Pot Stories for the Soul, page 4
Maybe the drug-law reformers should follow the example of gay-rights activists by having celebrities come out of the pot-smoking closet. Already, veteran stand-up comic George Carlin—in an interview with The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart following Carlin’s HBO special—admitted that he smoked a joint to help him “fine-tune” his material. “One hit is all I need now and it’s punch-up time.”
At the Shadow Convention that took place while the Democrats were in Los Angeles in 2000, Bill Maher revealed to the audience, “I’m not just a pot reformer, I’m a user”—something ABC forbid him from saying on Politically Incorrect. Then he quickly added, “Just making a light remark there, federal authorities.”
Actor and hemp activist Woody Harrelson has stated, “I do smoke.” Willie Nelson confirmed in his autobiography that he smoked pot in the White House. And on talk show host Michael Jackson’s radio show on KRLA, Michelle Phillips, actress and former member of the Mamas and the Papas, said that she still enjoys smoking marijuana.
Just as Ellen DeGeneres appeared on the cover of Time magazine saying, “Yep, I’m gay,” there might come a day when a presidential candidate will appear on the cover of Newsweek saying, “Yep, I’m stoned.” Isn’t that what young pot-smokers need—good role models, so they won’t be ashamed of their private pleasure seeking?
Meanwhile, then–Drug Czar McCaffrey continued his crusade, not only against illegal substances, but perhaps also against certain food supplements, such as a popular herbal mixture with a reputation for aiding memory and concentration. Who could ever have dreamed that chess players might get in trouble for using ginkgo biloba as a performance enhancer?
The Ballad of Tommy Chong
Jonathan Shapiro, who was a writer and executive producer of the 2006 Fox TV series Justice, reviewed Tommy Chong’s book The I Chong: Meditations from the Joint, for the Los Angeles Times. Shapiro wrote,Being incarcerated for resisting imperial power or because of Bone’s sexual preference or getting sent to the gulag for dissenting opinions are searing human tragedies that inspired brave acts of artistic resistance. Selling bongs over state lines just doesn’t carry the same moral weight.
Hey, Jonny boy, whoa! You’d better buy a new state-of-the-art apocryphal scale if you’re going to compare the moral weight of prison sentences.
In February 2003, Tommy Chong was among fifty-five people who were arrested in raids across the country as a culmination of the DEA’s Operation Pipe Dreams, named after one of Cheech & Chong’s stoner movies. Agents forced their way through the door of his home at six o’clock in the morning with automatic weapons drawn. Chong, who was the only one who served time—nine months at a federal prison—paid a $20,000 fine, not to mention the $103,000 that was seized when he got busted.
The reason he became an exception and received such punishment was precisely because of his “dissenting opinions” and “artistic resistance.” It simply would not have happened otherwise.
The DEA wanted to get him really bad. Traditionally, local law enforcement has the discretion to decide what priority should be given to prosecuting cases involving drug paraphernalia. Because both Pennsylvania and Ohio make that a top priority, the DEA chose to open a decoy head shop in Pennsylvania. Four times in one year, these sting-meisters tried to buy a pipe autographed by Chong online, but his Nice Dreams Enterprises would not fill any orders coming from either of those two states.
However, a request from a different return address easily passed through a new employee who acted as a fake firewall. Chong said he suspected that the employee was sent to infiltrate his company. I asked why he suspected that. He responded that it was a very strong suspicion, based on the fact that the employee left the company a couple of days before the bust, giving no reason.
In a deal with the authorities, Chong agreed to plead guilty in exchange for his wife and son not being indicted. Ironically, he was sentenced on September 11, the second anniversary of the real terrorist attacks, rather than a business run by an actor in such Cheech & Chong movies as Up in Smoke and, more recently, a recurring role on a popular sitcom, That ’70s Show, where he continued to play the part of a dedicated pot smoker.
The prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan—ignoring all relevance of the First Amendment in favor of her professional career—had the audacity to introduce Chong’s fictional character in the courtroom as evidence of his “frivolous” attitude toward the enforcement of drug laws. Chong said this was “like jailing all of the Police Academy people for making fun of cops.” Furthermore, he had joked with reporters about putting this criminal case in his next movie with Cheech. The prosecution insisted that such a comment indicated that Chong was making light of the case and might exploit it for money.
Behind bars, Chong said, “I’m a doper comedian, and I’m in here because I made a stupid joke about the bongs being the only weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration had found.” Chong, who is half Scottish-Irish and half Chinese and was raised in Canada, added, “When I became an American citizen, I took a vow to uphold the Constitution of the U.S. Doing anything less than exercising my right of free speech in defense of pot and against its prohibition would be a violation of my vow.”
So listen, Jonathan, if your show Justice ever returns to TV, how about considering a story line revealing the basic injustice of arresting 830,000 individuals every year for the “crime” of possessing marijuana? It may not get you high, but hopefully your consciousness will be raised in the process.
As for Prosecutor Buchanan, her career had been inadvertently boosted by the terrorist attacks of 2001 when a United Airlines plane crashed inside her jurisdiction (sixty miles southeast of Pittsburgh), catapulting her to prominence in the law enforcement community and enabling her to instigate the yearlong undercover sting. Three days after 9/11, she became the first woman and the youngest person in Pennsylvania history ever to be named a U.S. Attorney, and for her first major operation, she chose Tommy Chong as her priority target because his career had “glamorized” the use of marijuana.
Meanwhile, the cruel absurdity of antiparaphernalia laws continues to be underscored by such creative substitutes as apples, soda cans, toilet-paper cardboard tubes with aluminum foil, tweezers used as roach clips, and don’t forget those plain old regular tobacco pipes.
In Fulton, Kentucky, police investigating a marijuana-smoking complaint found pot burning on a backyard grill with a large fan on the other side of the house that was sucking the smoke throughout the home—in effect, said the police chief, it turned “the house into a large marijuana bong.” Seize it immediately, boys!
Bong Hits 4 Jesus
The Supreme Court sucks so badly that it finally turned itself inside out. In 2007, their outrageous five-to-four ruling made it acceptable to suspend a high school student for the off-campus act of holding a fourteen-foot banner reading BONG HITS 4 JESUS. That harmless bit of incongruity became a federal case ending with a dangerous precedent for suppressing free speech.
Chief Justice John Roberts agreed with the school principal that “the banner would be interpreted by those viewing it as promoting illegal drug use, and that interpretation is plainly a reasonable one.” What a ton of bullshit. Justices Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy voted with him but also stated that the their decision didn’t address “political or social issues such as the wisdom of the war on drugs or of legalized marijuana for medical use.” Ironically, this is the same Supreme Court that upheld the illegality of medical marijuana by falsely denying the existence of positive research.
Studies have concluded that cannabis is effective for relieving muscle spasticity and chronic pain in AIDS patients. The miracle weed can both increase hunger in HIV patients and suppress hunger to fight obesity. It can help those with glaucoma, Alzheimer’s disease, asthma, hepatitis, diabetes, epilepsy, osteoporosis, arthritis, insomnia, sleep apnea, migraine headaches, scoliosis, hypertension, depression, shingles, PMS, menopause, Parkinson’s disease, and multiple sclerosis. Cannabinoids can inhibit the proliferation of cancer cell lines, including breast, prostate, colon, pancreatic, and brain cancer.
As for the “concern about the health effects of smoking marijuana,” it was reported at the 2005 meeting of the International Cannabinoid Research Society that smoking marijuana—“even heavy long-term use”—does not cause cancer of the lungs, upper airways, or esophagus. As for recent claims of psychosis, the rate of psychosis has remained unchanged since 1950, while the rate of marijuana use has increased 10,000 percent since then.
