Goebbels Grins in the Grave

If you haven't figured it out yet, any of the networks, including PBS, are thoroughly corrupt.  For example, PBS heavily edited a Jill Stein interview to make her sound foolish and omit her criticism of  the two-party system:




Lee Camp and his crew at Redacted Tonight report the news without the megacorporate influence, and you can judge for yourself which you prefer.

Peace.

The Elephant in the Room

As told by Master Stanhope, citing research from our own Oregon State University:




And Master Hicks:



Obviously I make no claims to these works and post them merely to elucidate.

Peace.

I Used to be a Professional Paranoid

Then I did it for free--

Now, the word "paranoia" has surely been robbed of all meaning:

“no digital communication is secure“, by which he means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications – meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like – are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is.

Happy New Year.

Training Day, Part II

[part I here]

After tossing his tool belt in the bed of the pickup, Resin Nate slides the cooler onto the back seat and climbs in beside it, balancing a heavy nursery tray on his lap. The clear cover of the tray is fogged over with condensation.

Nate pulls the door closed and accepts the pipe from me. Ted accelerates hard into the fog, spitting gravel into the ravine, while Nate smokes in silence, seeming pretty calm for a guy whose truck had just been seized by the police.  He refills the pipe from a huge bag he takes from the cooler. Well into the second bowl he passes to the front, coughs, and tells this story:

CHP finally noticed  I never registered that rig* and pulls me over...and after he runs my license and it comes back clean, I tell him I never register my vehicles, don't believe in it, but I have the bill of sale--

Doesn't matter, the trooper says.  After this long, it counts as stolen.  I have to impound your vehicle today, I'm sorry.  Explain it to the judge. Then he called the wrecker and asked if I needed a ride to the job--and I call you instead, and thanks for picking me up--

While we wait, the trooper tells me to get whatever I need out of the rig. So I grab my tools and I'm laying the belt on the road, and he asks if that's it, did I get everything?

Well, no, I tell him, I got clones--

And he doesn't miss a beat. He just says Well, better get 'em out of there, so I get the tray and put it down by my tools, and he asks if there's anything else. 

Well, I say, I got my stash--

And again, he's just Well, get it out of there, and doesn't even try to look in the cooler. I sit down, the tow truck comes, and they weren't gone two minutes before you arrived--

Ted listens to Nate's tale like it's a weather report, nonchalantly nodding throughout and stroking the red beard. I sit stunned, staring, incredulous, and forget to pass the pipe. Ted glances at the bowl in my lap, my expression, and shares a long look with Nate in the rear-view mirror.

The brothers burst into laughter. The truck swerves a bit while Nate thumps me on the back.

Welcome to Mendo, man--

That afternoon, in the hot sun of the work site, Seven Thunders** simply shrugged when I repeat Nate's story, shoulder tattoos brushing the sides of the over-sized french drain trench. We dug with pickaxes, cutting roots and chipping rock, the sweet smell of harvest trimming and curing wafting from a nearby barn.  Seven Thunders was a Navajo, an alcoholic, married into the Pinole tribe, and required to work full-time as a condition of parole. Ted hired him when he took a crew to bury a shipping container grow on the Pinole land.

Seven Thunders shrugged again. That's typical:

I'm a volunteer fireman, okay, and last month we got a call from Covelo to transport a woman who'd given birth outside in her garden. Covelo's remote, and it took awhile to get out there and find them.  She was lying on a tarp, the baby on her chest, in the middle of hundreds of plants when we arrived.  Both were fine, and like I said; they just needed a ride to the hospital to get checked out.  But while we're lifting the stretcher into the ambulance, a county cop shows up, searching for us in the middle of this pot forest after overhearing the radio call.

Now the plant limit there is 100, okay, and this is way over, more than enough to call the feds. So we expect him to follow us in, or take our names as witnesses, but he leans out of the cruiser window, looks right at me, pulls off his shades--and winks.

Doesn't look over 100 plants to me, he says. You gentlemen drive careful to the hospital, now--

Seven Thunders chuckles. Now why do you suppose he'd do that, when he had her, dead to rights?  Nobody asked, but you stick around, you find the police pretty much leave the locals alone. Backbone of the economy, understand?  Guerrilla grows in the woods, on public land, the Mexican mafia--those guys are the real pisser. 

He stops digging and reaches for a cluster of water bottles sweating on the lip of the trench near his head.  He tosses me one, gets another for himself, and we drink deeply. He sparks a joint and points overhead with it.

