Six on History: Cannabis
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1) The 'war on drugs' was always about race, LA Times
"Democrats talk about a “failed war on drugs” because they lack the fortitude to speak on this uncomfortable truth: It didn’t fail.
As Kathleen Frydl eloquently points out in her book “The Drug Wars in America, 1940-1973,” the country’s gradual move from regulating recreational drugs to criminalizing them came to fruition in 1968. Before then, the federal government’s version of the drug war included tax policies such as the Marihuana Act of 1937, sending tax collectors after the industry.
After 1968, under the Justice Department instead of the Treasury (did no one consider Health and Human Services?), it was clear the war’s focus was criminal prosecutions, not treatment. So even before President Richard Nixon declared cannabis and other recreational drugs to be Public Enemy No. 1 in 1971, the Johnson administration had set the policy that would swell U.S. prisons for decades to come.
About 1.3 million of the 2.3 million incarcerated people in this country are in state prisons. Drug-related crimes are the most common reason for imprisonment in state prisons. The country has the planet’s highest prison population. Doesn’t it seem a bit nonsensical to characterize the drug war as a failure when sending people to prison for drug-related crimes was the intent?
Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020
Report showing the number of people who are locked up in the United States and why
But where the “failed war on drugs” rhetoric goes from nonsensical to offensive is when Democrats speak as if the race disparity in drug-related arrests wasn’t intentional.
“For decades, our federal government has waged a War on Drugs that has unfairly impacted low-income communities and communities of color. … It is time for Congress to end the federal marijuana prohibition and reinvest in communities most impacted by the failed War on Drugs.”
These are the words of Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, who along with two other Democratic co-sponsors announced the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act last week. While I applaud the move to end marijuana prohibition, I’m not a fan of the soft landing he gave our anti-drug history.
“Unfairly impacted”?
Nah, bruh — we were targeted. We are targeted.
Today Black people are four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than our white counterparts, despite comparable usage rates. And these arrests … we know they can ruin lives.
There are more than 500,000 people in jail right now simply because they can’t afford bail.
We know the FBI’s illegal Counterintelligence Program used policies from the drug war to try to discredit the civil rights movement and attack Black leaders like members of the Black Panther Party.
We know Nixon’s own domestic policy advisor, John Ehrlichman, said that drug laws gave a pretext to “arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.” He even said: “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
And we know in 1971, the same year Nixon launched his drug war, he was recorded sharing laughs with California Gov. Ronald Reagan as they call Africans “monkeys” and “cannibals.” Later, as president, Reagan put Nixon’s drug war and mass incarceration on steroids.
Yes, it is disgusting. Yes, it is nefarious. But it is also the truth. Rebranding it doesn’t change that."
"A new cannabis education program could take college students to new heights.
Medgar Evers College, located in Crown Heights, has announced the launch of a new cannabis minor degree program. The first such program in the City University of New York (CUNY) system, the school’s leaders frame the program both as an opportunity to develop new leaders in the burgeoning industry and as an extension of the civil rights work of the college’s namesake.
“Oftentimes, communities of color are the last to benefit from emerging economic opportunities,” Dr. Patricia Ramsey, president of Medgar Evers College, said. “The science faculty and the business faculty collaborated in developing the minor in cannabis education, thus exposing the students to the science, health, technical and business aspects of this new industry.”
The announcement of the course comes after the New York State legislature voted in March to legalize recreational marijuana, after years of failed attempts.
Students can now enroll in “Introduction to the World of Cannabis,” a prerequisite course for many of the other courses in this program. This course is designed to study “the intersectional nature of cannabis,” the college says, by examining the challenges and opportunities associated with institutional cannabis reform. Michael Zaytsev, who has written about the marijuana business and founded the networking community High NY, will lead the class.
“Whether you’re passionate about art, business, climate change, criminal justice reform, healthcare, or even pop culture, cannabis significantly impacts all of the above and more,” Zaytsev said.
In future semesters, students will be able to choose four of 13 newly-developed courses to earn a cannabis degree minor in one of four different tracks, including focuses on cannabis cultivation and laboratory sciences. The courses are open to students at all CUNY campuses.
