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FREE THE WEED 22
A Column by John Sinclair
Highest greetings for the holiday season and the New Year from Amsterdam, where smoking and purchasing weed is allowed and owning a gun is a very difficult proposition indeed.
This is not going to be a very popular thing to say—even now as our nation mourns its many innocent citizens slaughtered this past year by fellow citizens with guns—but isn’t it time to consider a life without weapons?
You can say what you want about Europe, but the one thing that most impresses me in the most positive way is that nobody is armed. They may have once slaughtered enemy populations in the course of centuries of armed warfare in Europe, but that long period ended with the formation and establishment of the European Union, and in daily life on the busy streets of the cities of Europe, people are not armed.
In the United States such a large portion of the populace is armed on a daily basis that we rarely even think about it. It’s the American Way of Life, that an individual should possess weapons of destruction and be ready to use them at any time against whomsoever may be perceived as a threat—or, as in the case of the mass murderers so popular today, as a handy target for whatever form of rage is on their minds.
I know it’s going against the American grain to think this way, but what does one do with a weapon except shoot animals or other humans? Why do these creatures have to die like that? What sort of mental and moral lapse allows us to hold ourselves superior to others of whatever species to the extent that we may decide whether they live or die?
I’m sorry, but I just don’t get it. I dream of a world without weapons, where we may pit our wits against nature and the need to feed ourselves and our loved ones, and if you need to kill somebody or some thing, do it with a knife or some other bladed instrument of destruction. Get rid of the goddamned guns!
How does this relate to our main theme, ending the War On Drugs? My modest proposal would include legalizing all forms of recreational drug use, removing the power of arrest or other legal harassment from the many various police forces and turn their attention to eradicating guns from our social order. Declare the possession and use of guns fully illegal and seek out all the guns in existence and confiscate and destroy them before it’s too late.
If the police are going to tap phones and follow people around, let them do it to possessers of illegal weapons. If they’re going to kick somebody’s door down and terrorize the people in the house or apartment or place of business, let it be where guns are kept and not where people are getting high or preparing and storing the means for getting high.
My preference would be for most of the police and legal apparatus to be dissolved and put out of business forever, and for the remaining forces of law and order to be closely focused on preventing or solving crimes against persons and personal property. If someone commits a crime against another, arrest them for the crime and not for what they happen to be getting high on. If they can’t do their job for some reason, let them suffer the consequences, not because they failed to pass a drug test but because they weren’t taking care of business properly.
The War On Drugs has served for more than 40 years as a way to build up the police forces, strip the citizenry of essential legal and human rights, remove elements deemed of the wrong race, caste or social class from the general population, build up a vast criminal court and prison system that’s stuffed with drug offenders from arrest to conviction to treatment plan or imprisonment.
The War On Drugs is the social poison that’s destroyed the legal, moral and spiritual fiber of American life and turned our country into a quasi-police state that preys on recreational drug users and turns them into informants, snitches, probationers, drug treatment program fodder, prisoners, parolees and worse.
The fact that the War On Drugs is totally based on anti-science and moldy quasi-religious myths only makes it worse, not better, and now that the citizenry at large is
beginning to penetrate what William S. Burroughs called “the tissue of horseshit” and see that, for example, medical and social use of marijuana is not in any way a “threat to society” nor to the safety and general good of the social order, the bullshit drug laws are beginning to fall.
Apart from the staunch opposition of the pharmaceutical and liquor industries fully sanctioned by the legal system and the illicit drug dealers who have amassed huge fortunes by moving their goods around the legal blockade, the only other sector of society that benefits from the War On Drugs is the police-and-courts-and-drug-treatment-and-prison industry. These people are understandably reluctant to give up their immense powers over the lives of drug users, but their time is up and they can only postpone their final withdrawal from the interstices of our lives.
So if you feel you must support all these forces of law and order in the long process of withdrawal from their addiction to the War On Drugs and the power it invests in them to interfere with the lives of others, for god’s sake turn the full mechanism of the law and its minions toward eliminating weapons from our society. Declare the manufacture, distribution, sale and use of guns as illegal as drugs have been and use the power of the law enforcement community to find the guns and destroy them, wherever they may be kept or hidden.
Then turn the vast propaganda machinery that’s demonized drugs and drug users all these years against the gun industry and the people who possess and use guns. Fight the culture of weapons with the weapon of culture. Make it a good thing to be without guns and a bad thing to use guns against people and other beings. Embrace a form of life where people are not at all likely to shoot each other. See the gun for what it is: an ugly machine dedicated to death for humans and animals, and act accordingly.
OK, end of sermon. This isn’t at all what I had in mind to write when I sat down to compose this month’s column, but there it is. I guess it’s the thought of the 20 little kids who were shot down in the schoolroom in Connecticut and all the other victims of idiots with weapons in the past year.
Let me end on a positive note: The Netherlands has dropped its plan to force its weed-smoking citizens to register for
a “weed pass” that would also exclude visitors to the country from its coffeeshops. This idiotic measure was scheduled to be put into effect on January 1, 2013, but it's not going to happen and things will stay pretty much as they are. Happy New Year, everybody!
—420 Café
Amsterdam
December 18, 2012
© 2012 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved. |
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