Pot Stories for the Soul, page 3
Scott conducted theatrical workshops, and one of his students was John Densmore, the former drummer for The Doors. “I stumbled into the downtown art scene,” Densmore told me, “after a big peak in rock’n’ roll. It felt as creative as the ’60s. I now get off on the process, and it doesn’t matter if it’s fifty people at the Wallenboyd or twenty thousand at Madison Square Garden, it’s the work that rings my bell.”
Scott also produced Peter Bergman, of the Firesign Theatre. Scott thought that Peter, Paul and Harry would be a great title for an evening of political satire at the Museum of Contemporary Art. He asked the curator if she knew of an appropriate performer named Harry. She suggested Harry Shearer. Scott asked me about him. “He’s brilliant,” I said, “let’s do it.” And so he produced a completely sold-out series that was extended for two weekends. But if Harry had been named after his other grandfather, there wouldn’t have been a Peter, Paul and Harry.
Each of us prepared to perform in our own particular way. Peter stared at himself in the mirror and made strange sounds to exercise his vocal cords. Harry sat in a separate room where his makeup woman, who had flown in from Iowa, transformed him into Derek Smalls from the mock-umentary Spinal Tap. And I was off hiding behind some boxes, toking away on a joint of the marijuana that served as my creative fuel.
Scott was sure that I performed better when I wasn’t high, and he was under the impression I was straight when he told me one night, “That was the best show you’ve ever done.” I confessed that I had smoked a giant doobie before I went onstage. The irony was that Scott sold pot to help pay the rent, and that was exactly the stash that got me stoned that night.
Who Killed Peter McWilliams?
Enjoy. That was his favorite word. He always signed his e-mails with it, even if he was bringing bad news. And Peter McWilliams, a Los Angeles-based author and publisher, was living with bad news every day. In 1996, he was diagnosed with cancer and AIDS, yet he was bursting with enthusiasm. His other favorite word was consent. His license plate said CONSENT, and his self-published, best-selling book was titled Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crime in a Free Society.
McWilliams survived cancer and controlled the AIDS with pills that nauseated him. Ironically, if he threw up his lunch, that regurgitation would also include the nausea-producing pills he needed to stay alive. But if he smoked marijuana, it not only increased his appetite, it also counteracted the nausea.
That same year, California Proposition 215 was passed, legalizing marijuana for medical use when recommended by a physician. It had been recommended to McWilliams by four physicians. Cannabis clubs opened up where AIDS patients could purchase marijuana. McWilliams devised a plan to supply marijuana to these buyers’ cooperatives that were providing a legal service for their sick and dying customers at reasonable prices in a pleasant setting.
He hired Todd McCormick—a cancer patient since the age of nine—to research and write the book How to Grow Medical Marijuana. McCormick proceeded to grow four thousand plants in a house known as the Cannabis Castle. But the DEA insisted that federal law superseded state law, and he was arrested in 1997. Federal prosecutors obtained an order forbidding a medical-marijuana defense—leaving McCormick with no defense at all—and, in order to avoid a mandatory ten-year minimum sentence, he pleaded guilty and served five years behind bars.
In 1998, McWilliams was arrested as the kingpin of this conspiracy to cultivate and distribute medical marijuana. In Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do, he had chronicled the cruelty of putting people in prison who had not harmed anyone. Now, not only had McWilliams not harmed anyone, he was trying to help others. But, like McCormick, he wasn’t allowed a medical-marijuana defense and ultimately pleaded guilty for the same reason as McCormick.
Without a medical-marijuana defense, he too had no defense at all. He would be considered the godfather of an insidious cartel. Furthermore, a federal judge prohibited him from smoking his medicine while he awaited sentencing, which was scheduled for August 15, 2000—the second day of the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, so it was unlikely there would be any media coverage of his incarceration.
