cannabisnews.com: The Truce On Drugs
function share_this(num) {
 tit=encodeURIComponent('The Truce On Drugs');
 url=encodeURIComponent('http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/27/thread27220.shtml');
 site = new Array(5);
 site[0]='http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u='+url+'&title='+tit;
 site[1]='http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit.php?url='+url+'&title='+tit;
 site[2]='http://digg.com/submit?topic=political_opinion&media=video&url='+url+'&title='+tit;
 site[3]='http://reddit.com/submit?url='+url+'&title='+tit;
 site[4]='http://del.icio.us/post?v=4&noui&jump=close&url='+url+'&title='+tit;
 window.open(site[num],'sharer','toolbar=0,status=0,width=620,height=500');
 return false;
}






The Truce On Drugs
Posted by CN Staff on November 29, 2012 at 07:56:50 PT
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells 
Source: New York Magazine
New York Magazine -- Cannabis is a highly persuadable plant. It thrives in Afghanistan; it grows beautifully in Mexico. It can prosper indoors or outdoors, in contained environments or expansive ones. Even on the essentials, like soil, light, and water, accommodations can be made. Cannabis in the wild will flower only once a year, early in the fall, but it can be tricked. Indoors, artificial light can be timed to mimic the patterns of the early sunsets of autumn, seducing the plant to bud; outside, the same effect is achieved by laying parabolic tarps, each shaped like the St. Louis arch, over the crop to obscure the sun. Nor does cannabis require expert botanists. There is a pattern that has been showing up in the criminal courts of Northern California in which a day laborer, often an illegal immigrant, is picked up for work, driven to tend a marijuana garden growing deep in Mendocino National Forest, and told that he is now in the employ of the Mexican Mafia. The guess, locally, is that the Mexican Mafia is not really involved, that this is just a ghost story to make sure the laborers stay put. But still, an untrained day laborer hired at Home Depot is all you need to manage a large crop. He’ll do fine.
Marijuana has remained mostly illegal, even as many Americans have come to consider it harmless and normal, and so it now occupies a uniquely ambiguous place in American law and life. There are a few places in the United States that have been known for decades for marijuana—far-northern California, Kentucky—where people are comfortable with sedition, and willing to live outside of the law. But during the last decade, as growing and selling marijuana began to edge out of the shadows, these places have become the sites of this country’s first experiments with tacit decriminalization. And so the business has shifted, too. “We have to face facts,” says a veteran California grower named Anna Hamilton. “We are in a commodity business.” The full implications of this first became clear to Kristin Nevedal one day a few years ago, when some neighbors of hers in southern Humboldt County, four hours north of San Francisco, noticed a rainbow, discolored and distended, rising over their yard. This part of California is gorgeous, and hallucinatory, but even here a weird rainbow is an unusual sight, and so they investigated. Next door was a large indoor growing operation, and when they walked over, they saw an abandoned generator leaking fuel into Hacker Creek. Soon there were diesel rainbows up and down the stream. “The gentleman who owned the property was in Thailand,” Nevedal says. Nevedal helped found the association of cannabis growers in Humboldt, and she is a bit of an idealist about pot. Everything about the episode—the use of diesel, the indoor growing, the recklessness, but mostly the absenteeism—seemed an affront. She says “Thailand” the way a Sufi mystic might say “Dubai.” That Humboldt County has remained so much a culture apart has something to do with the origami folds of its canyons and hills, which permit a certain isolation, but something more to do with pot. Driving through Myers Flat once, I saw a dreadlocked blonde girl, obese and braless, filling a van with male hitchhikers, like a cross between a community bus and a gender-reversal Manson Family. Most other back-to-the-land communes of the seventies eventually packed up and retreated, their members quietly reabsorbed into the suburban belt. The hippies in Humboldt had cannabis, which meant that though they were in many ways beyond the reach of government, they could pay for their own schools, for fire departments and private roads. They could see a future, and so they stayed.Still, reminders of their alienation were everywhere. By the early eighties, the California law-enforcement agencies were conducting annual raids (called by their acronym, CAMP). You would walk onto your deck, on a sunny south slope, and suddenly a helicopter would be hovering there, cops with rifles scanning the valley below. Camouflaged swat teams jumped out of forest groves pointing guns. “People here can be a little paranoid anyway—there were an awful lot of Vietnam vets here early on,” one longtime grower says, and the raids made paranoia seem reasonable. But there were side benefits to this armed form of prohibition. One joke here is that the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting was actually the Campaign to Appreciate Marijuana Prices. If you were savvy enough to dodge through the forest with helicopters overhead, carrying plants on a canvas stretcher, if you knew how to trim a tall tanoak in the forest so that its topmost branches protected the crop from view while still letting in just enough sunlight, then you could really make it. By 1996, marijuana here was going for $4,000 a pound.Complete Article: http://nymag.com/news/features/war-on-drugs-2012-12/Source: New York Magazine (NY)Author: Benjamin Wallace-WellsPublished: November 25, 2012Copyright: 2012 New York MagazineContact: nyletters nymag.comWebsite: http://www.newyorkmag.com/CannabisNews -- Cannabis Archiveshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/list/cannabis.shtml 
Home Comment Email Register Recent Comments Help 
     
