THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW!

I wrote the following letter on 12/8/00 to the local newspaper, who wouldn’t print it because I used the fictitious name of Mary J. Fillpot in fear of getting busted.
“For the umpteenth time in the 26 years I’ve been smoking it, I’m stoned and just as excited about it as the first time. It is Natures All-Purpose Relish; a better building material than wood; is a more durable fabric than wool or cotton; makes an excellent clean burning fuel; grows profusely (20 feet in 9 months!); returns more oxygen to the atmosphere than an equivalent area of forest; has never killed anyone; is an everyday holy sacrament (in that it takes one higher when shared more widely); is medically beneficial to an unfathomable degree — because it is also illegal.
For a law to be obeyed it must be just. To be obeyable, it must not violate nature. A system whose laws attempt to exclude natural occurrences must expect natural violations. In the instance of cannabis sativa and cannabis indicus, violations would seem to be, not only expected but, the very reason for the law in the first place. By its stated attempts to control marijuana for the good of the people, the government accomplishes it’s real, esoteric purpose of expanding their intrusive control over the very sheep who believe they are being served and protected against natures “death weed”.
When one gets high on pot for the first time, the enhanced feeling of well being naturally leads one to question its prohibition, the justice of so many stoners in jail, and inevitably to a glimpse of the shears in the hands of the shepherd. Obedience is out the window; just not getting caught replaces, “just say no.” The war on drugs and the imprisonment of its enemies cost the taxpayer, you, dearly, while the DEA reinvests its looted booty to prosecute their newly impoverished, imprisoned victims of victimless crime. Conviction record rises. Good DEA. Give ‘em more money next year! Send ‘em out to root around in and exploit colorful new foreign lands in search of exotic intoxicants from which to protect the lily white bread reality at home. Oh, and, ah, check around for oil while you’re there, would you?
Just what is the law protecting us from? Ourselves? There has never been a victim of reefer other than those being harassed and arrested by self-righteous enforcers of a ridiculous law. Because it is a “GATEWAY” to harder drugs? Any such gate was cobbled together by Harry J. Anslinger when he arbitrarily lumped all drugs under the same prohibition, and refined over the years by Nixon’s dismissal of his own commission’s finding pot benign and Carter’s cowardly withdrawal of legalization efforts. The law is a doubled-barreled gateway: (1) Since the law obviously lied about the leaf, maybe the harder drugs are really better … let’s check it out … whatcha’ got? (2) Even though our novice toker experiments with no other illegal substances, if apprehended, this lumpy law will slam our otherwise innocent pothead into classrooms in Crime College crowded to overflowing with the junkies and possessors of various other criminal talents he’d never even meet any other way, for endless semesters and no spring break. This is rehab? Good justice system. Let’s give ‘em more money next year. Just some more con-doughs goin’ up. Safer streets. Sleepy sheep.
But, then again, I’m stoned. I see the karmic comeuppance due a corrupted system of laws as it breeds disrespect and disobedience with it’s blatant disregard for the nature of the planet and her citizens in feeding the bloated bureaucracy’s swollen, ravenous appetite for revenue. There won’t be another meet-the-new-boss-just-like-the-old-boss revolution. There’s merely the continuation of personal revelation, responsibility and recognition that surfaced with the awakening of the flower children in the ‘60s and has been growing silently, steadily like a giant mycelium covering unseen acres beneath the surface of everyday life awaiting the proper conditions to gently emerge again.
The immensity of this independent, steady state is most recently evident in the unquestionable, incorruptible majority of citizens who chose to show total disdain for the system and the quagmire of its recent election process by giving officialdom nothing to miscount or recount, thank you very much.
I don’t want marijuana legalized; the government hasn’t the right, power or understanding sufficient to regulate nature. Only decriminalization, returning to the wild in which it has always existed, can atone for the injustices wrought upon this benevolent heroine and her maligned lovers.

Although this was written at the cusp of Bush’s reign of terror, I still think attention to the completely arbitrary drug laws and their victims should be maintained to supplement focus on the continually more and more atrocious human rights violations committed in the name of security and the purpose of control by fear since 9/11/01. I would venture to say that you are more likely to know someone in prison for smoking pot than someone who died in Iraq carrying out this war born of trumped up lies. My prediction about flower power rising to meet the occasion appears a little optimistic; perhaps those regular jobs they took put them to sleep after all. The degree of my concern about the underlying purpose of the current administration has intensified to the point that Mary J. Fillpot seems to have been wearing a Guy Fawkes mask. Remember, remember, the 11th of September. Check out this for activities at ground zero this 5th anniversary.



Everybody remembers where they were that day, where will you be this year on that day?