COLUMNS

FREE THE WEED 67

2016-12-10T14:58:48Z

FREE THE WEED 67

A Column by John Sinclair

Highest greetings from the Orbit Room in Grand Rapids, where I’m attending the 13th Medical Marijuana Conference sponsored by the MMM Report, and welcome to the great state of Michigan, where the state legislature and the governor have just made the first positive step toward legalizing marijuana since it was declassified as a narcotic on April 1, 1972.

The best part of the new law amended the citizen-mandated Michigan Medical Marihuana Act of 2008 to allow for the manufacture and use of marijuana-infused products by qualified patients.

Then there’s the Medical Marihuana Facilities Licensing Act “to license and regulate the growth, processing, transport and provisioning of medical marijuana,” which is indeed a mixed blessing as we will see.

Finally, they’ve constructed the evil Marihuana Tracking Act and a seed-to-sale tracking system to track all medical marijuana from seed source to smoker, which extends and gives new life to the massive police bureaucracy dedicated to making life hell for marijuana producers and smokers of every persuasion.

In fact, this new law has been carefully designed not only to extend police powers with respect to medical marijuana patients, but also to multiply and provide funding for the expanded police presence in the medical marijuana community.

It’s a new thing for the government of Michigan to take any action on marijuana that could be construed as positive, but it’s not as if they’ve moved out of increased intelligence, knowledge or compassion but instead to head off further citizen initiatives that would take more power out of the hands of the law enforcement interests.

Quite frankly, this result is the exact opposite of what the citizens meant when we voted for the Michigan Medical Marihuana Act in 2008. What we want is for the police to be completely removed from playing any role in the world of marijuana. The police have no business with marijuana beyond harassing and persecuting smokers and producers of the weed.

I know I say this all the time, but the truth is that there’s nothing wrong with marijuana whatsoever. Marijuana is a benevolent herb, a naturally-occurring plant that has incredible healing powers and is good for the mind and spirit as well.

What people do with marijuana is of no concern to the forces of law and order. No one needs to be protected from marijuana. An arrest for marijuana use, possession or production can never be justified. I’m not opposed to regulations regarding the growing, distribution or sales of marijuana, but arrests and prosecution for marijuana “offenses” have no place in our society.

In the interest of full disclosure, let me outline my own experience with the Michigan marijuana laws. I first heard about marijuana in 1957 when I read a book called On The Road by Jack Kerouac. I wanted some at once, but there wasn’t any way to get any where I was until several years later, when a friend in Flint turned me on early in 1962. I’ve been a daily smoker ever since.

I moved to Detroit in 1964 to attend graduate school at Wayne State University as a budding poet and music journalist with a passion for contemporary jazz and poetry. I met a lot of fellow poets, musicians and creative artists and most of us smoked weed together.

From my constant presence at jazz clubs in Detroit, I got to know the guys who had the weed and I could purchase enough to take care of my personal needs and those of my friends who got high. This was essentially an act of compassion, but when the police caught up with me I was charged with Violation of State Narcotics Laws and taken to court to face a sentence of a minimum-mandatory 20 years in prison with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment for selling $10 worth of weed to an undercover State Police agent.

Faced with this draconian punishment, I pled guilty to possession of the weed and received a sentence of two years’ probation. This was enough to convince me to stop selling small amounts of weed to my friends but not enough to make me quit smoking it. But I was outraged by the official claim that marijuana was a narcotic and, inspired by my friends Ed Sanders and Allen Ginsberg in New York City, I started a group called Detroit LEMAR to try to begin to correct this injustice by legalizing marijuana.

This changed my status with the Detroit narcotics police from user and former small-time dealer to a perceived major threat to their continued dominance of the marijuana community and, to make a long story short, I was targeted for persecution and solicited by undercover agents.

First I was persuaded to obtain a small amount of weed from a friend of mine and arrested again on the Sales of Narcotics charge. I wanted to mount a challenge to the constitutionality of the law, since marijuana was patently not a narcotic, but my lawyer persuaded me to cop another plea in the face of the mandatory 20-year minimum sentence upon conviction, and I was sent to the Detroit House of Correction for six months.

During this entire period I was functioning as a cultural activist at the Detroit Artists Workshop and somewhat of a minor public figure in the local arts community. Upon my release from DeHoCo I was targeted again by the Detroit Narcotics Bureau and convinced by an undercover policewoman to give her two joints just before Christmas of 1966. I was arrested and charged again with Violation of State Narcotics Laws—Sales to face the mandatory minimum 20-year sentence for the third time.

For this ordeal I was blessed with the legal representative if attorneys Sheldon Otis and Justin “Chuck” Ravitz and together we successfully challenged the constitutionality of Michigan’s marijuana laws, eventually proving before the Michigan Supreme Court that marijuana was not a narcotic and that a 10-year sentence for possessing marijuana was cruel and unusual punishment.

But this process ate up five years of my life, the last 29 months of which were spent in maximum security Michigan prisons without appeal bond while I waited for the Supreme Court to hear and decide my case.

For me, a poet, writer, cultural and political activist who liked to get high, every minute of this sentence constituted cruel and unusual punishment, and not one minute of it was warranted. Marijuana had been wrongly defined as a criminal substance. I had done nothing wrong to anyone by using marijuana, and I was doing the copper woman a favor by giving her the two joints. Further, I was entrapped into making this transaction in violation of the law, and I was given a sentence longer and more strenuous than those customarily received by robbers and killers.

It was 45 years ago when I was released from prison and discharged from my 9-1/2 to 10-year marijuana sentence, but the police have continued to run amok for all those years, arresting and imprisoning thousands upon thousands of innocent marijuana smokers year after year after year.

Now I’ve preached for too long to finish my presentation about the new marijuana laws, so I’ll have to continue with that next month. But you see why I’m opposed to the police being part of the marijuana world where they have no business whatsoever, always have been and always will be.

Free The Weed!

—Grand Rapids

September 25, 2016

FREE THE WEED 66

2016-12-10T14:43:43Z

FREE THE WEED 66

A Column by John Sinclair

Highest greetings from the northeastern sector of Detroit, where I’m visiting with my daughter Sunny and my granddaughter Beyonce for the next few weeks since returning from my summer in Amsterdam. I’d like to thank once again the people at Sensi Seeds for putting me up in one of their lavish guest apartments at the beginning and end of my stay, and to my man Tariq Khan for taking me in at his pad in the Heesterveld Creative Community in the Bijlmer for all the days in between. That was really sweet.

Now I’m back in the U.S.A. in the middle of the toxic waste dump called the presidential election season, trying to get mentally prepared for either the best—our first female president—or the worst, which would be the installation of Mr. “You’re Fired” in the White House.

This reminds me of the fall of 1991, 25 years ago, when I moved from Detroit to New Orleans in time for the historic gubernatorial race that pitted former Democratic governor Eddie Edwards—known as “the crook”—against popular Ku Klux Klan candidate David Duke. I say popular because Duke, running as a Republican, was deeply beloved by the white people of Louisiana and ended up with 58% of all Caucasian votes for governor.

