A Column By John Sinclair
We had a mild winter and a rainy spring here in Michigan but what we have now is sure-enough summertime—time to get out after the quarantine and take in the sun and see your friends again and share some of those good tokes that we seem to find at any time of the year. I remember when they used to have a killer drought every August and September it seemed, but those days are long gone.
I’ve been writing columns for a long time, and the great thing about writing a column is that you can talk about whatever you feel like. I wrote my first columns when I was an undergraduate at the Flint College of the University of Michigan—where my granddaughter is now a sophomore!—and I edited the student newspaper, a little mimeographed publication called The Word. I was inspired by my friend Ike Stein, who published a street-level entertainment guide to the city of Flint and contributed a column to every issue that talked about what was going on and who was doing it.
My roommate, the organist and composer Lyman Woodard, and I used to go over to Ike’s place on the south side every Sunday afternoon and listen to Miles Davis records and smoke weed. This is in 1962, and Ike had a big influence on my future development. I was working in a record shop downtown, in charge of the jazz department, and I was up on all the latest records, while I was also a literary fanatic and followed every development in the modern poetry world. I also headed the Cinema Guild at the college and kept up on the foreign art movie scene, so I was eminently qualified to scribe a regular multi-arts column for the students at UM—Flint, and I did until I graduated in the winter of 1964.
Then I transferred to Detroit to attend graduate school at Wayne State University and fell in with a guy called Kelly Williams, an art dealer who published a journal called Art & Artists and appointed me the music & poetry columnist. The next year the Fifth Estate started its existence as Detroit’s underground newspaper and I joined them in their second issue as the paper’s art columnist, writing a regular column called “The Coatpuller” that continued for several years.
At the same time I was selected to write the Detroit column for downbeat magazine, the bible of the jazz community, and covered the happenings in the clubs and concert halls and recording studios of the Motor City every two weeks for a couple of years.
I haven’t got enough space here in this column to drag you through through all the details of my column-writing career, but let it suffice to say that I’ve contributed columns to magazines in San Francisco, Oxford Mississippi, New Orleans, and the late lamented blues monthly called Blues Access, as well as the Ann Arbor Sun and its successor, the Detroit Sun. I’m a guy who’s always got a lot on his mind, so it’s never difficult to come up with things to talk about in my columns.
This is my 109th column for this particular magazine, and my text for today is the impact on our community of the draconian rules and regulations that the state, counties and municipalities of Michigan have dictated to shape the world of legalized marijuana in spite of the realities of marijuana life or the needs of the people to be served, from growers and retailers to consumers.
First of all, we have to note that these ridiculously punitive laws governing every aspect of marijuana commerce and use are dreamed up and instituted by the same people who were putting us in prison not too long ago for anything having to do with marijuana use and sales. They are not good people, and they perpetrated their unscientific bullshit attack on marijuana and its users for about 80 years until our voters decided just last fall to legalize the weed.
Now they’re creating a system of laws and regulations intended to punish the marijuana entrepreneurs in every direction and make it next to impossible for small-time growers and sellers to do enough acceptable business to make their time and investments worthwhile.
Over the many years of underground, or what they call “black market,” growing and distribution of marijuana, systems of transference, delivery, and individual sales were developed that worked beautifully for a lot of people for a long time. In fact, most of this underground network is still in place and functioning in real life for the long-time smokers who can’t stomach the price tags on weed in the dispensaries and don’t really feel like abandoning the people who have taken care of them for so long.
In terms of commercial ventures in the weed industry today, the big corporate spenders are gearing up to take a supermarket approach to distributing and selling weed while the persons who’ve been growing and selling weed on the black market find that the system is stacked against them from beginning to end.
To apply for a dispensary license they wanted a $60,000 payment to the state plus another $6,000 to the authority governing the place you want to operate, and then additional charges as you went along. You have to show that you have $300,000 or $500,000 in the bank before beginning operations, and of course you were barred from having a criminal record under the War On Drugs.
As long as it took to legalize marijuana in Michigan—we started in 1965, finally won in 2019—I’m afraid it might take us to get rid of the War On Drugs mentality in the ranks of our public legislators and administrators, who continue to think and feel that marijuana is something wrong and people who are involved in its proliferation and use are doing wrong in defiance of established social mores.
Horseshit. Marijuana needs about as much supervision and regulation as carrots or celery. It bears less risk and less responsibility for social ills than coffee, tobacco, beer and wine and whiskey. Growing and selling marijuana should be like dealing in carrots or lettuce—you make your crop, sell your desired amount, and pay sales taxes on what you’ve sold. That’s as far as it should go, and all the administrators and bureaucrats working to employ thousands of personnel and impede the natural progress we should be able to expect after legalization should be stripped of their powers and put out to pasture.
If we’re gonna free the weed, we have to free it and ourselves from the control of those ignorant interlopers who want to put all kinds of special money-grubbing conditions on marijuana entrepreneurship to continue to fatten their coffers at our expense.
It is my hope that the great people who have led our legalization struggle on to victory will continue to fight against the kind of insane, greedy state interference that’s holding things back as we speak. That’s my two cents worth for this month. Free The Weed!
—Detroit
June 24-25, 2020
© 2020 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