Medical marijuana is already legal in many states, yet it is prohibited—and trumped—by federal law. But cynical critics treat the legalization of medical marijuana as though it were intended to be a gateway leading to legalization of nonmedical marijuana. So this is really about the war on pleasure. In the past forty years, twenty million Americans were arrested for violating antimarijuana laws, primarily for simple possession.
The New York Times even editorialized about the importance of medical marijuana: “Although there are other prescriptions that are designed to relieve pain and nausea, and there is concern about the health effects of smoking marijuana, there are some truly ill people who find peace only that way.” But those “other prescriptions” are pushed by the pharmaceutical industry, which spent a record-breaking $155 million to lobby the government from 2005 to mid-2006. Altogether, prescription drugs killed over thirty thousand Americans in 2008. In 2009, more than a million emergency room visits resulted from prescription-drug overdoses, and fifteen thousand of prescription-drug OD’s resulted in death.
The World Health Organization spent three years working out an agreement with 171 countries to prevent the spread of smoking-related diseases, particularly in the developing world, but the United States opposed the treaty, which included a minimum age of eighteen for sales to minors. Around the globe, tobacco now kills almost five million people a year. Within a generation, WHO predicts the premature death toll will reach ten million a year. Anthropologists of the future will surely look back upon these times as incredibly barbaric.
Former Drug Czar John Walters insisted that pot growers are “violent criminal terrorists who wouldn’t hesitate to help other terrorists get into the country with the aim of causing mass casualties.” But syndicated columnist Clarence Page—referring to the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana (WAMM)—wrote about the DEA raiding “a legitimate health cooperative that was treating more than two hundred patients, some of them terminally ill, in Santa Cruz, California. Snatching medicine out of the hands of seriously ill patients sounds like terrorism to me. In this case, it was federally sponsored and taxpayer-financed.”
WAMM, founded by Valerie and Mike Corral, has been helping people dying of cancer and AIDS for nineteen years. Learning that such patients couldn’t afford the high cost of marijuana, WAMM established a communal garden where medicine is grown for patients who have a doctor’s recommendation; they may take what they need and give what they can, even if that is nothing.
The late Robert Anton Wilson, a prolific countercultural author, told me,I never thought I would become another WAMM patient. My post-polio syndrome had been a minor nuisance until then. Suddenly, two years ago, it flared up into blazing pain. My doctor recommended marijuana and named WAMM as the safest and most legal source. By then I think I was on the edge of suicide—the pain had become like a permanent abscessed tooth in the leg. Nobody can or should endure that.
After the DEA raided WAMM’s garden and arrested its founders, outraged Santa Cruz city and county officials sponsored WAMM’s medical marijuana giveaway on the steps of city hall and joined WAMM’s lawsuit against the DEA, the attorney general, and the Office of National Drug Control Policy. WAMM is considered the most likely organization to ultimately sway the Supreme Court at the time. According to Federal Judge Jeremy Fogel, “WAMM is the gold standard of the medical marijuana movement.”
Meanwhile, what ever happened to Joseph Frederick? He was the eighteen-year-old student in 2002 who, when the Olympic torch passed through Juneau, Alaska, seized upon the opportunity to hold up that banner that said BONG HITS 4 JESUS. He is currently learning Mandarin and teaching English in China. He’s proud that he stood up for his rights, with the aid of the ACLU, but regrets “the bad precedent set by the ruling.” However, his case was settled at the state level in November 2008, winning him $45,000 and forcing the school to hold a forum on free speech.
If only that banner had said BONG HITS 4 WAMM, then, by the Supreme Court’s own language—that their decision did not address “political or social issues such as the wisdom of the war on drugs or of legalized marijuana for medical use”—the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” student would not have been punished. He would’ve been protected by the First Amendment because blasphemy is protected by the First Amendment. But the prejudiced Supreme Court justices rationalized that “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” was “promoting illegal drug use,” even though such promotion is also protected by the First Amendment.