Sure, he says, grinning through smoke as we climb out of the trench and head to the barn for a break--I'm a just a convict, a ditch digger, a laborer. But I get twenty an hour, cash on the barrel--  

He gestures around with his free hand at the mountains, the sky, the trees. We enter the barn and his grin widens as yet another group of pretty manicurists (separate from Isis and Spirit's crew) look up from the trimming tables, several rising to share the joint.

--to dig ditches in paradise.

-------------
* In most of the U.S., "rig" refers specifically to semi-trailers (or "big rigs"--articulated lorries for you limeys).  In NorCal and throughout Oregon, "rig" refers to any form of ground transport, including cars, motorcycles, bicycles, and definitely Resin Nate's pickup truck.

**Seven Thunders' Pinole brother-in-law, also on the crew, later filled in the details: He gave himself that name.  The Navajo tell us the real translation is closer to "Seven Farts."

A Tale of Two States

Consider this story out of Lake Lure, North Carolina last week:

Based on tips from the neighbors, Rutherford County deputies obtained search warrants for a remote warehouse on a dirt road and raided the place, finding over 600 plants and 83 pounds of marijuana.

While North Carolina's pot laws are nowhere near the worst in the U.S., nonetheless the accused face multiple felonies at this point,  possible mandatory minimum sentences, possible loss of homes, savings, and other assets.

North Carolina also taxes marijuana (!) at the rate of $3.50 per gram, so 83 pounds works out to about $132,000, before tacking on the 140% penalty for non-payment, plus interest.

Surely it sucks to be a busted pot grower in North Carolina.  Taxing illegal drugs with penalties for non-payment is an especially Kafkaesque twist.

But now compare the above bust--600 plus plants, 83 pounds, etc.-- to Oregon. After July 1, the day Measure 91 goes into effect, say five adult housemates grow twenty plants--four apiece--but technically sixteen over the limit, no matter how many adults live on the property.  What happens to you under Oregon's "legalized" marijuana?

You're hit with a Class C felony, face five years, a $125,000 fine, and so on.

What if you carry five ounces in your car--perfectly legal at your house--but four ounces over the limit in public?  Say you give away five ounces to one person?  Or one joint to a twenty-year old--?

Five years. $125,000, etc.

It goes on and on, but I think the point is made.*

Oregon has not legalized marijuana.

We simply moved the War on Drugs over a few ounces.

Peace.
--------------
* If you care to pore over the details (non-lawyers, please let your loved ones know you're going in before clicking) the text of Measure 91 is here, and the state laws it modifies are here.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

World War Z

I was in the Bay Area in March, and took the time to visit a marijuana speakeasy I'd joined years ago in Oakland.

A local friend and member originally took me there, apparently a boarded-up construction site on a decrepit side street. But a mail slot was hidden in plain view amid a dayglo tangle of graffiti. We tossed our IDs through, smiled for the barely visible camera, and were buzzed in by the friendly proprietor, an affable Filipino. In the blacklit showroom he plied us with bubblehash (an effective sales strategy, I assure you) and quietly explained Oakland's Measure Z, passed with over 65% of the vote, that permitted him--and many others--to operate.

Pretty simple, really.  Measure Z mandates that crimes involving private adult use, sale, distribution and cultivation of marijuana are the absolute lowest priority for law enforcement, below even jaywalking and parking tickets.

Last month--eleven years after Measure Z passed--I returned to the speakeasy. They now operate from a group of rooms hidden within a bookstore, just another storefront among many.

Did you get that?  For eleven years, Oakland has come the closest of anywhere in the nation to full-on, it-might-as-well-be-dandelions legalization--

And the Sky Has Not Fallen.

I could still see it up there.

Oregon legislators, in the meantime, perpetuate the war on marijuana smokers.  They were scheduled to vote yesterday on SB 844 which would have effectively destroyed* both the medical marijuana program passed by voters in 1998, and Measure 91 legalizing marijuana, passed--again, by the voters-- last year.  A flurry of calls and emails delayed that vote, for now.

The so-called supporters of Measure 91 asked us to plead our legislature to preserve isolated bits as though it is some ideal we are trying to attain.

It is not.

Measure 91 was deeply flawed from the outset, but at least, we thought, locked in a reasonable starting point for reform.

We do not bargain away** what little Measure 91 achieves.

Instead--and, I promise, just for starters--we pass Measure Z here, forcing it down the legislative throat, if necessary--

Peace.