Fortunately the City of New Orleans and its mayor, Marc Morial, now director of the National Urban League, mobilized an incredible percentage of the Democratic voters in the city—in some precincts 88 to 90%—to register and vote for Edwards, bringing the statewide total to the point where Duke was driven back into relative oblivion. What a relief! This guy David Duke, who celebrates 4/20 every year as Adolph Hitler’s birthday, has done a lot of goofy things in the past 25 years. Now he’s running as the Republican candidate for Senator in Louisiana and has roundly endorsed Donald Trump for president. Trump acted like he didn’t know who Duke was, and took a while to say maybe he wasn’t exactly looking to the KKK for support.

This is what we’re up against: as if Ronald Reagan wasn’t bad enough, a mediocre actor who could play the B-movie role of President of the United States to perfection, now we’ve got a candidate who played The Boss on the most popular reality television show of the past 10 years and amassed a fanatical following of people into whose living rooms he’s been invited week after week for more than 500 times.

I guess what we’ll see in November is whether there are more reality television addicts casting their votes for The Boss than intelligent citizens—whether Democrats or Republicans—that want someone in charge who knows what she’s doing. Me, I’m one of those people who Bill Schuette is fighting that always votes straight Democratic, and I’ll be doing that once again on November 1st.

I’ve always been quite a bit to the left of the Democratic party, but never to its right. I’m more of a democratic socialist, like Bernie Sanders, and it was quite a thrill to see Senator Sanders drum up such a massive groundswell of support for the principles of economic democracy and comprehensive government service to the populace.

If we’re lucky, the young people who were attracted to the Sanders campaign and continue to fight for his positions within the Democratic platform for the coming election will maintain their interest in changing our political system during the four years before the next presidential contest. Usually some good ideas come out during an election cycle, but they go away for four years until the next go-around. Maybe this time it will be different, but who knows?

What does all this gibberish have to do with freeing the weed? Well, first of all, the reason we’re still being persecuted by the federal government and more than half the states for smoking weed is because we’ve consistently elected the wrong people into office. They can only flim-flam us as long as we agree to keep returning these numbskulls to the legislative and judicial seats they’ve occupied for so long. Put in some people who think and feel as we do and you’ll have a different country to live in.

I’d like to say here how much I’ve enjoyed having our first African-American president for the past eight years. I’ve always wanted to have a black president and I wish he could stay for eight years more, but it will be kicks to replace him with our first female president and witness her progress in maintaining and extending the progressive elements of the Democratic administration.

Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump

From my point of view, the one good thing about Donald Trump’s idiotic campaign is that it may well have the very positive effect of blocking the Republican party’s domination of both houses of the legislature through a resounding rejection of The Boss and his stablemates in the GOP by the voting public. This would return our democratic system to some semblance of balance and allow the executive to get some of its initiatives enacted into law.

In my long lifetime I’ve never witnessed anything like the Republican obstruction of every presidential initiative by the hated Obama for every day of his eight-year reign. Our democratic legislative system, bad enough in practice under the best of conditions, has been completely stymied by the GOP obstructionists and has frozen our country’s progress in many ways.

Again, from my personal point of view, a lot of good things have happened just the same, like the movement toward an actual comprehensive health care system, the recognition and regularization of relations with Cuba, the pardoning of hundreds of drug prisoners, the attempt to develop a humane immigration policy.

But here’s the question: why hasn’t the president, known in college as “The Interceptor” for his practice of moving himself up in the toking order to get a few more puffs in a group setting—why hasn’t this guy acted to bring the federal war on marijuana to a shuddering conclusion? Why are we still waiting for this dumb shit to end? And will it be any different when another notorious student pot smoker, Hillary Clinton, comes into office? What’s wrong with these people? FREE THE WEED!

In closing, I’d like to send a word of greeting to the people from High Times magazine who have decided to present a series of Cannabis Cup events in Clio, Michigan, just outside of my home town of Flint, including the one I’m getting ready to attend this weekend as a guest of my friend Laith al Saadi, the powerful guitarist and singer from Ann Arbor who’s headlining he celebration.

As the one and only High Priest of the Cannabis Cup (Amsterdam, 1998) and recipient of the High Times Lifetime Achievement Award (Detroit, 2011) for my 50 years of marijuana legalization activism, I’ve felt slighted that the organizers have never even extended an invitation for me to attend their event in my home town, and I had to invite myself into Laith’s band for this appearance so I could be even a small part of the proceedings. One always hopes for more from people like this, but so what? I’ll be there anyway. And I’ll say it again:

FREE THE WEED!

—Detroit

August 23-24, 2016

FREE THE WEED 65

2016-08-02T15:49:27Z

FREE THE WEED 65

A Column by John Sinclair

Highest greetings from Amsterdam, where I’m enjoying one of the finest summers ever with lots of sunshine and not so much rain. As a Flint native, I’m accustomed to long hot summers with plenty of heat, and as a former resident of New Orleans, I know what heat and humidity are all about.

There’s nothing like that here, and it stays kind of chilly most of the time even after the sunniest days, but it’s great to have more sun than rain in one’s life here in Amsterdam, and I’ll take it!

I had a great experience the other night when I went with my friend Leslie Lopez to the Nord to visit his little recording studio. I used to spend a lot of time with Lopez in the basement of Café the Zen, where his studio used to be, and we made an album together down there several years ago. It’s called Let’s Go Get ’Em if you ever want to hear it, and you can download it at CD-Baby for a modest payment.

Speaking of payment, the economics of marijuana consumption has been a hot topic in the mainstream media and among internet commentators. Of course, those of us who came to the marijuana liberation struggle from a spiritual perspective, with a special interest in the medicinal uses of the sacrament, have always known that marijuana would turn into big business once people got a chance to use it without punishment. But it’s really booming now.

For example, A story published by the Cannabis Law Group looks forward to the “all-but-inevitable legalization for recreational use” of marijuana in California this fall and reports that “investors are preparing for the day when legalization comes.

“In fact, such explosive growth is expected in the cannabis business and so much profit is expected to be generated, the situation is being described as ‘a new California gold rush’ as new businesses open, new products come into the marketplace, and new investor money comes in.”

The story explains that “the cannabis industry is an underground industry which is tremendously profitable. It's now becoming investible for the first time. As cannabis businesses come out of the shadows, industry revenue is expected to leap from $2.7 billion in 2014 to around $11 billion by 2019.

“New and innovative products are being developed every day, including a whole new product category consisting of the world's first cannabis distillery, as well as new vaporizer and accessories products.“

On a smaller but not insignificant scale, the state of Louisiana is looking into growing and selling medicinal marijuana products now that the Louisiana Legislature has approved a bill that legalizes the use of marijuana for people suffering from a specific list of debilitating diseases

“The so-called medical marijuana legislation authorizes LSU and Southern University to grow and produce cannabis to be consumed in a liquid form,” Tyler Bridges reports in The New Orleans Advocate, asking in a headline: “How Much Might LSU, Southern, Companies Profit? How Will It Be Distributed?"

