Oh, the Irony, Part II

Or: Justice Roberts Sends me to Mendo

Maybe ten Septembers ago, I'm seated inside a large outbuilding on remote property in Mendocino County, California. A tiny farmhouse outside is tucked onto the flat of a knife-shaped, steep-sloped outcropping, the dead end of a private road that to this day does not exist on GPS. As I'll soon be reminded, the stumps of thirty cut marijuana plants visibly protrude on the slopes and flat around the house. Ten more still ripen on the north slope; easily twelve feet tall, expertly topped and drooping with colas.  They check the calyxes twice a day with a jeweler's loupe, and before clear trichomes turn milky or golden, the plant will be cut and hung in a room nearby.

Isis and Spirit, the sisters who own this place, sing to their plants often, but always at the full moon, which is tonight, and a bit of a happening.  Drummers will arrive before dusk and set up in the fields, a bonfire will be lit, joints and spliffs and hand-blown glass passed around.  A collective howl at sunset will start it off. Some women will drum and some men will dance, but mostly vice-versa, and everyone will sing or wail or ululate to the plants, and we'll mean it.  At midnight, we'll eat an organic feast of roasted roots: carrots, potatoes, beets and yams, with fresh berries and cream as the topper.  This dinner happens every month during the grow, with various menus, and is in fact integral to it.

Isis, my then-girlfriend, invited me here to meet a minister who claims that marijuana is his congregation's sacrament--that First Amendment religious guarantees mean the cops can't bust them for grass any more than they can roust Christians for wine, or Jews for anything kosher.  Timothy Leary tried this argument long ago, and it did not go well for him.  The courts of the day said, in coarse vernacular, fuck your religious freedom, marihuana [their archaic spelling] is toooo dangerous.* I did the research [I got skills], starting with modern cases and extending back to Leary, and no one had ever beaten a pot rap using religion.** 

The upstart church was already fighting criminal charges at the state level.  I called Isis to make the introduction because Chief Justice Roberts had just ruled--with a unanimous Court behind him, that a tiny religious group in New Mexico could import and manufacture a dimethyltryptamine [DMT] brew for its members--then pass the collection plate. In other words, the court allowed them to import, manufacture, distribute, and profit from this totally illegal, powerful hallucinogenic--

So long as it's for church. 

Because Congress identically classifies both marijuana and DMT as Dangerous Drugs With No Use Whatsoever, I'm understandably fascinated. I plan to interview the minister tonight, here on friendly ground--then write about it.

I ponder this as I sit alone in the outbuilding, trimming buds of Trinity.  They left some big, easy ones for me, humoring their guest, on a clean tray with a new pair of snips. The women (Isis, Spirit and not-quite-a-passel of skilled manicurists who return here from around the world at harvest like spawning salmon) have gone for a swim in the Russian River.  If I don't join them, past experience tells me they'll be back shortly in the late afternoon heat, dripping, mostly naked, to joke about my work and get high with me before prepping for dancing and dinner.  The attitude toward clothing here was simple: if you're hot, take it off.

I promise this didn't suck.  I promise I was relaxed as I have ever been, in that chair, waiting for beautiful women, with pounds of finished marijuana in turkey bags all around me, pounds more drying on racks in the next room, never mind the shotput-sized ball of finger hash I was just finishing a bowl of--when I heard the helicopter.

Now, the occasional helicopter/small plane flyby is not itself unusual near O and C territory; forests do burn, after all. But this helicopter's sound drew inexorably closer, then flew along the ridge, and now hovered low--almost directly overhead.

I had heard about CAMP raids--hell, pirate radio broadcasts the flyover schedule every day. So as I feel the rotor-thud in my chest, I envision black-clad tactical men dropping in on ropes, masked, weapons ready, fingers already inside trigger guards, sweeping the place. They see the outbuilding of course.  

They head for it, of course.

I rise, dumping the tray, and run in panic for the door.  The helicopter isn't going anywhere. It sounds like it might land--

Terrible truths race in parallel through my brain: I think it's best I go outside, hands raised (I'm white), and I simultaneously think if I'm wrong, at least my last look will be these mountains, this forest, even if my AR-15 bullet-ridden corpse is flashed everywhere by breathless news media, giving my parents and friends a very bad last look indeed--

The light is dim by the door, away from the worklamps of the trimming tables.  I heave it open, and step out where the chopper roars so close it nearly blots the sun--

Next: We Have Good News and Bad News, Gurn--and the Irony Ain't Over

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*If you care, the full legal opinion can be found here.
**A decade hence, you still can't.  But we're getting close.