Happy New Year’s, everybody, and welcome to the brand new year of 2019. Now that marijuana is legal in Michigan at last, I’m looking forward to a new kind of public reality where smokers like ourselves are no longer criminals nor subject to the whims of the police and courts.
But before I enter into my elongated preachment for this month—Dismantle The Police State—I’d like to invite all my readers to join me at my new coffeeshop, the John Sinclair Foundation Café, located inside Dr. Bob’s Psychedelic Healing Shack at 18700 Woodward Avenue at Goldengate Street in the North End of Detroit.
Following our Grand Opening on New Year’s Eve, the John Sinclair Café is open daily from 2:00 pm until closing, with live music from 8-10 pm Tuesdays through Saturdays, live poetry on Sundays curated by M.L. Liebler, anda live broadcast if the John Sinclair Radio Show over Radio Free Amsterdam each monday night at 9:00 pm. The café is serving coffee, espresso, teas, juices, fresh Dutch Girl donuts and handmade snacks every day, with hi- speed wi-fi service for all patrons and continuous music provided by Radio Free Amsterdam.
The music line-up includes guitarists Jeff Grand on Tuesdays, Tino Gross on Wednesdays (followed by the traditional Dr. Bob drum circle), and Billy Davis on Thursdays, with Ras Kenta and his reggae posse on Friday nights and special jazz and other musical presentations in Saturdays. The Café is managed by Adam Brook for the John Sinclair Foundation, the music is curated by Matty Lee and myself, and the sound system is directed by Mike Boulan of Straight Ahead Sound.
I’d like to repeat my special thanks and appreciation to my old friend Rodriguez, the singer & guitarist sometimes known as “Sugarman,” who’s helped inspire me to undertake this venture in order to provide people today with the kind of place we used to enjoy in the old days with music, poetry, a warm, relaxed atmosphere, coffee and juices, and art, cultural and historic materials displayed on the wall—a place where we can go to be with other people like ourselves in a welcoming environment where we are always made feel at home. Me and Rodriguez came up in this sort of e environment and we want to try to bring it back for the people of today.
We’d like to invite all our friends and neighbors to join us at the John Sinclair Café for a coffee and a smoke at your earliest convenience. Bring your personal electronical devices and relax with us in a creative, supportive atmosphere unlike anywhere else. And bring your friends—they’re always welcome. I’ve waited a great many years to be able to open a place like this, and as I write this on Christmas Day, I’m thinking that Santa Claus has really been good to me in my old age despite my recent physical set-backs, which now seem finally about to relent.
And speaking of relenting, with the legalization of marijuana on December 6, 2018 there are certain unacceptable forms of behavior that should cease altogether this year, including arrests for marijuana possession and use, seizure of sacraments and property under the power of law, denial of public benefits to marijuana users like public housing, job opportunities, and welfare support, and in general the fearful aura of repression and interference with the pursuit of happiness by otherwise innocent Americans.
It’s going to take a while for all this to sink in, but it’ll take even longer to force the police and legal authorities out of our lives altogether for the rest of the future. Witness the fervent attempts by the vicious Republican legislature in Michigan to subvert the intent of the citizens’ initiatives passed by majorities of Michigan voters with respect medical marijuana use and now, recreational use as well.
I’ve preached about some of these topics before in this column, but the most galling to me is the idiotic call to track marijuana distribution from “seed to sale,” which is projected to provide employment for something like 150,000 police officers who—Instead of busting your door down and dragging you off to jail—will sit in front of their computers and count marijuana seeds and follow them from one destination to another and, presumably, come up with some sort of punishment for offenders of the intricate seed-selling regulations.
But the whole complex of rules and regulations being promulgated by the hostile legislators and enforced by their goofy agencies completely fails to grasp the actual intent of the citizens who voted to legalize the use of marijuana for medical and recreational purposes (i.e., what we call “getting high”).
What we want is for marijuana to be legal in every respect, to be recognized as the medicinal and positive social force it is, and to be free to be grown, transported, distributed, bought, sold and ingested at every level by everypne who wishes to do so. Marijuana needs no greater level of regulation than, say, carrots or lettuce, and commerce in marijuana should be regarded as no different from trade in other vegetable matters.
The business of dismantling the war on drugs starts with the prevention of the sort of regulatory nonsense that’s being devised in the present period of transition. We must contemplate the ugliness of a situation where the very people who arrested and imprisoned millions of us for marijuana use or sales are now charging citizens thousands and thousands of dollars to presume to want to grow, distribute or vend marijuana to consumers.
The authorities who devised, enacted and enforced marijuana criminalization constructed their eventual empire on a flimsy structure of bullshit, half-truths and outright lies, and they gave it life through the force of weapons, jackboots kicking down your door, cynical prosecutors and district attorneys, corrupt judges, venal probation and parole departments, and the millions of employees of the nation’s vast web of prisons, courts and jails.
The world of drug law enforcement is the darkest emanation of the American urge to suppress and punish people who refuse to subscribe to the nation’s societal norms. A gigantic machine powered with lethal force has been constructed on the backs of the marijuana smoking populace and used for 80 years to oppress smokers and fill the coffers of the government and the national community of defense lawyers.
The power and might of this evil social construct has permeated every aspect of American life for several generations, but now it’s time to bring it to a complete and utter end. I can’t possibly predict how this is to be accomplished, but my faith in the creative and organizational genius of the voting public leads me to believe that we will continue the struggle against the War On Drugs until every trace of this filth has been eliminated from our lives. Amen! Free The Weed!
—Psychedelic Healing Shack,
Detroit
December 25, 2018
© 2019 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