And what about the private companies that are now “emerging to try to profit from the new industry by partnering with the universities”? LSU and Southern both report getting calls from representatives of companies that want to rent or sell land or provide a growing facility, while others are inquiring about financing the entire venture with the expectation of earning a profit. “It’s a money-making venture,” Bridges quotes a Southern University official.

On an even deeper level, Karen Turner writes in the Washington Post that “Microsoft Becomes The First Big Tech Company To Get Into The Legal Weed Industry” by “partnering with a cannabis industry-focused software company called Kind Financial to provide ‘seed to sale’ services for cannabis growers that allow them to track inventory, navigate laws and handle transactions—all through Kind’s software systems.“

Tunrer notes that “the partnership marks the first major tech company to attach its name to the burgeoning industry of legal marijuana,” but I’m sure it won’t be the last. Wait until the big pharmaceutical companies get their hands on cannabis!

In fact, one of my favorite sources, Wonkblog, just published a piece by Christopher Ingraham about “Why Pharma Companies Are Fighting Legal Marijuana.” They’re fighting now but, so far as I can see, it’s basically a holding action to keep down progress toward legalization of weed while they figure out how to coopt our natural medicine and bring it into their own highly profitable domain.

But there’s a lot of fascinating information in Ingraham’s story, which points to “a body of research showing that painkiller abuse and overdose are lower in states with medical marijuana laws.

“In the 17 states with a medical-marijuana law in place by 2013, prescriptions for painkillers and other classes of drugs fell sharply compared with states that did not have a medical-marijuana law.

“In medical-marijuana states,” Ingraham reports, “the average doctor prescribed 265 fewer doses of antidepressants each year, 486 fewer doses of seizure medication, 541 fewer anti-nausea doses and 562 fewer doses of anti-anxiety medication.” That’s a lotta missing doses!

“But most strikingly,” he concludes, “the typical physician in a medical-marijuana state prescribed 1,826 fewer doses of painkillers in a given year.

For many of us this is great cause for celebration. But guess what? “These companies have long been at the forefront of opposition to marijuana reform,” Ingraham reveals, ”funding research by anti-pot academics and funneling dollars to groups, such as the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America, that oppose marijuana legalization. Pharmaceutical companies have also lobbied federal agencies directly to prevent the liberalization of marijuana laws.”

Big Pharma makes a strange bedfellow for the law enforcement and prison guard unions that typically lead the charge against marijuana legalization, but when the pharmaceutical industry adjusts its chops to the taste of selling lega cannabis medication, they stand to make big profits while their allies will lose their ill-gotten powers for good.

In closing, It may be kind of a sick thing to say, but the War On Drugs, like legally-enforced racial segregation—with full recognition of their evil intent and inhuman effect—actually resulted in the creation of some beautiful lifeways and cultural constructs developed outside of and in opposition to the Americo-Puritan paradigm that in many ways were far superior to the ones we have now.

Under legal segregation black business and entertainment districts thrived, and there was a palpable sense of community among the citizens of the black ghettoes that hasn’t existed since the one-way street of integration was bulldozed through the black communities of our nation.

By the same token, the culture of interdependence, cooperative farming, underground economics and spiritual sharing that grew up in the wake of the insane marijuana laws created a life for many of us that no longer exists, even though we can buy our weed over the counter now in many locations. But the cost of freedom from imprisonment has been to surrender our identities and become mindless consumers of whatever the pot industry wants us to purchase.

On a personal note, my friend Maryjane Bunker has recently left the Grannies For Grass group to pursue a pair of initiatives of her own: Cannabis Information & Education, an on-line service she writes me “is reaching 3.8 million this a.m.,” and Puff, Puff, Paint, an organization set up to integrate puffing and painting in the process of art therapy. I had some great times when she brought me to Grannies For Grass events, she’s an accomplished and very generous grower, and I wish her every possible success in this next stage of her adventure.

P.S. I started out to say that when I visited Leslie Lopez’s studio in the Noord, it was in an abandoned police station! And we had quite a few laughs sharing a joint and listening to music where the police used to do their ugly business. FREE THE WEED!

—Amsterdam

July 21, 2016

FREETHE WEED 64

2016-07-01T18:57:40Z

FREE THE WEED 64

A Column by John Sinclair

Highest greetings from Amsterdam, where I’m spending the summer in a very interesting section of the city called the Bijlmer that used to be a terrible fear-ridden slum on the outskirts of town but has been redeveloped by the government as a sort of art-centered multi-cultural neighborhood populated by people of many descriptions, from dark-skinned immigrants to young white urban professionals with real jobs and a certain quotient of bohemians both black and white.

The interesting thing is that, unlike in the States, the immigrant population of the former ghetto was not expelled to make the renovated area “safe’ for white people but was included in the redevelopment plans and rehoused as an integral component of the upgraded neighborhood. The oppressive 1950s-style Stalinistic eight-storey project dwellings were razed and replaced with buildings of no more than four floors and the whole thing painted in bright colors marked by diagonal stripes of orange, yellow, green, bright blue, and lots of third-world murals.

I’m staying in the spacious apartment of a new friend named Tariq Khan, a Dutch Rastafarian with big dreads who started out as a rapper called MC Lazy but now is an energetic artistic and cultural activist with his own recording studio in the building around the corner that also houses a hip-hop radio station called Hot Twenty that’s staffed by local youths. Tariq also produces and directs video shoots for many purposes and conducts youth workshops for community groups, but his day job is working for the Sensi Seeds empire at the Hash, Marijuana & Hemp Museum one day, the Cannabis College the next and the Sensi Museum Gallery on Thursdays, where he joins my old friend Joseph who mans the vaporizer and gets people high all day.

What a job! Joseph has been around for a long time and knows everybody who’s into anything in terms of the cannabis culture—he’s even regarded as a spiritual leader in some advanced quarters—so I turned to him when I was desperate to find a place to lodge for the summer after my week-long residency in the Sensi guest quarters was up at the end of May. He hooked me up with Tariq, and Tariq took me straight to his place in the Bijlmer and set me up like a champ.

Sensi Seeds is a remarkable enterprise started by a guy named Ben Dronkers in Rotterdam a long time ago, first as one of Rotterdam’s initial coffeeshops and then as a way to get marijuana growing in Holland by supplying top-quality seeds and encouraging local growers to plant and harvest them. Over the past 30 years Sensi has grown into a mammoth operation known as “the most comprehensive cannabis seed bank in the world,” dispensing millions of seeds to funky farmers all over the world and then pioneering the revitalization of the hemp industry as well.