--------

*The press has done an abysmal job reporting on the most damaging provisions of the bill.  For example, it limits the number of patients for whom a doctor may prescribe marijuana.  Federal prohibition effectively scares most physicians away from even putting in writing that marijuana might help their condition.  Most of the roughly 80,000 medical marijuana patients in Oregon will then be cut off, and forced into the heavily taxed recreational stores where prices will be prohibitive, or back to the black market.

**I am sure Alex Rogers has done some good work, but for my tastes, his plea for action yesterday amounts to this.

The Rational Basis Test Isn't

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

Thus spake Denis Diderot, a shining intellectual beacon, to be sure, but he is only partially correct.

He left out lawyers--and, by default, judges.*

Only lawyers will maintain, with straight faces, that Congress' classification of marijuana as a dangerous addictive substance with no use whatsoever is rational.

Yet this is precisely what government lawyers argued: that so long as Congress could rationally believe that their total ban on marijuana might effect (as in accomplish) the legitimate Congressional interest in promoting public health, then it does not matter if that belief is based upon bad information.

I know it sounds batshit crazy, but it is the sort of thing lawyers argue about in Constitutional-level cases every goddamned day.  Quoting from a government brief:

Rational basis review does not permit the Courts to ‘second guess’
Congress’ conclusions, but only to enjoin decisions that are totally
irrational or without an ‘imaginable’ basis.

In other words, Congress can be wrong about marijuana, demonstrably wrong, stupendously wrong, contradicted by overwhelming scientific evidence--but for the law to be constitutional under the rational basis test, Congress need only demonstrate that it believes the wrong science. (Judge's order here, if you care.)**

I propose we amend Diderot's quote to read

Humanity will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest--and force-fed--(wafer thin mint-style)--to the last lawyer

Peace.
----------------------
* There's an old joke among litigators: What do you say to an attorney with an IQ of 98?
"Your Honor, I object--" 

**In previous posts I indicated this case was before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, but I was wrong.  Judge Mueller sits on the District (trial) court for the Eastern District of California. The NORML lawyers will certainly appeal this result--and that case will be before the 9th Circuit.

On the Edge of My Seat

Update:  Judge Mueller rules Controlled Substances Act Constitutional.  This means the good guys lost. More, after I have a chance to analyze the opinion.
---------
Today is April 15, and 9th Circuit Judge Kimberly Mueller is about to tell us whether Congress' classification of marijuana as a Schedule I drug violates the U.S. Constitution.

I've been waiting on amphetamine tenterhooks, as it were, to see just what the hell is going to happen. No matter how the judge rules, I believe the NORML lawyers on the case (Zena Gilg and Heather Burke) will happily appeal it all the way to the SCOTUS if necessary.

Meanwhile, Congress appears to be on the verge of placing marijuana in Schedule 2--the same class as cocaine and hillbilly heroin.

If I understand NORML's position (and I probably do), Schedule 2 could also be unconstitutional, essentially because the science is overwhelming that marijuana is both non-toxic and non-addictive, key components of the Schedule 2 designation.

In the meantime, formerly pot-free zones like Oklahoma and Indiana suddenly have legal weed in their midst.  In Oklahoma, where a seed can get you jail time there are Indian Reservations, sovereign nations where Congress has just deemed it will allow marijuana cultivation and sales--

Indiana, on the other hand, blissfully (from cloistered white middle-America standards) free of Injuns, was myopic enough to pass the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), effectively granting businesses the "right" to discriminate against people if they want to--

But emphasizing first-amendment religious freedom opens the door to marijuana use as a religious sacrament, and a minister in Indiana has already jumped at the chance.

The Oregon legislature, meanwhile, seems hell-bent on continuing the War Against Marijuana, albeit with larger exemptions: the Oregon Liquor Control Commission has already requested armed police to enforce marijuana laws (how long before someone is gunned down or beaten senseless at a pot shop with their hands up in surrender?), swearing they won't use that authority to go door-to-door making sure you don't exceed four plants or eight ounces; just trust them. 

Don't know about y'all, but my days of trusting cops are long over, and the legislature and OLCC have likewise proven themselves unable to effect the Will of the People. 

Marijuana is not a dangerous drug, and indeed is not a drug at all.  It is SO SAFE, in fact, that it is impossible to name a single substance that is safer to ingest.

Alcohol?  Don't make me laugh.
Acetaminophen? Nope.
Aspirin?  Nope. 
Plain water? Wrong again--

Wait--marijuana is less toxic than drinking freakin' water?

'Fraid so.

---------

Judge Mueller held a five-day evidentiary hearing on the safety of marijuana, and postponed her ruling once already.  Some take this as a sign she is writing an extensive rationale for her decision, something only necessary if she rules the law unconstitutional.