     
     
     




Comment #3 posted by FoM on November 29, 2012 at 16:48:33 PT
schmeff 
You're very welcome. The author was on MSNBC a couple times today. That is what made me look for the article.
[ Post Comment ]


Comment #2 posted by schmeff on November 29, 2012 at 13:47:10 PT
Well Done
This article is sort of an updated version of the movie "Traffic" in essay form. It really emphasizes, as did the movie, the societal costs of waging the ceaselessly uphill battle of prohibition.Too often, my U.S.centric bias causes me to focus on things like the thousands of my fellow citizens being criminalized for being in possession of dried flowers, or the political chicanery involved in plundering our right to control our own substances. I think about how racially and economically biased the Drug War is, and how unjust that people suffering from cancer and numerous other painful diseases and maladies are misinformed, misled and denied this miracle herb. All of this dystopia that so offends me is just a minor irritation compared what is experienced by those who are not U.S.South of U.S., our neighbors are experiencing the actual carnage of war. Tens of thousands dead, rampant corruption and instability, criminals overwhelming and threatening legitimate* government (* Did I mention corruption?) In Mexico, there is a daily dose of death, destruction and mayhem spawned by the Drug War, and very few of the population has much access to peace or security. In the U.S. the Drug War is mostly an occupation and policing action; in the countries south of U.S. borders it's a war zone. The literal battlefield. Shame on me for always thinking about U.S.If the carnage in South America was happening to U.S., the Drug War would have died in the womb. When similar violence and criminality was spawned by alcohol Prohibition, the "war on alcohol" was scrapped. Good for U.S. that the battlefield is mostly out of sight, behind the curtain. Bad for mostly everyone south of U.S.At the beginning of cannabis prohibition, most of U.S. were propagandized by the corporate media of the day, William Randolph Hearst, to believe that cannabis was a dangerous soul-stealing threat used by the inferior and lazy Mexican race. His newspapers called it 'marijuana', Spanish street slang, for purposes of racial association. Pretty much what you'd expect from the Father of yellow journalism. (I personally prefer the term cannabis because I recognize the racial slur implied by the "M" word. William Randolph Hearst had a bigger readership than I, however, so the term marijuana prevails, nearly a century later.)The Drug War sputters on. The same interests of wealth, greed and control inform U.S. today. Cannabis prohibition generates high profits for the Police/Justice Industrial State here in the occupied territories, as well as for the pharmaceutical, chemical, agricultural and energy corporate sectors. They have managed to sweep the most horrific cost of the Drug war behind the curtain, away from outrage.I'm not authorized to apologize for U.S., but I apologize for myself to my southern neighbors. Shame on U.S. for our disasterU.S., hypocritical, racist and profit-driven War. Not in my name.The article is well worth the time invested to read nine pages. Thanks for the post FoM.
[ Post Comment ]


Comment #1 posted by FoM on November 29, 2012 at 07:58:57 PT
Comment on New York Magazine Article
I don't think this whole article would fit so I posted the first page and a link. It has 9 pages!
[ Post Comment ]


Post Comment