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FREE THE WEED 34
A Column by John Sinclair
Hallelujah, dear friends, the moment I’ve been waiting for all my adult life has finally arrived! On Tuesday, December 10, 2013, the South American nation of Uruguay elected to legalize marijuana—including cultivation, delivery, sales and personal use—once and for all.
The dominos have been slowly toppling since California voters legalized medical marijuana in 1996, and 40% of our states have since elected to join them. Colorado and Washington have taken the next step into full legalization, and legislatures there are grappling with how they will “regulate and contain a drug that is still outlawed across most of the country,” as the New York Times put it in a recent story called “Corner Cannabis Store Nears Reality.”
That’s because there’s been absolutely no progress on the part of the Federal government, where the skull & crossbones flag of the War On Drugs flies over the White House and Capitol Hill and the buffoons they call Congress continue to cling to their self-generated myths and idiotic pronouncements about the dangers of recreational marijuana use.
Duh! The danger is that these bloodthirsty galoots will continue to persecute and punish us for getting high without recourse to the approved products of the alcohol and pharmaceutical industries that own the politicians, and despite the stated wishes of the majority of American citizens.
Ironically, while 58% of American voters are now reported to support full legalization of marijuana in the United States to no Federal avail, an identical proportion of Uruguayan voters is reported to oppose legalization. Yet the political leadership there seems to have consulted its own intelligence and examined the scientific and social realities of marijuana use in order to reach its momentous decision to FREE THE WEED.
This enlightened approach to social policy just seems radical in the context of the rabid right-wing political and cultural bias and its ceaseless propaganda that have shaped American drug law policy and marijuana law in particular since the end of federal alcohol prohibition in 1933.
Maybe this will sound familiar, but the War On Alcohol had built up a formidable law enforcement mechanism “too big to fail,” as they say about the criminal banking industry today, and when alcohol was re-legalized during The Depression, the federal police establishment figured out a way to keep its vast minions hard at work: Criminalize marijuana use and demonize marijuana smokers as criminals and degenerates deserving of the vicious treatment they would begin to encounter at the hands of the drug police—and courts, and prisons, and parole offices, and drug treatment programs, and forfeiture of assets, and loss of employment opportunities, and drug tests, and the whole tissue of horseshit woven around the idea that there’s something wrong with smoking marijuana.
It can’t be said too many times in today’s world: There’s nothing wrong with marijuana or marijuana use. Cannabis is not toxic. It causes no deaths. There are no evil side effects. It’s a simple green plant that produces a mild euphoric sense of well-being, enhances the creative process and the sensual experience, and may serve to alleviate the symptoms of serious physical illnesses.
Marijuana should be available for smokers to purchase and consume at our leisure, wherever we are. If we want to grow it for ourselves and our family and friends, that should be our decision alone. If we want to grow it for distribution and sale to the marijuana smoking public, it should be our right, and we should not be penalized for being small growers and processors as opposed to gigantic corporations as long as we fulfill our legal obligations as taxpayers and small businesses.
The retail end of the marijuana chain has been solved in the Netherlands for 40 years now, and there’s nothing like walking into a coffeeshop and buying your weed or hash over the counter and smoking it with your friends right there on the premises.
But even in Holland the government today remains opposed to legalization and “any attempts to regulate marijuana production,” as DutchNews.nl reported in December, “despite mounting local authority pressure for change.”
“Many [local] councils are highly critical of official government policy on marijuana,” the report continues, “and say legalised production would remove organised crime from the equation. ‘Marijuana does not fall from the sky,’ Heerlen mayor Paul Depla said earlier this year. ‘If the [national government] wants to tackle illegal plantations, then the government has to take over growing marijuana itself.’”
This is the solution contemplated by the government of Uruguay, according to Reuters, where the new law “will now provide for government regulation of all aspects of the marijuana trade,” The law mandates the creation of a drug control board “that will regulate cultivation standards, fix the price and monitor consumption.” “What sets Uruguay's bill apart,” Kavitha A. Davidson comments in The Huffington Post, “is that it provides for government control over the entire marijuana industry, from cultivation to consumption. Individual citizens, cooperatives, and private companies can grow a specified amount of weed each month, though it may only be sold to consumers by state-run pharmacies. Purchasers will have to register with the state and will be limited to 40 grams per month.”
“Registered drug users should be able to start buying marijuana over the counter from licensed pharmacies in April,” the Reuters report concludes. And Julio Calzada, Uruguay's drug czar, told El Pais newspaper that “the proposed fixed price of $2.50 per gram is on par with the going underground rates, the hope being that the competitive pricing will attract users to the legal market without providing a profit incentive for resale in the black market.”
$2.50 a gram! That’s more like it! In Amsterdam the grams are priced from 8 to 15 euros, and in Colorado the New York Times reported that “prices now range from $25 to $50 for an eighth of an ounce,” which is to say 3.5 grams at $8 to $15 per gram.
“Although the governors of Colorado and Washington both opposed legalizing marijuana,” the Times pointed out, “once the voters had spoken, they and other state officials threw themselves into setting up shop to make marijuana work. In Washington, the State Liquor Control Board is in charge. In Colorado a commission presented plans to the Legislature, and state and city agencies are now sifting through applications.
“So far, no dispensaries in Colorado have cleared the final inspections and obtained the final licenses to begin selling recreational marijuana. Licenses in Washington will be issued as early as January, but the first retail marijuana to sell will not be available until spring.”
Here in Michigan, where the backward-thinking State legislature continues to resist any form of forward motion toward legalizing marijuana and keeps dragging its feet in resistance to the will of the voters even with respect to medical marijuana, NORML reports that “Members of the House Judiciary Committee have overwhelmingly approved legislation, House Bill 4271, to allow municipalities to authorize the establishment of medical cannabis dispensaries.
“The measure is in response to a recent state Supreme Court ruling which found that such facilities were not explicitly authorized under existing state law and, thus, could be forcibly closed down.”
We’ve got a long way still to go, but full legalization in Uruguay and the victorious citizens’ initiatives in Colorado and Washington are something to shout about. I have to note that the new law in Uruguay was passed exactly 42 years to the day of the John Sinclair Freedom Rally in Ann Arbor that gained my release from prison three days later. No matter how long it may take: FREE THE WEED!
—London
December 18, 2013
© 2013 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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