A Column by John Sinclair
Hi, everybody, and welcome to our first column of the new year. What’s in store for us as marijuana users, growers and distributors over the 12 months of 2023 remains to be seen, but be sure that the war on drugs and its effect on us is a long way from over.
I’m a big fan and close follower of the work of my fellow columnist Tim Beck, and his contribution last month made me ponder the problems still remaining for our marijuana community.
Even though our present marijuana statutes in Michigan were created by a direct vote of the electorate, the politicians who created and waged the war on drugs for 80 years are not giving up without a bitter fight.
The police, courts, prisons and politicians behind this ugly social aberration have gained unprecedented power and billions of dollars from marijuana smokers and our suppliers, and they’re determined to hold on to this power as long as they possibly can.
The most pervasive ugliness of their approach is the vast tissue of horseshit and lies they use to demonize us and justify their severe treatment of the smoker.
Proceeding from their realization that marijuana is a staple of daily life for millions of Latino and African American citizens, and resolute in their determination to keep white people from getting high and dropping out of commercial society, the one-percenter white men who control our social order have literally stopped at nothing in pursuing their goal to keep white America free from any non-white influence.
First, they created a gigantic social untruth that marijuana is a harmful substance that must be avoided at all costs—they even said that it leads directly to heroin use!—and then they enacted a system of punishment so far out of proportion to the so-called crime that it’s almost impossible to comprehend.
And that’s just where the trouble starts. Next, you’re robbed by a bondsman to get back home, forced to appear in court upon threat of bond revocation and reimprisonment, brought before a black-robed judge and charged with a felony or misdemeanor that will never disappear from your criminal record, and sentenced to a fine and probation at best or a prison sentence at worst.
Oh yeah, and I almost forgot the key role in this process played by attorneys and their colleagues in the law who will represent you before the court in exchange for an exorbitant fee or series of fees and thus minimize the cash fine and/or penalty likely to be handed down by the judge during the sentencing proceedings.
In other words, you smoked some joints and maybe provided a few to your friends, and now you’re on trial for possession of narcotics or controlled substances, depending on the local law.
In Michigan, for example, until 1972, the state provided penalties of up to 10 years for possession of marijuana and a mandatory minimum prison sentence of 20 years (with a maximum of life) for selling or giving away the weed, at that time classified as a narcotic.
Following my arrest in January 1967 for “sales or dispensing” of marijuana—I had given the two joints to an undercover policewoman—I was freed on bond for the next 2 1/2 years, but upon conviction in Detroit Recorder’s Court in July 1969 I was held without appeal bond for 29 months in prison.
I say in 1972 because that’s when my appeal of the 9 1/2-to-10-year sentence for possession of two joints to which I had been sentenced in July 1969 was successfully accepted by the Michigan Supreme Court and the former narcotics laws were thrown out.
You don’t have to be a lawyer or a judge to understand that marijuana is not a narcotic. All you need is a dictionary. Yet this distortion of fact and application of intense punishment held sway from 1937 to 1972, a period of 35 years.
The law was thrown out in March 1972, but as we know so well, the problem with the police and their so-called legal system has continued for another 50 years.
In 2018—already five years ago!—the citizens of Michigan legalized recreational marijuana use, but the politicians and police have maintained their oppressive punitive system by changing “marijuana dealing” to “black market distribution,” and continue to arrest and prosecute innocent people whose only “crime” is supplying their fellow citizens with the medicine they need.
These are the reasons why we have to keep on fighting to FREE THE WEED until these government thugs and police criminals are stripped completely of their power over our lives. How much police presence will you suffer if you grow a carrot or a head of lettuce? Get these people out of our lives once and for all!
—Detroit
December 19-20, 2022
