal invasion, and if he didn’t, why is he not ending it? Why is he breaking his campaign promises?
I have heard a lot of theories. The pharmaceutical and alcohol beverages industries stand to lose billions if marijuana is legalized, which would result in millions of lost campaign contributions. Even more important is the theory surrounding law enforcement. Petrified at the thought of losing the $20-billion-a-year, taxpayer-funded, full-employment marijuana prohibition program, they are promising their re-election support, or at least not supporting his Republican opposition.
The local cops calling in the feds is trickle-up. Obama allowing it to happen is trickle-down. The federal invasion would not have happened if local police had not requested federal assistance. The federal invasion would not have happened if Obama had told Attorney General Holder to stop it.
Whatever the reason, it really doesn’t matter. What does matter is that he broke a campaign promise that many believed and acted on, and his failure to follow through on his campaign statements has ruined their lives and made miserable the hundreds of thousands of California medical-marijuana patients who depend on people like me to provide them with marijuana as permitted under California state law.
The change Barack Obama promised never came, and in the case of medical-marijuana patients, his broken promise has ruined my life and the lives of thousands of medical-marijuana providers, and brought dismay and fear to the medical-marijuana community.
Warning: Trusting cops and politicians can be hazardous to your health.
Sentimental Journeys
The Undoing of Matilda
ROY TUCKMAN
The felonious smoke drifted brazenly into the skies of downtown Los Angeles. I, the imbiber of the holy weed, drifted lightly into the confused interior of myself. The feeling of smoking freely, and privately, in the middle of a workday, in direct line of sight of tens of thousands of people, was a strange mixture of self-congratulatory respect for my courage, fear of the criminal act I was performing in “the belly of the beast,” and profound gratitude for the beauty of the sunlight reflecting off the skyscrapers and the wonder of existence.
It was my lunch hour, a rigidly defined period of time in this civil service environment. Yes, I was into the whole thing with house, tie, freeway commute, and, of course, a comfortable salary and future. Financial future, that is. The other part was bleak. The so-called ’60s, for me and others, was not a celebration of peace and love with hearts and flowers. Added to the mix was Vietnam and so many political assassinations. In the mix was the realization that all our major political leaders considered us the enemy. We were threatening “their America.” But of course it was forgotten that they were destroying us.
Pot is a gateway herb of sorts. It is a gateway into the land where you see for yourself, in your own experience, that your society is a liar. We were already being told that “war is peace” and “black is white.” And so, many sought to supplant this fallen leadership. And there were choices to make that our parents would not have dreamed of. And now, after two and a half years of psychiatric drugs and a radical squarization process, I was contacting the memory of the acid-inspired insights of the past to ask for a judgment on my life. Matilda helped me with the answer.
Matilda was the bane of the office. She was an attractive woman who strove to live up to the stereotype of the “hot Latina.” Before you start salivating, let me add that there was no sexual component to her temperature. But she was professional in her ability to stop the office cold with her shrieks and cries, brought on by the least perceived slight or criticism or any of the other slings and arrows that jobs are prey to. And with this emotionalism, Matilda ruled the office from her secretary’s desk, rattling at will even the second-in-command of the entire department. I don’t recall what it was about me that motivated Matilda to aim at me; I must have been a quiet and pleasant, if slightly depressed, type.
And I was square, absolutely square. And there was certainly no racial component in this relationship. My graduate years in anthropology had specialized in the study of the astounding cultures of Mexico and Central America and had only the greatest respect for her ancestry. I had climbed El Castillo in Yucatan (before Raquel Welch) and passed my graduate Spanish exam at UCLA. I never insulted her, but I never bowed to her either. I was living with a real woman and considered Matilda’s childish games to be, well, childish games. She probably found that approximately unforgivable. Fortunately, most of my job was out of the office, so relief was just a few steps away.
I looked at my watch—my schizophrenic watch, that is. I often told people that the two shimmering spider turquoise stones ornamenting the band were a second watch, telling the real time, which is always Now. But my chronometer dictated that it was time for me to go back to work. So I disposed of the rest of the joint—in those days it was by eating the rest of the marijuana but not (usually) the paper—and left the roof of my downtown office building, descended the stairs, washed my hands, combed my short hair, straightened my tie, and sat down in my shared office cubicle with my papers and adding machine.
Matilda came prancing down the office aisle, carrying a load of three-by-five cards. She would soon walk past the three-foot-wide entrance to my cubicle. I sat at my desk in absolute calm, glowing from the rooftop experiment, and enthusiastically planned the rest of my day and my life. Then she screamed: “Ohhhhh!”
Matilda had tripped or otherwise slanted her office-supply burden, and a stream of dozens of three-by-five cards slipped out of her hands and all over the floor around my desk and chair. The shrill woman whose pride would have done credit to an Aztec headdress was forced to crawl and grovel all around my office for several minutes.
The victory was too obvious for me to feel any sense of revenge, accomplishment, or satisfaction. I felt compassion for her plight, although, in my memory, my compassion did not extend to actually helping her to pick up the cards. But I was a beginner, as I am now. And there were other cards being dealt, cards foretelling my future and my relationship with marijuana and the meaning of my psychedelic years. In one second, while I was busy in relaxed and joyful contemplation, the number one office problem had been solved for me. Matilda would never again try to goad me. We both knew that the war was over and we had witnessed the final battle. I knew, although she didn’t, that I credited the Spirit of the Herb, whatever that was, with this little adventure as a sign that the herb was an ally, not an enemy, and our separation would end.