As the Sensi Seeds website explains, Ben Dronkers started growing marijuana in 1975 and began saving the seeds he found in good quality weed, eventually collecting and categorizing all the cannabis seeds he could find. From the end of the 70s until the mid-80s Ben travelled the world from Central Asia and the Hindu Kush to the Himalayas, down through the subcontinent to Southeast Asia and around the tropics, seeking out the best genetics and focusing on regions famous for their ancient cannabis traditions.

Around 1984 Ben began several cross-breeding programs in order to develop new cannabis hybrids. He gained access to the first examples of the new stabilized hybrids from the US—including Haze and Skunk—and took the final step required for the creation of new, world-class hybrids in Europe. By 1985 he had founded the Sensi Seed Club, expanding and centralizing the process of creating hybrids and keeping meticulous records of plant genealogy and interrelations.

In 1991, Ben bought another seed company from a breeder who had also been working with the US hybrids since the 80s and merged the two companies to form the Sensi Seed Bank. In 1994 he founded HempFlax, a company dedicated to growing and processing industrial hemp, and successfully revived the once-thriving Dutch hemp industry. in 2006 Ben acquired the Flying Dutchmen seed company when his friend the owner decided to retire, and he consolidated its venerable stock with the existing Sensi Seed Bank to make an even more comprehensive collection of cannabis strains.

The great thing about Ben Dronkers and Sensi Seeds is that it isn’t just about raking in the profits like most of the people in this great industry of ours. Sensi has garnered millions of dollars in sales over the years, but—aided and abetted by his friend Ed Rosenthal, the great American cannabis activist—Ben has dedicated a significant portion of his earnings to the creation of public benefit institutions like the Hash Marihuana & Hemp Museum, the Sensi Museum Gallery, and the Cannabis College, which was initially a project of Flying Dutchmen. Among many other things, The Gallery displays Old Masters painted hundreds of years ago which depict ordinary men and women enjoying the smoking of cannabis.

Now these institutions are lined up on the Achterburgwhal in the Red Light District in the center of town, making up a sort of Green Light District of their own along with the Sensi Seed Bank itself and the Sensi Corner Store, formerly the Sensi coffeeshop where I used to hang out and got to know all these incredible people that make up the Sensi empire.

One of my fondest memories of the Sensi coffeeshop was the day I sat down with Ben Dronkers at a table inside and listened while he carried on an intense conversation with a South American man who turned out to be a minister in the new government of Bolivia led by the former coca famer and now head of state, Evo Morales. Evidently Ben and Evo had met and even toked down together on Morales’ visit to Amsterdam before the Bolivian election, and Ben was making a impassioned plea that the new government consider completely legalizing marijuana and establish Bolivia as the world center of cannabis enlightenment.

Dronkers promised that he would move his entire cannabis empire to Bolivia and encourage the international growing community to do likewise, bringing incredible amounts of new revenue to the small South American nation and transforming it into a haven for the worldwide cannabis community of suppliers, growers and consumers.

I listened with rapt attention as Ben’s argument unfolded, but the Bolivian minister calmly explained that there was no chance that the church and moral authorities would let them get away with it, no matter how great an idea it might be. Ben was visibly dejected, but I guessed he was accustomed to official rejection of his visionary ideas and the conversation passed on to more mundane topics.

Well, there were several other topics I’d meant to discuss in this month’s column, but I got carried away thinking about the greatness of Sensi Seeds and now I’m out of space for this time. Of course I continue to feel that one day cannabis will be granted its rightful place in our world of oppression, but it’s never going to be an easy proposition and we’ll just have to keep on fighting every way we can until that happy day. FREE THE WEED!

—Amsterdam

June 24, 2016

FREE THE WEED 63

2016-06-01T22:35:28Z

FREE THE WEED 63

A Column by John Sinclair

Highest greetings from Amsterdam, where I’ve just returned for the summer (if all goes well) to continue my efforts to set up my personal foundation called Stichting John Sinclair in order to make a proper repository for my life’s work, my intellectual properties, copyrighted writings and albums, and artifacts of my creative endeavors including my poetry and book manuscripts, master recordings, and related materials.

I’ve always preserved the materials created by my work as an artist and activist with an eye to the future when I’m no longer here, and in the past I’ve created an archive at the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan for most of the materials and artifacts I’ve amassed over more than 50 years of activity so far. When I moved from Detroit to New Orleans 25 years ago, I left my Detroit jazz archives with the Museum of African American History so they would be available to Detroiters into posterity.

Now I want to create something that’s more than an archive and also more directly under my intellectual control so I can preserve my works in poetry, music, journalism, recording, performance and broadcasting in perpetuity and in a single digital realm. This has been my dream for years, to gather all my things together in one place and make them available long after I’m gone. You can call it an ego trip if you want to, but any sort of artistry is a true ego trip in the sense of following the mental trips one’s self takes and follows in the course of making something in art and of one’s life.

There’s also the evidence of my work outside the art and music world as a cultural and political activist, a relentless opponent of the War On Drugs and a zealous proponent of marijuana legalization all my adult life. I had the honor and the pleasure of kicking off the marijuana movement in Michigan 50 years ago, and in my old age I’m trying to hang on long enough to see the battle won once and for all.

I helped campaign for the first marijuana ballot initiative in California in 1972 and returned to Ann Arbor to make the first feeble attempt to launch a Michigan Marijuana Initiative, beginning a trajectory that hopefully will culminate as a result of the current efforts of MILegalize in full legalization in our state following the November elections this year. At the same time I had the privilege of assisting in the institution of the $5 marijuana law in Ann Arbor, and I was on the Diag for the first Hash Bash and helped for several years to make sure it continued to take place on the first Saturday in April every year.

In more recent years I’ve appeared in support of marijuana legalization at MassCann in Boston, in Seattle and Oregon and Denver and Maine, and frequently in Michigan in many diverse settings. Now, since I first came to Amsterdam as High Priest of the Cannabis Cup in 1998, I’m part of the cannabis culture here in the long-time marijuana capitol of the world, and I’m striving to unite all these strains of my life in one location under the aegis of the John Sinclair Foundation.

I’ve been blessed in my work and my widespread travels over half a century to make legions of friends all over America and Europe, and I’m calling on them now to help me build my foundation. My friend and long-time supporter Sidney of the Ceres Seed Company and the Hempshopper stores has backed my internet radio station at RadioFreeAmsterdam.com, my own website at johnsinclair.us and my FaceBook page for most of the present century, and he’s agreed to serve as the head of the Stichting John Sinclair.

My friend and roommate in Amsterdam for the past several years, drummer, deejay, webmaster and producer Steve “Fly Agaric 23” Pratt, now in Bristol, is playing a key role in the organizational effort and is creating a new website for the Foundation that will integrate the several sites I work from now, including the site he maintains for us called Fattening Blogs Fpr Snakes.

