A Column By John Sinclair
Hi everybody and highest greetings from the Motor City, where we’re sweltering through the summer quarantine and waiting for life to return to—what? What it’s gonna be like after the pandemic and when, we don’t have the slightest idea. But we’ll smoke our weed and do our best to work with others in a proper way until things get better.
One of the things that’ll be different in the future is the establishment of a Native American marijuana market in Michigan (and I’m sure in other states to come) independent from state control. According to Gus Burns at mlive.com, the Bay Mills Indian Community, some 2,200 Native Americans from the Ojibwe tribe based in Brimley, Michigan, which operates the Bay Mills Resort and Casinos, now intends to break ground on a 10,000-plant indoor grow facility south of Sault Ste. Marie as early as January of next year.
Burns quotes Bay Mills Indian Communities Board Chair Bryan T. Newland, who says the grow operation will eventually supply stores near the tribe’s casino and on land it owns close to Gaylord, Port Huron and Flint. According to Newland, the Bay Mills Indian Community hopes to expand its marijuana operation into a cooperative with Michigan’s dozen tribes “so we can share the burden of doing this and the benefits can flow to different tribal communities.”
Bay Mills Indian Community would provide marijuana and other related products for sale on cooperating tribal lands and will compete with Michigan’s existing medical and recreational marijuana market. Since Native American lands are not subject to state law, tribal marijuana would be exempt from state sales and excise taxes, which currently total 16% for recreational marijuana sales in Michigan.
The tribe will also be exempt from state licensing, application and renewal fees totaling more than $200,000 in application and licensing fees up front with a similar but variable renewal fee each year.
“Look, we’re sovereign governments,” Newland told Gus Burns. “We’re not giving up our right and our authority to regulate what goes on on our lands and we’re certainly not going to pay the state of Michigan taxes for what we do on our lands. Governments don’t tax other governments and they don’t ask other governments for permission.”
“If you plant a seed and turn it into a product and sell it on tribal lands, you’re outside the state’s taxing authority,” Newland said. “So we expect that will allow us to be competitive on pricing.”
The Bay Mills Indian Community voted in 2019 to legalize marijuana in a similar fashion to the legalization law passed by Michigan voters in 2018, Gus Burns says, adding that “the tribe intends to create its own regulatory system to ensure safety and quality control.”
“On quality and price, we’ll be competitive with anybody else in the state,” Newland said.“It’s our intention to grow this business, grow this venture, and bring it statewide.”
This is a beautiful thing, and I heartily applaud the Bay Mills Community on their very wise and timely decision to bring marijuana business to their people here in Michigan. Marijuana got up here in the first place through the efforts of indigenous peoples in Mexico who grew weed and distributed it to needy citizens in Mexico and North America for a modest price. It’s definitely their turn to get paid at last, and a big middle finger to the State of Michigan on the unjust taxation issue.
I can’t say it enough times: the State of Michigan, which persecuted marijuana smokers and dealers for so many years and put thousands of us in prison, has no business charging nor collecting these exorbitant licensing fees for marijuana operations. It’s just another way of saying that there’s something wrong with the weed and people have to be disciplined and punished for dealing in marijuana.
There will be no way that the weed is free until these state-operated rip-offs are eliminated and marijuana businesses are taxed like any other business venture, at a modest percentage of their sales totals less expenses like everyone else. To charge these invidious fees and penalties is just as wrong as everything else the state has done to punish the marijuana culture and its denizens.
On a happier note, I don’t think I’ve taken the requisite time and space in this column to celebrate a spate of imminent releases of my creative output, starting with the new edition of my blues work in verse, Fattening Frogs For Snakes, first published in New Orleans in 2002 by the Surregional Press and out of print for several years, but now made current again by the Horner Press, publishers of this magazine.
The book of FFFS will also be included in the box set of 4 LPs cut with four different ensembles that put my works in verse to music and performed appropriate backing material of their own devise. The four volumes of FFFS are I-The Delta Sound, II-Country Blues, III-Don’t Start Me To Talking, and IV-Natural From Our Hearts. They’ll appear on 4 vinyl discs put together by Jarrett Kowal of Jett Plastic Recording in a colorful box containing the book as well and will see release in November.
Horner Press is also about to publish a new book of my verse called Blow Baby Blow—Uncollected Poems, which will make up the final section of my Collected Poems, the complete works excepting the book-length blues work and my 4-volume jazz work in verse called always know: a book of monk. The “uncollected poems” are all the works that weren’t incorporated into the several small books of poetry I published between 1965 and 2020,
Finally, Horner Press is bringing out a new American edition of my collection called It’s All Good—A John Sinclair Reader, first published in Italy, then Great Britain, and eventually by Ben Horner at Horner Books. The new edition will also include a collectors’ hardcover printing of the Reader with color illustrations and a setting designed by the author’s daughter, Celia Sinclair.
Speaking of my Monk work in verse,the Trembling Pillow Press in New Orleans is bringing out always know: a book of monk, volumes 1 & 2 (“blue notes” and “prestige”) with an introduction by Edward Sanders. Trembling Pillow also published my collection of poetry & prose called Song of Praise: Homage to John Coltrane. I’m hoping the publication of the first half of this Monk work, started in 1982, will inspire me to go ahead and compose the rest of the poems for volumes 3 & 4 before 40 years are up.
Further with respect to my Monk work, RJ Spangler & the Planet D Nonet will issue a double LP recording of the Nonet with my recitation of verses from always know: a book of monk to music composed entirely by Thelonious Monk that are performed by the nine-piece orchestra led by RJ Spangler & James O’Donnell. This recording comes from a recent concert at the Scarab Club in Detroit.
A nice collection of work for a poet who will celebrate his 79th birthday on October 2nd, and all of it accomplished with the help of regular doses of cannabis sativa. FREE THE WEED!
—Detroit
August 23-24, 2020
© 2020 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