Anthropologists of the future will look back upon these times and wonder how legislators could have been so uncivilized. Although eight states and Washington, D.C., had already passed initiatives to legalize medical marijuana, then–Indiana Congressman Mark Souder (known as “Mad Mark”) claimed in July 2000 that any effort to make medical marijuana legal “is just a phony excuse to be a pothead.”
In an interview in 1998, McWilliams told me,I agree that medical marijuana will eventually lead to the legalization of marijuana use for all adults, but not for the reasons the drug warriors paint. There is no “massive, well-funded conspiracy” to legalize marijuana that General Drug Czar McCaffrey and his drug warriors maintain. Certainly the few million spent each year by all the marijuana legalization groups combined becomes an ineffective drop in the ocean when compared to the fifty-billion-dollar annual drug-war budget.
Medical marijuana will lead to recreational marijuana legalization through the natural process of experience and education. Once people personally discover how benign marijuana is, the next logical question is simply no reasonable, factual response to that question. As [marijuana activist] Jack Herer pointed out, once enough people ask, “Why isn’t the emperor wearing any clothes?” the game is over. All it takes is enough people asking the question.
Enter medical marijuana. Once in general use, tens of millions of Americans will be asking that question. How many people? Well, let’s consider pain relief alone. In 1997, the National Academy of Neuroscience determined, based on studies from four major universities, that ninety-seven million Americans each year could benefit from the use of medical marijuana to treat pain. Once those ninety-seven million—half the adult population of America—realize that the horror stories they have heard about marijuana are simply not true, there will be a chorus of “Why isn’t the emperor wearing any clothes?” It will shake the narco-prison-industrial complex to its very foundations.
Something that a lot of people don’t realize is that when you smoke marijuana regularly—several times a day—it loses its euphoric effect. The medical benefits continue—relief of nausea, pain (physical or emotional), spasticity, excessive eye pressure (glaucoma), and so on—but the euphoric effects go away. While I was using marijuana to treat my nausea, I can’t tell you how much I missed getting high. Although I’d smoke it several times a day, the average high school student was getting high more times a month than I was. That’s because after the first month, I never got high, and I really enjoy marijuana’s high. Simply put, recreational marijuana you use to get high; medical marijuana you use to get by.
Marijuana is the country’s fourth-largest cash crop after corn, soybeans, and hay. There are eighty million Americans who have smoked pot. Eleven million still smoke it every month, and half of them smoke it every day. And they inhale. And they enjoy it. But marijuana arrests accelerated during the ’90s. In federal prisons, average drug offenders spent more time behind bars (82.2 months) than rapists (7.3 months). In California, more inmates are doing life terms for possession of marijuana than for murder, rape, and robbery combined.
In the larger prison outside those walls, more and more companies are requiring employees to submit to random drug tests, and their privacy goes down the drain while their urine is sent to the lab. The New York Times and Rolling Stone are among the publications that have such a policy. When a Times employee takes a drug test, the faucets are removed from the sinks in the bathroom so that employees cannot dilute their urine with water.
Peter McWilliams was subject to random drug tests for two years while his sentencing date was postponed over and over. His AIDS medications caused nausea, but he couldn’t smoke marijuana to keep it down. And he vomited, and vomited, and vomited again. Every day. With a touch of mordant humor, he told me,The stomach acid that comes up along with everything else with the regularity of Old Faithful has eroded my teeth into spiky little remnants of their former selves—my mouth resembles a photograph from The Amazing Ozark Mountain Book of Dental Oddities.
Over time, I tried various techniques to keep the AIDS medications down a little longer before vomiting. In addition to large doses of Marinol [synthetic marijuana prescription], which is essential, I added herbs, lying in hot water, curling up in a fetal position in bed, and two electric massagers—a smaller one to stimulate the acupuncture points for anti-nausea and a larger one for my stomach.
Gradually, over many months of trial and mostly error, I was able to increase the length of time I could hold down my medications from thirty minutes to one hour and fifteen minutes. That forty-five-minute increase is apparently enough for the medications to get into my system. The procedure of keeping them down is agonizing, exhausting, and debilitating, and I must do it three times a day. It is entirely unnecessary if I could use medical marijuana.
