Marijuana in the news, indirectly this time
Just as some US states and many former users do the smart things, ICE goons foolishly step in...
Alas, Rastafari DIDN’T partake of the sacred ganja weed.
Vices, crimes, sustainability and idiocy
by Eric Jackson
Trips down memory lanes that some would imagine must have been erased, triggered by this past week’s headlines, the curiosity of a history major and part-time farmer and ugly scenes that have been the subject of international scandals and conversations more heated than enlightening.
Back in my student days, I used to smoke a lot of pot. The habit persisted for many years, but then for even more years I have not used the stuff.
It wasn’t because cops appeared at my door, or that some Chick pamphlet about that particular vice saved me just in time — if all other things go righteously — from an eternity burning in Hell.
Back then on campus, some student senators and campus newspaper folks who took the dimmest views of my activism to decriminalize marijuana were heavy tobacco smokers. We’re all in our 70s now, those of us who made it so far, and a bunch who didn’t make it died of tobacco-related diseases. Not just the smokers, but also people who didn’t themselves smoke but lived in smoke-filled environments with those who did.
MEANWHILE
Masked and anonymous ICE goons raided a legal marijuana farm in California, brutalizing and taking away both US citizens and mainly Mexican undocumented migrant workers. The government of Mexico registered its protest.
A MAGA source, which because of that cult’s and its leader’s incessant lies should never have its declarations taken at face value, accused the Democratic government of a state where pot is legal and taxed of paying subsidies to a large corporate marijuana farm.
This smoke shop in Ann Arbor, where notorious former marijuana and political prisoner John Sinclair is said to have bought his first LEGAL bag of weed, announced that it’s closing its doors in light of not enough business.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi4VDlQviqY&si=alH2ZoSOlmzbiEBB
Yeah, I was there. A few days later, the Michigan Supreme Court let him out of prison, where he had been serving 9 1/2 to 10 years for delivery — without any money entering into the transaction — of two joints to an undercover agent. Three years later I was publicity director for a local initiative campaign to reduce the penalty for marijuana offenses in Ypsilanti to a $5 fine.
Do we want to get 2020s about it? Do we want to get in reference to Panama about it?
From time to time the National Police here post a video or still photo of them taking away some bound young man for “micro-trafficking,” that is, selling some small amount of an illegal drug, generally marijuana.
In jurisdictions where marijuana is legal and taxed, yesteryear’s economic structure no longer applies. The price of marijuana was elevated because it was illegal. Where that is no longer the case, notions of state revenue based on those higher prices proved unrealistic. It’s still a money-maker that helps governments to pay for the services they provide but isn’t the cash cow that some had expected that it would be.
Panama could legalize right now and immediately save the courts, police and prisons the expenses of dealing with marijuana offenses, but those savings might be offset a bit by added health care costs. As should be intuitive, smoking anything isn’t good for the heart and ever more rigorous scientific studies are confirming this notion.
So do we want to compare with another leafy substance that’s legal, regulated (no sales to minors at least) and taxed? Let’s not be so foolish as to think that the thing that’s less deadly is harmless and risk-free.
But Americans would do well to consider the tobacco economy and what it has done for and to the USA. It is, after all, a republic largely founded by tobacco farmers.
George Washington grew tobacco, and is it a coincidence that at the time of the American Revolution he was insolvent? It was no huge shame, as that rebellion against rule from London was about Navigation Acts, taxation schemes, territorial restrictions and agricultural mandates to squeeze those 13 colonies. It got to the point that a great many of their residents were broke.
And tobacco? That plant strips the soil of nutrients. You can’t profitably grow the stuff in the same place season after season. You have to rotate, fertilize, or get more land. More land as in west of the Appalachian Mountains, where the British sought to forbid colonization.
When did the Democrats have their first Jefferson-Jackson dinner? Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson both grew tobacco and disliked one another. Jefferson arranged so that his slave concubine Sally Hemings and his children by her were not enslaved after his passing, but his will was to free all of his slaves but the debts he left behind meant that they were auctioned off to make the estate solvent. When Jackson died in 1845 his tobacco and cotton plantation in Tennessee was a going concern, which his adopted son and heir by and large squandered. The mansion is still there but it never really stood for the fabulous profits of tobacco growing.
That first Jeff-Jack Dinner must have been in a smoke-filled room and one of the reasons why I expect that is a key to tobacco’s profitability — nicotine is both addictive and a cultural trait. Politicians gathering to smoke and plot the future of that part of the world where they hold sway or wish to do so is one of the clichés of US culture.
Tobacco use also kills people, or in many other cases has them live their later years in compromised health. One recent study estimates that that cigarette use costs American society $2752 per current smoker and $1083 per former smoker. As to government’s share of the burden, offset that by the tax revenues.
Seen from many angles, both marijuana and tobacco are less than stable cornerstones for national economies — no matter what the Cuban cigar industry might say.
Mainstream US culture finds it insufferable to make too much of an issue of unhealthy vices — but listen to some of the reverends and notice all of the drug offenders living behind bars. It’s one of those culture wars issues that’s tearing American society apart, and that isn’t so healthy either.
Don’t let other people do the voting. US citizens living in Panama can register to vote via Vote From Abroad.
