Hi everybody and welcome to the Motor City, where by the time you read this I’ll have celebrated my 79th birthday on October 2, something I’d never even dreamed of as I negotiated my course through life. Now I’ve been here an awfully long time, and if I can surmount my current health issues I’ll be here even longer, now shooting for the age of 80!
I want to start off this month’s column with a heart-warming report contributed by my man Allen Peisner, taken from the Jerusalem Post. The Post says that a group of Israeli cannabis advocates called the Green Drone dropped hundreds of plastic baggies each containing two grams of cannabis flower over the city of Tel Aviv.
Before the event, the Post reports, activists published a statement via Telegram, an online messaging platform, that hinted at their plan:“It’s time my dear brothers. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s the green drone, handing out free cannabis from the sky… Enjoy my beloved brothers, this is your pilot brother,making sure we all get some free love.”
— “Green Drone” cannabis group, via the Jerusalem Post
The Post notes that “Passersby were recorded picking up baggies off the streets and sidewalks surrounding Rabin Square in downtown Tel Aviv. Some even stepped through busy traffic to retrieve baggies from the street.”
The activists hinted that this was only the first such cannabis airdrop. “We’re launching the ‘rain of cannabis’ project,” they told the Post,“that will include a weekly delivery to different parts of the country of 1 kilo of cannabis divided into free 2-gram bags,” the Green Drone group said on Telegram.
This is a terrific development in the right-wing warrior state of Israel and one we’d love to see here in Detroit and Michigan, where we have much less positive news to report this month.
An uncredited story in the Michigan Chronicle sent to me by Jamie Lowell insists that BLACKS SHOULD CONTROL CANNABIS SHOPS and cites a guy named Jonathan Barlow who believes that marijuana is a cash crop that has the potential to offer blacks a golden harvest. The Chronicle explains that the legal U.S. marijuana industry grossed about $7.1 billion sales in 2016 and, of course, even more in the succeeding four years.
Barlow, spokesperson for Citizens for Sensible Cannabis Reform (CSCR) has led an effort to place two proposals on Detroit’s November 7 general election ballot. One ballot measure would align the city with state law, allowing growers to set up shop and processors and safety compliance facilities to be permitted in certain business and industrial districts.
The other measure would allow dispensaries to open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily and locate themselves within 500 feet of a church, another dispensary, park, liquor store or childcare center.
As the Chronicle points out: “With crafty names like House of Dank, Green Genie, Starbuds, and Detroit Grass Station, the city had as many as 283 dispensaries a few years ago, set up in former banks, strip clubs, restaurants, and even homes. In 2015, for example, 64 percent of them were located within 1.15 miles of suburban communities and 62 percent were located within 1,000 feet of an active school.”
Councilman James Tate, a former police official, introduced an ordinance that took effect on March 1, 2016 and resulted in the forced closure of 175 dispensaries who have been ordered to close. Tate says that there were about 30 black-owned dispensaries in Detroit, but “as a result of the ordinance,” he told the Chronicle, “those numbers went down, but all of the numbers went down because they were operating illegally.”
Reginald Venoy, an African-American Detroit resident, owns a dispensary on West 7 Mile Road near Evergreen called Greener Thingz. He believes that it is important for people from the community to own these shops. “I think they should be owned by people in the city,” he told the Chronicle, “and blacks should be a part of it.“
Andre Godwin, a member of the Sons of Hemp, supports the ballot measures advanced by the CSCR. The Sons of Hemp wants the city to issue 50% of all dispensary permits to Detroiters, and at least 50 percent of the jobs to go to neighborhood residents and military veterans.
The Chronicle reports that Councilman Tate opposes the ballot measures, citing a U.S. Supreme Court case that ruled race-based set-asides were unconstitutional. Marijuana use is roughly equal among blacks and whites, yet blacks were almost 4 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession before the recent legalization laws were passed.
In the Detroit Metro Times, Lee DeVito and Jerilyn Jordan report: “According to the Lansing State Journal, only 4% of the respondents to a survey of cannabis license holders conducted by Michigan’s Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs identified as Black, though the group makes up 14% of the state’s population. High start-up costs are to blame for limiting who can enter the industry, though some municipalities have social equity programs that offer reduced fees for minority groups, as well as for people with previous drug offenses.
“Meanwhile, Detroit, the biggest Black city in the country, has decided to not allow recreational cannabis sales for now, further limiting representation in the industry.” This points up the necessity of passing the CSCR measures in the Detroit City elections next month, and in this writer’s humble opinion, the pressing need to replace the numbskulls on the Detroit City Council with a much more reasonable, progressive group of citizens whenever possible.
Speaking of replacing numbskulls through the electoral process, the moment we’ve been waiting for over the past four years is now upon us, and it’s time to exercise our duty as citizens of this country to vote the despicable Resident Rump out of office. Whether he will leave the scene if and when defeated is another area of concern, but first we’ve got to out-vote the gang of thugs and bullies called the Republican Party and their spearhead, the dishonorable Rump.
Their latest caper, the rush to nominate and approve a new Supreme Court justice to replace the Notorious RBG, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, is as ugly a maneuver as I have ever seen, particularly since the very people who are perpetrating this ruse are the ones who refused even to consider President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee in 2016, several months prior to the presidential election, on the grounds that the new president should have the right to select the replacement judge.
Now, fairly certain that they will lose the election, the exact same Republicans are rushing to push some objectionable right-wing woman into Justice Ginsberg’s recently vacated seat despite their own doctrine of just four years ago. Incredible! How long are Americans going to put up with their gangsters and their insulting, unprincipled behavior?
They were supposed to vote on legalizing weed at last but they punked out at the last minute. We don’t deserve this shit! Free The Weed!
—Detroit
September 24, 2020
© 2020 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