Peter was hoping to be sentenced to home detention with an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet while simultaneously trying to prepare himself for the possibility of five years’ incarceration in a federal prison. On June 14, 2000, two months before he was due to be sentenced, he was found dead in his bathtub. He had died from asphyxiation. He had choked to death on his own vomit. He had been murdered—but by whom? And for what reason?
I accuse President Bill Clinton for coming out against medical marijuana during his term. By doing so, it’s as if he said, “I feel your pain; I just don’t want to help you relieve it.” I accuse former Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey, who proclaimed, after medical-marijuana initiatives were passed in Arizona and California, “There is not a shred of scientific evidence that shows that smoked marijuana is useful or needed.”
I accuse former California Governor Gray Davis for opposing recommendations by his own Attorney General’s Task Force on Medical Marijuana. I accuse Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jackie Chooljian and Mary Fulginiti, the pair of prosecutors who sought to prevent the use of a medical-marijuana defense. I accuse Federal Judge George King, who denied Peter McWilliams—slumping in his wheelchair in the courtroom—not only the right to a medical-marijuana defense, but also his legal right to smoke medical marijuana.
These individuals participated in an unspoken conspiracy, all for the same reason. And what was it they had in common? They all wanted to keep their jobs. They all wanted to advance in their careers. They all wanted prestige. They all wanted to live in a nice house. They all wanted to send their kids to college. They all wanted to be responsible to their families. And the price was simply their own humanity.
McWilliams’s death at the age of fifty occurred the same day the governor of Hawaii signed into law a medical-marijuana bill passed by the state legislature. His signature made Hawaii the first state in the United States to authorize the medical use of marijuana through the legislature rather than by a vote of the people. A vote had been attempted twice in California, and although the legislature passed the bill in each case, then-Governor Pete Wilson vetoed it both times, which caused the people to eliminate the middleman and pass a referendum.
A few politicians have had the compassion and courage to speak out against the insanity of the war on drugs. I mean the war on some people who use some drugs sometimes. Among such heroes are: former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson (a presidential candidate in the 2012 Republican primaries), who stated, “We’re trying to get tougher with things that we got away with. And there’s a hypocrisy to that, in my opinion,” and former California State Senator John Vasconcellos (a Democrat), who introduced legislation to implement recommendations whereby persons legally possessing ID cards would be immune from arrest under state law for possession, transportation, delivery, or cultivation of medical marijuana. In July 2000, the bill was passed.
That same month, the DEA—forced by recent scientific evidence—began legally binding procedures that could conceivably result in the end of marijuana prohibition. Meanwhile, like a pair of dinosaurs trying to survive, both major presidential candidates were drowning in chickenshit. Al Gore and George Bush both took public anti-medical-marijuana positions. Another presidential candidate, Social Democrat David McReynolds, came out publicly as a pot smoker.
At the Green Party convention, Ralph Nader’s opponents—Jello Biafra (the lead singer of The Dead Kennedys and a political activist) and Stephen Gaskin (founder of The Farm commune and author of Cannabis Spirituality)—each preceded Nader with a ten-minute speech. Biafra called the war on drugs “ethnic cleansing, American style.” Gaskin, sad and angry over Peter McWilliams’s death, spoke with great passion, declaring that it was “as if Barry McCaffrey came out with a pistol like that South Vietnamese general and executed him.”
Nader watched this on the TV monitor, and during his own ten-minute speech—clearly influenced by Gaskin’s tribute to McWilliams—he proclaimed, “We’ve got to stop this drug war that does these horrible things to our people.” Later, in his lengthy acceptance speech, he said:At home, our criminal justice system, being increasingly driven by the corporate prison industry that wants ever more customers, grossly discriminates against minorities and is greatly distorted by the extremely expensive and failed war on drugs. These prisons often become finishing schools for criminal recidivists. At the same time, the criminal justice system excludes criminally behaving corporations and their well-defended executives.