The Fly is also going to direct our crowd-funding project on Indie-Go-Go that launches this month and will run for the next 60 days, working with another friend and Stichting board member in Bristol, guitarist, nightclub manager and former charitable fund-raiser Dylan Harding. Another board member, Jerry Poynton, now in Athens, organized and maintains the literary estate of his late friend Herbert Huncke, the original literary character who helped bring together and inspire Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs to create what became known as the Beat Generation, to which we all owe our present existence—including the central place of marijuana in our lives.

In Amsterdam we’ve just gained the valuable participation of Kai van Bentham, an ex-Canadian community arts organizer and web specialist, and Marianna Lebrun, bassist, translator and activist. Finally, my long-time friend Hank Botwinik, mime, actor, and veteran media manipulator, has agreed to join our board of directors and help us reach our organizational goals. Hank and I started Radio Free Amsterdam together with our late comrade Larry Hayden on January 1, 2005, and he sponsors our programming stream at streema.com.

For the past ten years Radio Free Amsterdam has been my central passion in life, and I’ve spent thousands of hours creating original programming for the John Sinclair Radio Show and other series, gathering original radio programs from fellow deejays Bruce Pingree, Leslie Keros, George Klein, Steve The Fly, Elisa Mancini, Tom Morgan, Cary Wolfson, David Kunian and others, editing these shows into one-hour episodes, annotating and attaching playlists for each show, posting the episodes on the Radio Free Amsterdam site, archiving every program posted for perpetual access, and reposting each episode to our live stream server at streema.com.

This is a lot of work for one old guy, but I derive so much pleasure from this activity and it serves both artistic and educational purposes: I believe I’m creating a serious, carefully organized, fully accessible archive of American roots music programming—blues, jazz, gospel, soul, funk, Afro-fusion, reggae and other classic forms—and presenting the music in the classic radio format that gave me my life in music, with knowledgeable deejays sequencing the music and commenting on it from their own unique viewpoints.

First of all it’s something you can listen to as an alternative to the horseshit radio and media programming of today, and my pledge is that if you listen regularly to Radio Free Amsterdam for a year, you’ll have a whole different perception of what good music is about, where it came from, how it developed, and why we should always give it a central place in our lives.

Radio Free Amsterdam is on-going as the central focus of the John Sinclair Foundation, and our fund drive, if successful, will allow us to secure proper licensing for the music we play, upgrade our delivery system and our website, and provide for continuous promotion of the station so we can turn more people on to our mix of Blues, Jazz & Reefer at RadioFreeAmsterdam.com

That’s the end of my sermon for today, but I hope I can convince you, my readers, to check out the John Sinclair Foundation fund drive at Indie-Go-Go. We’re seeking people who will join the Foundation as members and support us in our efforts to develop and grow into a self-sustaining alternative institution. And, by the way, FREE THE WEED!

—Amsterdam

May 22, 2016

FREE THE WEED 62

2016-06-01T21:37:12Z

FREE THE WEED 62

A Column by John Sinclair

Highest greetings from Detroit, where I’m spending my last week before crossing the ocean to appear at a Detroit Artists Workshop exhibition in London and then on to Amsterdam for as long as I can get away with it.

April is always a great time for me to be in Michigan, and except for the day-long snowfall at the Hash Bash in Ann Arbor at the top of the month, which didn’t really seem to dampen too many spirits out on the Diag and on Monroe Street for the festivities, I’ve had a great time celebrating the sacred weed in various settings all month.

Following the Monroe Street Fair there was the annual Hash Bash celebration at the Blind Pig where I get to perform with Brennan Andes and Ross Huff from the Macpodz and their musical comrades for the occasion. Oh yeah, and there was the before party hosted by the Third Coast people from Ypsilanti at a big house in the country where I had the pleasure of hanging out with Dan Skye, editor of High Times, listening to music by an impromptu ensemble headed by my old pal Muruga, and then spending the night in one of their splendid guest rooms so I could make it to the Diag on time the next morning.

On April 16 I had the privilege of attending a water purification ceremony organized by Native Americans from the area and conducted by elders and spirit leaders of the Potawatomie nation. This beautiful ritual culminated with the passing of the sacred pipe among all the participants and the offering of traditional Potawatomie prayers for the cleansing of the river and all waters.

As the pipe was offered to each person and passed from the pipe carriers to the people one by one, I was reminded that this is where our practice of toking and passing the joint came from in the first place and how toking and smoking together have their origins in spiritual communion with all our relations and the universe itself.

The sharing of marijuana has become farther and farther removed from its spiritual roots as the cannabis culture has become more and more commodified and commercilaized over the past half century since we were first introduced to weed by our brothers in the ghetto and supplied with our sacrament by growers in Mexico and our intrepid comrades who brought it to us despite the incredible obstacles in their path—particularly their relentless pursuit by the drug police every step of the way.

Now that the police are gradually but inexorably being removed from our lives as marijuana smokers (or whatever delivery system one may choose), I’d say that it’s a good time to return to our roots and embrace the concepts of spirituality and ritual celebration that once served as the underpinnings of our relationship with the weed.

The coffeeshop concept that prevails in Amsterdam and the Netherlands is much closer to the traditional practice of marijuana smokers than what we are seeing now in Michigan and elsewhere weed is being permitted to be bought and sold in public. I’ve spent some delightful hours in compassion centers like GC3 in Flint and The Herbal Centre in Mt. Morris, where I just spent the 4/20 holiday, because along with the availability of multiple locally-grown strains of great weed offered by the producers themselves in a cooperative, “farmers market” sort of environment, these establishments also provide smokers with a special room where we can sit with fellow patients and smoke our weed in peace and fellowship.

My experience with the modern dispensaries of Michigan is fairly limited since I have a care-giver who supplies me with my medicine and other caring growers who make me gifts of their produce, so I rarely have to pay over the counter while I’m here. But what I’ve experienced almost invariably is that, despite the fact that their product is marijuana in immediately usable form, the provisioning centers want you to make your choice, buy your medicine and beat it without delay

Frankly, this is the opposite of what I’m looking for in a marijuana provisioning center. What I’m looking for is the opportunity to get together in a congenial setting with other smokers like myself and get high together, share our herb and our experiences, listen to music together, engage in relaxed conversation and, when we move on, take some weed home with us. I submit that this is a more civilized and humane system for taking care of the needs of medical marijuana patients, or humans of any stripe for that matter, than we are afforded here under their present scheme.

The proliferation of provisioning centers throughout Michigan and particularly in Detroit should have led to a superior form of organization for the dispensaries that would include the on-site ingestion of weed in a comfortable, friendly atmosphere, but this prospective organic development has been stymied by the attack on the compassion centers by the Detroit City Council and the DPD. Instead of allowing these innovative installations to evolve and flower into more perfect entities, the City is trying to make sure that regression will be the only course allowed.

In the first place, instead of being ecstatic that over 200 new businesses have opened in the city, many in seriously dilapidated areas, in response to the legalization of medical marijuana several years ago, the City administration is trying to reduce the number of care centers to what Detroit Corporation Counsel Melvin “Butch” Hollowell claims will be “approximately 50 Medical Marihuana Caregiver Centers in various locations in the city.”

