Sep 28, 2000:
Stoned
Or just stupid?
Sep 28, 2000:
Stoned |
|
Dude, you want to buy some buds?
No thanks, I replied I have friends enough, and most of them are trouble.
I walked past him and down the organic juice aisle. Obviously I knew that he had pegged me for someone who might be interested in buying marijuana from him. I wasn’t, actually, even if I had been I probably would have thought twice before buying it from a guy unwise enough to solicit random strangers in a supermarket. After all, that’s what park bandshells were built for. I was mulling this over when the guy approached me again in front of the free range poultry case.
Um, I have some killer nugs, I need to trade them for some cash.
Look, I asked Do I look like the kind of guy who’d buy pot from you in a supermarket?
Yes. He answered. You live in Boulder, right?
I had to admit that he was right. But I didn’t want any ganja, and hadn’t for a long time.
I have smoked marijuana. One cold winter’s day in 1983, I tried some with some other kids, underneath a bandshell in New York City. Unlike some public figures, I freely admit to having inhaled.
...I exhaled in 1990. When I came to, I was a junior at a small liberal arts college near the Canadian border. I have only vague recollections of having gotten through high school (apparently I gave a commencement speech of some sort,) being kicked out of my mother’s house ( But I digress…
For better or worse, mind altering substances played a part in my adolescence. Drugs are known to have played a part in a lot of people’s lives people like Al Gore, for one. And George W. Bush, for another. Both of whom are publicly for continuing the War on Drugs, a ludicrous national policy that would have sent either of them to prison had they ever had the misfortune to be caught in their young and foolish days. Well, had they not belonged to the tiny but protected American minority group known as the immensely overpriveleged..
Drugs were an issue in the 1992 election. In this election, one of the candidates was known to have smoked (but not inhaled) marijuana, and two candidates who had either never done it, or hadn’t ever been caught. There was quite a bit of finger pointing in that election, but the non-inhaling pot smoker prevailed (sending a dangerous Its OK to waste message to the nation’s youth). Many people, myself included, figured that the war on drugs (Begun by Ronald Reagan, a man who, even then displayed all of the signs of chronic marijuana abuse) was over. I mean, how can a president whose admitted to smoking pot keep throwing people in jail for marijuana offenses?
How wrong we were. Defying all logic, the drug war only escalated under Clinton. Convictions for marijuana related offences soared, and with it, the prison population.
(China bashers, take note: Their incarcerated population is 110 per 100,000. At 650 per 100 K, Ours is 6 times as that. Source: UN Global Policy Forum, 1999). The number of people currently in jail for non-violent drug related offenses is nearing the half million mark. That’s more people than the entire prison population of the European union.
Calls for ending this war on drugs are coming from all sides of the political spectrum. Among the politicians who have come out for decriminalization of Marijuana are Governor Gary Johnson of New Mexico, Congressman Tom Campbell of California, , Former Mayor of Baltimore Kurt Schmoke. Liberal democrats, no doubt. Think again. Both the governor and the congressmen are republicans.
Which brings us back to Al and Dubya. The vice president admitted ’tway back in 1988 that he and his wife, Tipper, smoked marijuana in their misspent youth but never said he was a regular user. However, according to John C. Warnecke, Al’s friend from Harvard, the candidates pot use was somewhat more…shall we say, Boulderesque. In a recent interview, Warnecke said of his college daze with Gore:
Of the countless rumors of his own cocaine use, candidate Bush has said only admitted to having once been young and foolish. Bush has not made Gore’s admission of drug use an issue in his campaign. A magnanimous gesture, or simple self preservation on his part? We can only guess that neither candidate wants to start hurling stones from their own glass houses. Wouldn’t it make sense for both candidates to agree to make the re-assessment of the war on drugs part of their platforms.
But neither candidate will touch the issue with a ten foot bong. Both Gore and Bush are for continuing the war on drugs, opposed to medical marijuana use, and for a continuation of a drug policy which benefits the prison-industrial complex and pharmaceutical industry at the expense of millions of Americans whose only crime is a desire for personal mental alteration. As with many issues in this campaign, the desire of big money to become even bigger money is winning out.
I considered this as I continued my shopping. Perhaps the supermarket is the most reasonable place to buy pot. With the playing field safely leveled, Why don’tt the candidates justcome out of the closet on this issue? In a swing state like California, one could only imagine what a difference the stoner vote could make.
Joshua Samuel Brown is a freelance writer who has lived in Boulder, San Francisco, and (briefly) the Taiwan Strait island of Penghu. He has only vague recollections of any occurrences between the years 1983 and 1990, and would be grateful if anyone who knew him during this time would contact him with any details whatsoever at phibes@ficnet.net
We smoked more than once, more than a few times, we smoked a lot. We smoked in his car, in his house, we smoked in his parents’t house, in my house, we smoked on weekends. We smoked a lot.
copyright 2000 Joshua Samuel Brown