A Column by John
Sinclair
I’m completing my
five-month residency in New Orleans working with Dave Brinks & Jimmy Cass
to help establish the N.O. Institute for the Imagination, but I made a quick
trip to Michigan last weekend to join MMMR
publisher Ben Horner for a little series of three visits to medical marijuana
sites in Flint, Ann Arbor and Detroit and to take part in the opening of the
late Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead
project at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD).
Since I started
smoking marijuana as a student at Flint Junior College in early 1962, I’ve had
a hard time separating my love of getting high and enjoying the mental health
it engenders from my love of art, music and poetry. They’re all part of the
same experience to me, and I wouldn’t even think of one without the other.
Visiting my home
town of Flint, Michigan is always a source of intellectual and emotional
thrills that I don’t get anywhere else, because this is where I grew up and
began to form the idiosyncratic world-view that’s directed my life for half a
century now. Between 1961 and 1964 I started getting involved with jazz, I
started writing poetry and arts criticism, I started smoking weed, I started
going to Detroit to hear live music, and I had my first psychedelic experience
with peyote that changed my life forever.
That was in the
fall of 1963 on a trip to Detroit one night to see Art Blakey & the Jazz
Messengers at the Minor Key coffeehouse, and it turned into a trip of quite a
different type when my pal, the painter Jams McCracken, pulled out a shoebox
full of peyote buds he’d sent away to Texas for in the mail, began to prepare
them for our ingestion and launched me on a psychic journey from which I’ve
managed somehow never to return.
Three months later
I graduated from the Flint College of the University of Michigan, where I had edited
the campus paper called The Word and
directed the Cinema Guild. I moved to Detroit in April 1964 to go to graduate
school in American Literature at Wayne State University. Soon I had a good weed
connect through my friends in the jazz scene and a lot of new friends in the
WSU neighborhood that seemed to radiate outward from my basement pad in the
Forest Arms Apartments at 2nd & Forest.
That October I was
busted by Detroit and Michigan State Police narcotics officers for selling a
dime bag to a guy I knew who had been compromised by the state police and faced
a mandatory minimum 20-year prison sentence as a result, so he passed it on to
me. At the time I was deep in the process of organizing the Detroit Artists
Workshop with a bunch of characters from the neighborhood—painters, poets,
musicians, 8-mm filmmakers, and other artistic characters—and we went ahead
with our planned Grand Opening on Sunday, November 1, 1964.
From that point on
artistic production, cultural activism and advocating the legalization of
marijuana have been my mode of life, and I’m proud not to have wavered in my
commitment for nearly 50 years. Now, in my old age, I’m enjoying the ripened fruits
of my activity and reaping the benefits of a lifetime of making friends,
shaping and disseminating my art works, and advancing the cause of legalization
to the point where we can take our medicine without police interference and
look forward to full legalization in the foreseeable future.
Public opinion in
the U.S.A. has finally passed the halfway mark in terms of popular support for
legalization of marijuana, and mark my words, when that figure finally reaches
60% we’ll start to feel a seismic shift in the political sphere as the
vote-thirsty professional politicos wrench themselves free from their
decades-long embrace of criminalized weed to begin to recognize the need to
bring the War On Drugs to a shuddering conclusion at last.
One of the most
hopeful signs I’ve seen on this trip to the U.S.A. is the new fellowship
facility at the Genesee County Compassion Club (GC3), of which I am a proud
member. I visited there a year ago in April for a 420 Party and was deeply
impressed with the positive nature of the operation and the human warmth of the
environment created by the GC3 members and staff.
But in the past
year of fear and trembling within the Michigan medical marijuana community behind
the vicious attacks on our outlets by General Shuette and his legions, GC3 has
intensified its remarkable program of providing the highest possible experience
for its members by doubling its physical size and opening an expanded meeting
area with booths, tables and chairs, and a coffee bar in the center of the room
where first-class liquid refreshments may be obtained.
Along with the
World Famous Cannabis Café of Portland, Oregon where I visited last year, GC3
is the closest thing to an Amsterdam coffeeshop I’ve encountered in the U.S.A.
So many outlets I’ve dropped in on in the past few years have seemed to center
solely on dispensing some medicine and getting the patients back out the door,
with no time, space nor inclination to provide the requisite opportunity for fellowship
that’s so important to the healing process.
I had a great time
at the Genesee County Compassion Club not far from where I smoked my first
joint in Flint over 50 years ago, but I’ve run out of space to go much further.
One of many high points of my trip to Michigan was starting off my week with an
editorial in the Detroit News on
Monday, May 13 titled “Let’s end Michigan’s war on drugs” written by Luke
Londo, a “conservative activist” student at Northern Michigan University in the
U.P., in support of Rep. Jeff Irwin’s bill in the Michigan legislature to
decriminalize marijuana.
I had the benefit
of hearing Rep. Irwin speak at some length about his legislation when I
appeared with him and my old pal, Atty. Dennis Hayes at the OM of Medicine Center
in Ann Arbor following my visit to the GC3. Jeff’s hopeful of getting a hearing
for a measure which would basically bring the rest of the State of Michigan up
to the standard set in Ann Arbor over 40 years ago with the institution of the
$5 fine for marijuana offenses.
Young Mr. Londo
characterizes the War on Drugs as “an abysmal failure” that’s wasted a trillion
dollars and asserts that “marijuana is safer than alcohol…a true gateway
drug.” I laughed out loud when he said
that “the only thing in harm’s way of a marijuana user is an unattended bag of
potato chips” and smiled even wider when he claimed that 65% of “his fellow
Millennials…support legalization of marijuana.”
Londo closes by
pointing out that “Decriminalization is the right thing to do for Michigan.
More than $325 million annually is spent fighting it, and marijuana is more
accessible than ever.” That’s a good thing, and decriminalization is a fine
idea, but full legalization is the only correct answer to the “marijuana
problem.” FREE THE WEED!
—New Orleans
May 17-19, 2013
© 2013 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