As Chris Feretti reports in the Detroit News, Butch holds that “the city’s medical marihuana regulations are lawful, fair and reasonable. We will continue to enforce compliance in the courts, while concurrently processing the applications submitted for medical marihuana caregiver center licenses.”

About 195 applications overall have been submitted. Of those, 74 are seeking to operate in what the city calls “drug-free zones,” Hollowell said. A group of caregiver centers brought suit against the City in March when their applications were turned down outright when the City claimed each of the dispensaries was located in a so-called “Drug Free School Zone.” The lawsuit was filed because the City provided the appplicants no means to appeal, but the suit was dropped before it could be heard.

As Peretti reports, “The federal Drug Free School Zone Act prevents the drug from being delivered, sold or manufactured within 1,000 feet of a school. State law also factors libraries into the rule. The city’s zoning regulations cover educational institutions and goes beyond that, prohibiting shops from operating near child care centers, arcades and outdoor recreation facilities.”

I’m leaving Detroit this week so I’ll have to follow this issue from afar, but while I’ve been here I couldn’t help but notice the many green outlets and how good they looked against the desolate landscape of Detroit. Comrade suppliers, you’ll be in my thoughts and prayers until my return. FREE THE WEED!

—Detroit

April 25, 2016

FREE THE WEED 61

2016-04-01T16:30:58Z

FREE THE WEED 61

A Column by John Sinclair

Highest greetings from Chicago, on my way by train from New Orleans to Grand Rapids for the 11^th Michigan Medical Marijuana Conference, and then on to Detroit for a special occasion next week when the Kresge Foundation honors my ex-wife and mother of my children, the great photographer Leni Sinclair, as Detroit’s Eminent Artist of 2016.

This is quite an honor as she joins other old friends of mine, the poet and playwright Bill Harris and the late trumpet great Marcus Belgrave, in this select pantheon of eminent creative artists of Detroit. Leni’s photographic contributions to the cultural history of Detroit date back more than 50 years to the creation of the Detroit Artists Workshop, where we collaborated with Bill Harris and other poets like Robin Eichele, George Tysh, and James Semark, musicians Charles Moore, Ron English and Danny Spencer, painters Ellen Phelan, Howard Weingarden, and Larry Weiner, and a host of creative individuals to establish our own place in the heart of the city and develop an audience for our work in art.

Leni Sinclair was a committed artist from the beginning, a cultural and political activist, the backbone of the Artists Workshop Press and a pioneer in the marijuana legalization movement from the founding of Detroit LEMAR early in 1965. She and my dearly departed brother David Sinclair spearheaded the long effort to free me from prison on my 9-1/2-to-10-year sentence for feloniously possessing two joints of weed in December 1966. She also served on the Central Committee of the White Panther Party and the Rainbow Peoples Party in Ann Arbor and was an organizer of the first Hash Bash in 1972.

Leni and I were married in 1965 and gave life to our daughter Sunny in 1967 and Celia in 1970 before we separated as a couple in 1977. We continued to do work together and collaborated on raising our children and, since 2001, our granddaughter Beyonce. Leni’s photography is recognized all over the world and was recently featured in exhibits at the College for Creative Studies, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and the Scarab Club, as well as exhibitions in London, Rotterdam, and Lille, France.

Now I’m writing again from Detroit on the day after Leni’s award ceremony—and, oh yeah, after she received the $50,000 stipend in the form of a check from the Kresge Foundation. That was a beautiful thing!

Before that came a weekend in Grand Rapids with Ben Horner and the cast of characters from this magazine, who combined to produce a fun-filled and very successful conference at the Orbit Room filled with people from Grand Rapids and all over western Michigan.

But this week I’m looking forward to the Hash Bash in Ann Arbor, where this magazine will be passed out for the sixth consecutive year and I’ll be celebrating with the hordes of tokers at the formal ceremonies on the Diag and following at the Monroe Street Fair. This is our 61^st issue, beginning the 6^th year of publication for Michigan Medical Marijuana Report, and as for the Cannabis Cup, this will be number 45!

I’m also scrutinizing the minions of law and order in the City of Detroit as they attempt to corral and close down scores of marijuana dispensaries that have sprung up in an entirely unregulated atmosphere since Detroit legalized medical marijuana in 2005 and further legalized marijuana use of all kinds in 2012. Both measures were passed by citizens’ initiative with mire than 60% approval by the voters, making crystal clear the position of Detroit residents on marijuana: we want some!

A responsible city council would have responded at once to the wishes of the people back in 2006 and drafted regulatory measures after the law was passed so that proper marijuana dispensaries could be opened and operated under a sensible licensing scheme. When the city legalized marijuana by initiative four years ago, the need for a rational regulatory system became even more pronounced.

But the city council turned its back on the citizen smokers and ignored the situation until police pressure and frenzied agitation by special interest groups, many religion-based, spurred them to take action against the dispensaries, which the city now estimated at 211. Each of these new city-based businesses was opened in an unrestrained atmosphere devoid of rules and regulations governing such establishments, and one would suppose that they have thrived in this environment because more and more facilities continue to open their doors to the smoking public.

In the first place, one would assume that a financially bankrupt and physically ruined city like Detroit would be happy to have over 200 new businesses of whatever sort. But above and beyond the potential tax and licensing revenues generated by this activity, give a moment’s thought to the idea of the city actually growing, harvesting and distributing tons of marijuana to the dispensaries and whatever other outlets may evolve.

The City of Detroit owns thousands of acres of empty land suitable for growing crops like marijuana, augmented by hundreds of vacant buildings equally suitable to growing massive amounts of weed—abandoned schools, fire stations, police installations and the like. Say the City were to embrace marijuana production and sales to its citizen smokers as a possible source of enormous municipal revenues.

This is not a pipe dream but something that could actually happen with a little civic foresight and a basic commitment to common-sense solutions to societal problems. But if this eventuality were ever to be realized, the kind of idiotic, non-scientific, superstition-laden system of beliefs which underpins our marijuana laws would have to be thrown out in its entirety and a completely new approach to marijuana use and availability would have to be adapted without reservation.

I hate to sound like a broken record, to use a popular metaphor from the glorious days of 78 rpm singles and vinyl albums, but what’s wrong with this whole insane system is that there’s nothing wrong with marijuana! It’s good for us. It deals with many of our medical problems in a very pleasant and effective way, and to top it off, weed gets us as high as we need to be to deal with the sick social order we inhabit.

At times like this it feels like I’m preaching to the choir, but it’s time for all the believers to unite behind this simple truth and keep pushing until we remove the police and courts and religious orders from our lives as marijuana smokers and FREE THE WEED once and for all.

One last note: I was a little more than optimistic when I reported last month on the proposed changes in the municipal marijuana laws in New Orleans. The idea was to remove the smoker from the arrest and/or ticketing procedure so popular in law enforcement circles. But in the end the police prevailed and will retain the right to arrest and prosecute marijuana smokers at will.

