A Column By John Sinclair
Now the sun is shining and the temperature is better than bearable and soon the most challenging conditions of the virus protection system will begin to lift and people will start to congregate again after this long long social drought.
Last month I talked at some length about my physical difficulties of the past few years and mentioned my latest fall, now a month ago. The pains have finally abated and I’m good to pursue my rehabilitation program in recovery from open heart surgery this February. It hurt to cough for some time and I had to cut back on my smoking because, like they say in Amsterdam, if you don’t cough, you don’t get off.
Now the pain has receded and I’m trying to build my marijuana habit back up even if I have to remind myself to smoke more joints. Nothing has ever worked for me like enough weed all the time, and as I get the rest of my life back after recovery I want to get all of my head back together too.
I want to send a shout out to my old friend and comrade, Keith Stroup, former director of NORML for many years, who’s celebrating 50 years of the marijuana decriminalization organization founded in 1970. I met Keith in 1972 when we were both campaigning at the invitation of AMORPHIA in support of the first California Marijuana Initiative and, later in the season, in support of marijuana legalization efforts in Arizona and New Mexico.
Keith Stroup is a great guy, vastly intelligent and possessed of a beautifully developed sense of humor. He created NORML out of his own vision of the organization and steered it righteously for many years until his recent retirement. While I’ve always had the utmost respect for Keith and have long considered him a close friend in the struggle, I haven’t always seen eye to eye with NORML in terms of appropriate strategies for legalization of the weed.
For me, the idea of NORML, or normal, is a frightening concept to begin with. It is the normal people who have constructed the entire ideological mess that is the War On Drugs, and it was the quest for universal normalcy that fueled the War On Drugs for so long. I always felt that what we were doing with marijuana was abnormal, its effects and deep influence on our lives were abnormal, and it was no pathway to normalcy in any form. That was the great thing about it in a societal context—weed did not lead to normalcy.
What bugged me abut NORML for many years was its reluctance to take on the issue of legalization full force and try to end the marijuana front in the War On Drugs once and for all. NORML seemed to be happy with the steady increases in polling numbers showing support for decriminalization rather than in diminishing the number of arrests and incarcerations for weed.
Maybe this is just my own prejudice against the organization, but I felt much better about NORML after other progressive forces had actually legalized marijuana and the decriminalization organization started calling for outright freedom for the weed smoker. They’re pretty forthright now and that’s a very good thing in my estimation. And congratulations to my pal Keith Stroup on his many years of service to all of us,
I’ve been obsessed for some time with some public provocations that I’ve been meaning to write about in this column, so maybe I’ll just rear back right now and let ’em fly. For the longest time _since its inception as a chain— Starbuck’s was known as the place you could cop the daily papers wherever you were and get the national edition of the New York Times. I depended on the Starbucks at Woodward & Mack Avenue, about as far as I was able to travel with the assistance of my walker, to get my Detroit News and Free Press and the much-desired NYTimes.
I did this every day for months after I was confined to my 2nd-floor Cass Corridor apartment, and then one unholy day in August 2019—voila!—Starbuck’s decided that they didn’t want to bother providing this service to its patrons and it removed the newspapers from the store. I understand that this was a universal measure that went into effect at all Starbuck’s outlets in the U.S.—another nail in the coffin of national literarcy in this god forsaken country.
Now I keep up with my newspaper jones through the kind services of my daughters Sunny and Celia, who take care of my shopping needs and manage to procure a New York Times for me almost every day from the splendid University Village store at Third & Forest, not far from my place.
You’d think, “why doesn’t the guy just subscribe to the papers like a normal American,” but they don’t know that the NYTimes will not deliver anything except the Sunday paper in downtown Detroit, and the Detroit papers will let you have home delivery only on Thursday, Friday and Sunday. It sounds crazy but that’s the way it is.
Speaking of newspapers, another thing that drives me nuts is the always burgeoning obituary section in both Detroit papers in which only white people seem to die in this city, a metropolis which is about 80% African-American in its composition. I imagine that you have to pay to be included in the dying numbers and the black populace isn’t able to make the necessary payments to get their loved ones listed in the newspaper obituary section.
The other thing that drives me batty in contemporary urban life is a phenomenon that doesn’t have a handy name so far but it consists of foot-pedaled wagons stocked with beer drinkers and casks of beer that amble from their downtown pickup spot north on Woodward to my street, Peterboro, turn west two blocks to a place called Detroit Shipping Company, where everybody gets off and buys a drink from the bar, then they continue either down Peterboro or adjoining Charlotte Street back to Woodward and back downtown.
There is nothing uglier nor more offensive in urban life today than these goddamned beerwagons and their drunken customers careening through this battered inner-city neighborhood to the obscene songs and screams of their riders. They had these in Amsterdam but they outlawed them along with a bunch of other tourist atrocities.
Speaking of Amsterdam, I’ll sign off with the dreadful news that the Mayor and City Council are trying to use the coronavirus crisis to call for a shutdown of the red light district and to limit the use of marijuana coffeeshops to residents of the Netherlands—no foreigners allowed. How ugly can these square motherfuckers get? FREE THE WEED!
—Detroit
May 24, 2020
© 2020 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