At the National Libertarian Party Convention—where presidential candidate Harry Browne came out firmly for the decriminalization of marijuana—Peter McWilliams became the first posthumous winner of their Champion of Liberty Award. Peter was the victim of a political assassination, but his legacy lives on.
I e-mailed this piece to a few friends and received the following responses.
From Robert Anton Wilson: “Nobody except Tim Leary ever faced oncoming death with as much bravery and hilaritas as Peter. He will be missed by multitudes. I do not think you exaggerate in using the word murder. Depriving the ill of the medicine they need ranks as ‘depraved indifference’ or Murder Two in most states.”
From retired Congressman John Vasconcellos: “I am deeply saddened, deeply angered. Poor Peter! Poor each and all of us in this crazed society we inhabit! What shall we do next?”
And from Ken Kesey, with his uncanny ability to cross-fertilize compassion and irreverence: “Well, I would rather choke on my own vomit than on somebody else’s.”
My immediate instinct was to forward Kesey’s little message to Peter, whose particular sense of humor would have enabled him to really appreciate such a sardonic observation. And, of course, I would have signed that e-mail with Enjoy.
Checkmating with Pawns
It was a hot day at the chess tournament in Phoenix, Arizona—103 degrees, to be exact—and fourteen-year-old Nathaniel Dight was elated over his custom-made chess set. The carved wooden pieces had been weighted precisely for the smooth moves he liked to make. Each one had been lacquered and, for this extreme heat, carefully protected by matte acrylic spray. But before the game could begin, young Nathaniel was ordered to take a urine test.
“I know why you’re doing this,” he snarled. “It’s because I’ve won three tournaments in a row, isn’t it?”
“No, son, that’s just a coincidence. This is a random drug test.”
“I don’t do any drugs. I mean, like when I get a headache from playing chess too long, I won’t even take an aspirin.”
“Look, here’s a cup. I need you to go fill it, right now . . . ”
All right, I confess, I made all that up, but consider the implications of something that I haven’t made up:
America’s former Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey wrote in an article published in Chess Life magazine: “Research proves that mentoring youngsters and teaching them games like chess can build resilience in the face of illegal drug use and other destructive temptations. Drug testing is as appropriate for chess players as for shot-putters or any other competitors who use their heads as well as their hands.”
Accompanying the television image of a couple of eggs sizzling in a frying pan, the phrase This is your brain on drugs has always carried negative connotations, but apparently General McCaffrey has changed his mind about that. He now seems to believe that drugs can actually improve the way your the brain functions.
There was an infamous chess player named Alexander Alekhine, who held the world championship longer than anyone else. His games often had superb surprise endings, known in chess circles as “brilliancies.” For instance, he would checkmate with a pawn move that no sane and sober mind could ever imagine. However, he was a notorious alcoholic, and McCaffrey was only referring to illegal drugs.
“Just when I thought I’d heard it all from McCaffrey,” said Allen St. Pierre, executive director of NORML. “Drug testing for chess players? What’s next from this overreaching drug czar? Drug testing for tiddlywinks players? How about bingo players?”
Moreover, McCaffrey’s proposal smacks of subliminal racism. Social psychologist Walli Leff told me, “I think most of the movement to involve young people in chess is directed toward the African American community, and the assumption is, if the kids are black, they’re going to be drug users. I think white middle-class suburban parents would have a fit if their kids had to take drug tests for their extracurricular activities. Or am I out of it and am I missing a new white middle-class suburban submissiveness?”
McCaffrey had been influenced by Chesschild, a group sponsored by the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). Chesschild is a substance abuse prevention program conducted in libraries and schools, promoting a combination of drug-free lifestyles and chess.
“Policy recommendations like this one from ONDCP,” said St. Pierre, “demonstrate a deep and disturbing pathology that goes well beyond opposing drug-law reform efforts.”