Remember, it’s not the size of the fine nor the extent of the punishment but the fact that the police can stop us and harass us and search us and seize our stash and run us in and subject us to criminal charges and ruin our lives from that point on.

Have a happy Hash Bash and let’s put legalization on the ballot and pass a new law this year! FREE THE WEED!

—Chicago > Grand Rapids > Detroit

March 17-24, 2016

FREE THE WEED 60

2016-03-01T06:12:53Z

FREE THE WEED 60

A Column by John Sinclair

Highest greetings from New Orleans, where I was greeted for Mardi Gras with the splendid news that the New Orleans City Council is about to pass an ordinance virtually decriminalizing marijuana possession in the Crescent City, largely due to the work of Kevin Caldwell and the organization called Legalize New Orleans and to Councilmember Susan Guidry, who introduced the measure.

“Under the proposed municipal law change,” nola.com reports, “a first-time offender could get off with a verbal warning. A second-time offender could get a written warning, then a $50 fine the third time” and a $100 fine any time after that. “Police will now be able to use their discretion,” the report continues, either issuing a summons under the municipal code or making a custodial arrest using state marijuana possession laws.

Since Councilmember Guidry introduced the original ordinance in 2010 that redefined first offense simple possession, “We have found that the police officers 70% of the time are writing out a summons rather than taking someone to jail," Guidry said. “Most importantly,” nola.com adds, “research shows that the NOPD's discretionary use of summonses has been applied evenly by race.”

But according to New Orleans Municipal Court and NOPD records cited by nola.com, African-Americans still account for 75% of all misdemeanor marijuana arrests and 92% of all felony marijuana arrests (whether by summons or custodial arrest). “This is unacceptable and not in line with the demographics of our city or the reported demographics of marijuana users,” Councilmember Guidry said.

Guidry says she hopes the ordinance will “free up police, save money and make application of marijuana laws more fair and just across ethnic and economic backgrounds.” She wants police on the street investigating murders, rapes and armed robberies, “rather than at the station spending countless hours booking individuals on victimless, non-violent crime.

"These marijuana arrests clog our already overburdened court systems and public defender's office. Also, when indigent defendants cannot afford the hefty state law fines for possession offenses, they end up clogging our jail for failure to pay. Those offenders then struggle to get back on track once released. They can't bond out and they wind up losing their job, then they get out and they are really in desperate circumstances, and really it makes the severity of the punishment much more than the severity of the crime," Guidry said.

That’s some of the most sensible municipal wisdom to be encountered today, and this grizzled veteran of the marijuana legalization wars would like to commend and thank Ms. Susan Guidry for leading the way to common sense in New Orleans.

In Detroit, however, the City Council is gallopoing off in the opposite direction, even though the citizenry has voted to legalize marijuana for medical (2008) and recreational (2012) use and the cannabis community has opened up more than 200 public dispensaries to serve the needs of local smokers.

This has happened in the most natural fashion and absent any supervision or regulatory system devised by the city government. Now they want to corral the dispensaries and impose stringent post-facto legal strictures that are based in the usual idiocy of War On Drugs policies.

The Detroit City Council has adopted a report pretentiously titled “Medical Marihuana Caregiver Center Application Process Status Report For Detroit City Council” and identified 211 dispensary locations in the city.

According to Rick Thompson of The Compassion Chronicles, the new medical marijuana rules will begin on March 1 and any dispensary now open in the city has only until March 31 to apply for a business license. Most of the applicants will also have to apply for a zoning variance, Thompson adds, ”as the city was extremely stingy on the number of locations properly zoned for the inappropriately-named caregiver centers.”

There isn’t enough space in this column to go into every detail of the Detroit dispensary ordinance, but Richard Clement, Marijuana Policy Analyst for Council Member George Cushingberry, suggests that anyone interested in viewing the relevant documents visit www.detroitmi.gov/Government/City-Council/George-Cushingberry/Newsletters-and-Documents

Let it suffice to say that the ordinance is full of tricks and traps that are designed to deprive as many people as possible of access to their medicine. First off, all operational dispensaries must apply for their licenses in the month of March—period. Up-front costs include a Site Plan Review for $160, an initial Conditional Hearing for $1000, a Board of Zoning Appeals Hearing for $1200, and, as Rick Thompson points out, the price of the business license itself is yet to be determined.

Once the licensing fee is established, the businesses will have to purchase the initial license in the spring and will be forced to renew their license and pay the fee again in September.

The whole thing is based in the kind of backwards, police-state ideology so assiduously developed in the service of the War On Drugs. For instance, anyone who cultivates marijuana in a residence will be required to register with the city of Detroit as a home-based business. The registration process involves inspection and approval by numerous city agencies.

Further, dispensaries cannot be less than 1000 feet from another such business, from a park recognized by the Recreation Department, from a religious institution that has received a tax exemption from the city, or from a business identified as a controlled use (topless clubs and liquor stores). The City has specified a few industrial districts where dispensaries may be less than 1000 feet from each other to allow for clustering of similar businesses.

What happens if you don’t follow the rules? Rick Thompson asks. “Any premises, building or structure in which a medical marihuana caregiver center is regularly operated or maintained in violation of the standard included and incorporated in this Code shall constitute a public nuisance and shall be subject to a civil abatement proceeding initiated by the City of Detroit.”

What’s even worse, Thompson reports in a follow-up piece, the Detroit Police Department raided more than a dozen medical marijuana dispensaries in February despite assurances that businesses of that type will begin licensing procedures on March 1.

“The Detroit Police raids are a tortious interference with a business expectancy,” Royal Oak attorney Barton Morris told Thompson. “The recent Detroit Police raids are unlawful and unconstitutional. The city should be legally estopped from taking any action to an issue they created and allowed.”

“The current policy to shut down, raid and deny safe access is a losing hand to play,” said Michael Komorn, an attorney from Southfield. “Medical cannabis is a public health issue, not a public safety issue.”

“The City has not only allowed dispensaries to operate by providing them certificates of occupancy, they enacted an ordinance to license and zone them,” Barton Morris pointed out. “At the same time, they send the Detroit police to raid select dispensaries purporting to enforce state law. That is the ultimate hypocrisy.”

“These raids are discriminatory in nature and further persecute caregivers and the patients who need safe access to their medicine,” said Bruce Leach of Kirsch Leach PLC of Birmingham. “So many people will be negatively impacted by these raids; many will be thrown into the criminal justice system.”

It will be interesting to see what happens in March, and we’ll be following this procedure very carefully. Incidentally, this is my 60^th column for MMM Report—one every month for the past five years. If all goes well, the column will continue here for at least another five. FREE THE WEED!