The Great Hippie Debate
At the Winnipeg Comedy Festival, I participated in a fake debate—“Whereas they were mostly disheveled, disorganized, and doped up, be it resolved that the hippies of the ’60s accomplished nothing”—played strictly for laughs. Comedian Bruce Clark took the affirmative position:Don’t get me wrong, I like hippies. Some of my best friends are squeegee kids. In fact, it would be a better place if hippies were running the world. And when I say “running the world,” what I really mean is harvesting the marijuana. It would be a kinder, gentler society, but let’s be honest, nothing would ever get done. Unless you think it’s an accomplishment to stare at your own hand for an hour or tie-dye your cat.
Hippies often give their children names associated with hippie culture. Names like Sky, Rain, Sunshine, and Autumn. I thought it was because of their respect for nature. But it’s actually something else that’s associated with hippies—being homeless. I didn’t figure that out myself, I heard it from the son of hippie parents and a good friend of mine, Spare Change. He’s not happy with the name, but his sister Dumpster Diver is livid.
Hippies justify their counterculture lifestyle by pointing to the man they call the original hippie, Jesus. I gotta say, I agree. Jesus had long hair, he wore sandals, he was antiestablishment, and he hung around with a dozen other guys who never seemed to have a job. And he must have been stoned to hang around with all those lepers. I’ll concede the fact that Christ was a hippie—but I doubt that Jesus made his wine out of bong water.
Unless we employ revisionist history, there’s no evidence to suggest hippies accomplished anything. Grace Slick, the lead singer of Jefferson Airplane, said it best when she said, “If you remember the ’60s, you probably weren’t there.” And if you were there, you’re probably too old to remember them. Hippies have added little to the world. It would be a great MasterCard commercial: Used Volkswagen bus, $600. Incense, $10. Collection of Grateful Dead eight-tracks, $6. Being a hippie: Useless.
Then came my rebuttal:In the aftermath of the repression and blandness of the 1950s, hippies exploded onto the scene, deriving their entire philosophy from Celestial Seasonings tea bag boxes. At its core, the counterculture was a spiritual revolution. The holy trinity was sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. But the fundamental accomplishment of hippies was that they cared for each other. This characteristic was crystallized at Woodstock by an announcement warning the audience: Do not take the brown acid.
Timothy Leary, a cheerleader for the hippie movement, was the guru of LSD, a chemical compound that he considered to be a vehicle for expanding consciousness. Leary even wanted to experience consciousness after his death. He planned to have his head frozen so that someday technology would enable him to be cloned from his own cells. And if that didn’t work, his head could always be used on Celebrity Bowling.
After I took my first acid trip, I told my mother about it. She was very concerned. She said, “It could lead to marijuana.” My mother was right. She cautioned me, “And marijuana could become a habit.” Indeed, when High Times published a questionnaire, one of the questions was, “Is it possible to smoke too much pot?” And a reader responded, “I don’t understand the question.”
Socrates said, “Know thyself.” Norman Mailer said, “Be thyself.” And the hippie movement said, “Change thyself.” Many hippies changed their names as a symbolic act of their independence from mainstream society. The editor of a psychedelic paper, The San Francisco Oracle, changed his name to Siddartha and he joined a commune, where they all called him Sid. They thought his name was Sid Arthur.
Hippies not only developed a humane value system, they also lived their alternative, based on cooperation rather than competition. They served as harbingers of organic farming, alternative medicine, women’s liberation, environmental pro-activity—and hippie theme parks.
That old hippie maxim of the 1960s, “make love, not war,” is as relevant today as it was then. Literally. Aging male hippies don’t seem to have any problem with erectile dysfunction. They just worry that it’s really rigor mortis setting in on the installment plan.
I imagine myself emceeing the Geezerstock Festival, standing on an outdoor stage, looking out at a vast audience of gray-haired hippies with paunches and wearing granny glasses. “Are you having fun? I can’t hear you! No, I mean I really can’t hear you! And now I’d like to introduce the Rolling Stones before they gather any more moss. Oh, wait, I’ve just been handed an announcement: Warning: Do not take the brown antacid.”
Judging by audience applause, the moderator declared me the winner of the debate.