The contents of that hearing--win or lose--is the basic science we will use to achieve true legalization.

Updates on this--and on the grow-adventure thread--soon.

Peace.

Training Day

Frenetic pace of late leaves little time for explication, but suffice it to say that if the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rules that marijuana's classification as a dangerous drug with no uses whatsoever is unconstitutional next week--then EVERYTHING, including each state's medical program, is tossed in the air, nothing is certain, and we are in for a long, litigious ride.  

More after the court issues its opinion on March 25.

In the meantime, an anecdote that ties in with the bits that started awhile ago, the original bits are here, here and here.    Peace--
  -------------------------------

It's not yet 6 a.m. the Monday following the full-moon ceremony.  I walk through a chilly fog in a northern Mendocino town.  I'm parked just off the freeway on the designated street, the Acura dwarfed among heavy pickups. I approach a group of maybe a dozen men gathered in the parking lot outside a string of darkened office-cottages. They are clad mostly in Carhart  jeans, heavy boots, woolen caps and shirts, neck gaiters or collars turned up against the mist, sipping giant coffees, passing a glass pipe and a 3-paper rocket. 
 
Looking for Ted.

No one answers, but the guy hitting the joint nods and extends it to me, and I step into their circle.  A gleaming king-cab F350 glides up and kills its lights, engine idling. The driver's window drops silently, and a wildly-bearded redhead leans out and reaches for the pipe, baring a popeye forearm with a coho salmon tattoo.
 
Someone nudges me. That'd be Ted.  
  
Morning gents, he drawls.  Dave, take five guys and meet Nate at Covelo.  You'll need three carpenters, plus people who can dig. Everyone else to Redwood Valley. He looks my way.  New guy, come with me. 

I climb into the passenger side of the cab, exhaling smoke, and feel my ears pop as I pull the door closed. Ted tosses a clipboard into the tool-cluttered rear of the cab and backs onto Highway 101. He accelerates south into the fog and turns on the headlights, then turns to me.
 
So. How do we know you?

Isis, I say.  Came down for full moon and harvest.  I'm  camped on her north ridge for maybe another week, with a searchlight, a siren and dogs----

He nods knowingly, beard waving.  Good plan. Glad you're there.  Scooby'll rip you right off.

Beg pardon?

He laughs. Those darn kids. Like at the end of every Scooby Doo.   He thumps his chest, holds out a rough hand. Ted. Resin Nate's my little brother. 

Gurn. We shake.

Do construction?

I can frame, I've done foundation work--

Perfect.  Lot of folks got flooded this past spring, so today we put in another french drain.  We only work grows, and we can't keep up.  He rummages around the console caddy, hands me a silver box. Gear's in there.  Load up a bowl for Nate. He starts to decelerate.

Nate? 

Cops impounded his truck--there he is!

And there he was, sitting atop a cooler on the shoulder of southbound 101, framed by a misty mountain in pre-dawn light. Resin Nate smoothed back his dreads and stood up.

With Everyone

from the ethically besieged Governor of our fair state (live press conference here as I type) to out-of-touch state legislators willing to ignore the Will of the People, marijuana in Oregon is poised to become an expensive commodity, and the War on Drugs will continue unabated, albeit with larger exemptions.

My non-lawyer friends--and even many of them, who should know better--have relaxed to the point of giddiness.

In the meantime, reefer-madness rhetoric about Protecting The Children (and I have to side with master Carlin on this one) and other profoundly disproven theories are trotted out yet again to create a regulatory scheme fostering marijuana for non-poor white people.

In order to create reasonable regulations, the pro-pot science must be on the record.

We currently strive to make it so.

Peace.

It Is Hard

To give a goddamn about  trivialities like "legal" pot when the killer-cop non-indictments continue to pile up in America's back yard, cooking in the sun like the body of Michael Brown--or gasping "I can't breathe" under half a ton of cops, cops who chat casually and wave to the camera as a completely non-violent member of society lies dying at their feet.

So let us pause to remember that at the End of the Day, Blanston isn't fooled or lulled into any false sense of complacency.  The illegal wars by drone, kill lists, lack of habeas corpus and the ever-more-in-your-face-motherfucker police state continue unabated, and the war has clearly, finally, come home.

I have nothing more to say at the moment.

When I return--soon--to post on the inarguably bread-and-circus issue of the pot industry--please know that I know I am ignoring fundamental flaws in a system that may well be set to implode.

Or explode.

More, soon.   Peace.