—New Orleans

February 20-21, 2016

FREE THE WEED 59

2016-02-01T08:13:14Z

February 2016

FREE THE WEED 59

A Column by John Sinclair

Highest greetings from Amsterdam, former marijuana capitol of the world, although I intend to be in New Orleans for the Mardi Gras by the time you’re reading this column. Sad to say, Louisiana is one of the most backward sectors of the USA in terms of its marijuana laws, and I’ll go back to a life of full-time criminality as a toker during my up-coming six weeks in the Crescent City.

Here in Amsterdam the attack on the cannabis culture by the Dutch authorities continues to rage, with another round of forced coffeeshop closings completed in the busy Warmoestraat on January 1, including the mammoth Grasshopper shop and the popular Baba.

Across the Damrak—the main drag—the 420 Café (my own headquarters in Amsterdam since the turn of the century) was slated to be closed on New Year’s day along with the Kroon across the street, but the local government granted a 6-month extension which may or may not be extended even further. Who knows? All of these restrictive moves are totally without sense and represent a radical restructuring of a local social construct which has worked very effectively for more than 40 years.

If it weren’t so sickening and stupid it would be funny: Now that 52% of Americans clearly favor legalized marijuana in the United States, the Dutch government—after nearly half a century of permitted public smoking and copping although never actually legalizing marijuana—now wants to try to shrink the cannabis culture and drive it back out of the public eye in order more fully to commercialize and commodify the Dutch tourist industry.

The YouGov.com poll cited above, as reported in NORML News, concludes that “a majority of Americans, including two-thirds of Democrats, believe that marijuana should be legal [and] only 34 percent of respondents opposed the idea.” NORML News adds that “66% of respondents agreed that government efforts to enforce marijuana laws cost more than they are worth…while 62% said that the government should no longer enforce federal law in states that have legalized and regulated the plant's use.”

The story concludes: “53% of those surveyed, including 68% of respondents between the ages of 45 and 64, acknowledged having tried cannabis.” Wow! It would seem that experiential knowledge in Americans is finally outweighing the horseshit propaganda and outright lies of the authorities. Try it! You’ll like it!

And speaking of exploding bullshit myths about marijuana use propagated by the unholy alliance of whiskey drinkers and religious nuts in power, Christopher Ingraham recently pointed out in Wonkblog that, duh, smoking weed does not make you stupid after all.

It turns out that a popular study released by Duke University in 2012 which found that persistent, heavy marijuana use through adolescence and young adulthood was associated with declines in IQ failed to account for a number of confounding factors that could also affect cognitive development, such as cigarette and alcohol use, mental illness and socioeconomic status.

Ingraham reports that two new studies this month examine the relationship between marijuana use and intelligence from two very different angles: one looks at 2,235 British teenagers between ages 8 and 16, and the other looks at the differences between American identical twin pairs in which one twin uses marijuana and the other does not.

Despite vastly different methods, Ingraham says, the studies reach the same conclusion: They found no evidence that adolescent marijuana use leads to a decline in intelligence; in fact, they found that those who used marijuana didn't experience consistently greater cognitive deficits than the others.

The twin data "fails to support the implication by the authors of the Duke study that marijuana exposure in adolescence causes neurocognitive decline," the study concludes. “On the contrary, children who are predisposed to intellectual stagnation in middle school are on a trajectory for future marijuana use." In other words, Ingraham summarizes, “rather than marijuana making kids less intelligent, it may be that kids who are not as smart or who perform poorly in school are more inclined to try marijuana at some point in their lives.”

This is really quite a provocative story, and the author makes some very interesting speculations. “If marijuana use were responsible for cognitive decline,” Ingraham wonders, “you might expect to find that the more marijuana a person smokes, the less intelligent they become. But this paper found that heavier marijuana use was not associated with greater decreases in IQ.

“Marijuana is a drug,” Ingraham reasons, “and just like any other drug—alcohol, nicotine, caffeine—there are risks and benefits associated with use. But exaggerating the extent of those risks and benefits won't help create smarter policies. For proof of this,” he adds, “simply review the history of the drug war.”

Well, yeah. Let me call on my own experiential knowledge gained from smoking marijuana virtually daily since early in 1962: Weed can make you smarter, more aware of what’s happening around you, more sensitive to your environment and your fellow humans, more receptive to visual arts, music, poetry, arts activity of all kinds. It can help you open your mind to new experiences, new companions, new cultures, new perceptions of reality.

These are things I know from my own experience and from observing others who are daily tokers like myself. With the current drive by the burgeoning marijuana industry to sell their products to squares and as many people as possible, someone should warn the potential smokers that they are in for a whole new ride and about to enter a significantly different mental universe than the one to which they’re accustomed.

Don’t get me wrong—this is a good thing, something I’ve looked forward to for more than 50 years of turning on my friends and colleagues, and my belief is that people should be able to get as much of the finest weed available as often as they may want to have it, and as conveniently as possible. And this leads me exactly to where I wanted to end up this column: spending my final 200 words on expressing my disgust for the recent “Medical Pot Shop Law” introduced by the Detroit City Council.

As Christine Ferretti has pointed out in The Detroit News, medical marijuana dispensaries do not exist under current state laws, but the experiential reality is that something like 150 such dispensaries have opened up within the Detroit city limits since the City legalized marijuana use in 2012. (Detroit legalized medical marijuana in 2005.) As Ms. Ferretti put it, “Some have opened and have been operating with strict standards to monitor products and treat patients; others are not.”

The demand for licensing of these outlets by the city—despite their lack of legal existence—has been spearheaded by the Metropolitan Detroit Community Action Coalition, a group of community, block club and faith-based groups who have come together to combat medical pot shops.

“Right now what we have going on makes absolutely no sense,” city councilman James Tate remarked. “We have no regulations whatsoever.” So he proposes to set strict licensing requirements for dispensary operators and specify where marijuana access facilities can legally locate within the city, establish required distances between each of the potential dispensaries and specify a distance between the shops and other controlled uses, including party stores and adult cabarets as well as the city’s parks, schools and churches.

I’ve got an instant solution for them: Let the merchants sell the weed to the people who want it. If you don’t want any, don’t buy any! Don’t smoke it! Relax! You don’t have to do this. Let it go! Free The Weed!

—Amsterdam

January 20-23, 2016

FREE THE WEED 58

2015-12-30T19:10:38Z

FREE THE WEED 58

A Column by John Sinclair

Highest greetings from the south of England at the end of 2015 and highest wishes for the New Year, which may indeed be the one that brings us legalized marijuana in Michigan and takes us closer to our goal on the national level: FREE THE WEED!

Dear friends, let us pray that 2016 will be the year that begins to blow away the web of distorted myth from the topic of marijuana and starts the process of according full recognition and respect to the reality of marijuana and its many beneficial uses in our sick social order.

This whole process of demonizing marijuana and its users in order to forge a police state around us is only about 80 years old, originating in the demented propaganda and ugly mythology spewed forth by Harry Anslinger, America’s first “drug czar,” in order to convince Congress to criminalize marijuana by means of the Harrison Tax Act of 1937.