The school hopes the program can also serve as a resource for policymakers through its instructors as well as with industry partners like the cannabis leadership organization Women Grow, the Cookies cannabis brand, and the Webber Wild Impact Fund, among others.
The program was designed by a Cannabis Education Taskforce assembled by the school, and is housed in the Department of Chemistry and Environmental Science. Taskforce members said they were aware of the significance of launching the program at Medgar Evers College, a Predominantly Black Institution located in a neighborhood that has born the brunt of the nation’s war on drugs.
“The central tenet of this entire program is to achieve targeted outcomes that will elevate a community that has been sidelined, blocked out, stifled, alienated, and even forgotten because of the devastating and adverse impact of the U.S.’s historical war on drugs and associated cannabis policies,” said Dr. Alicia Reid, chair of the school’s Chemistry and Environmental Sciences department and a Taskforce member.
Though the recreational use of marijuana by people aged 21 and over has been legal in New York since March, the state’s legislation left many details of regulation—including how to regulate retail sales—up to a yet-to-be-created agency. To get things moving, the state must nominate and confirm members of a new five-person cannabis control board.
Governor Kathy Hochul has indicated that the confirmations will likely happen during a special legislative session taking place this week."
"Yesterday, I published a list of unusual literary cookbooks—and in doing so was reminded of perhaps the most notorious recipe ever included in such a volume: “Haschich Fudge,” printed in The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book in 1954. Since this is Thanksgiving and you may be called upon to make dessert and/or come up with creative ways to tolerate your relatives, I thought I would share it again here.
Of course this wasn’t Toklas’s recipe at all—it was sent to her by a friend, the artist Brion Gysin, who lived in Morocco. (You may not recognize the name, but he’s a literary celebrity in his own right, or should be: Gysin invented the cut-up method, which William S. Burroughs made famous.) Toklas signed a contract with Harper’s for the cookbook in 1952, but as the deadline approached, she decided she didn’t have enough recipes of her own and started asking her friends for help. This was Gysin’s contribution. (I have corrected his misspelling of “cannabis” in multiple places.)
Haschich Fudge (which anyone could whip up on a rainy day)
"This is the food of Paradise—of Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradises: it might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR. In Morocco it is thought to be good for warding off the common cold in damp winter weather and is, indeed, more effective if taken with large quantities of hot mint tea. Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extension of one’s personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost anything Saint Theresa did, you can do better if you can bear to be ravished by “un évanouissement reveillé.”
Obtaining the cannabis may present certain difficulties, but the variety known as cannabis sativa grows as a common weed, often unrecognized, everywhere in Europe, Asia and parts of Africa; besides being cultivated as a crop for the manufacture of rope. In the Americas, while often discouraged, its cousin, called cannabis indica, has been observed even in city window boxes. It should be picked and dried as soon as it has gone to seed and while the plant is still green.
For those who’d rather hear it directly from the source, or who simply have their hands full, below you’ll find Toklas—dignified as can be—reading the recipe aloud on Pacifica Radio in 1963. She reads the above and then tells the interviewer:
The recipe was innocently included without my realizing that the hashish was the accented part of the recipe, and then I was shocked to find that America wouldn’t accept it, because it was too dangerous. Well this was an offense to the American eye and American thought because they were afraid they were up against the law. And so my publisher wired to Washington and asked the administration if it were possible to use such a recipe. Then it appeared, there’d been an outcry. The magazines took it up. And he got as an answer from Washington: “you can do anything you please except eat it. That is forbidden by law. You may grow it, you may manufacture it, but you may not sell it, you may not eat it.” Brion Gysin himself wired me and said, “what are we doing about this?” And I said, “I’m doing nothing, what can you do?” I was shocked to find that it was hashish. I thought it was just a joke of his. And he said “well something should be done,” and so he wired to the editor, who paid no attention to him. He said it was too late. Later, in conversation. So that was that. It never went into the American edition. The English are braver. We’re not courageous about that sort of thing.
"BREVARD COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE IS ATTEMPTING TO RETURN LOST ITEMS
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See more""If you were a pot-smoking teenager in the ’90s, chances are you heard the same urban legend I did. Marlboro’s just waiting for weed to be legalized, man. They’ve got the tobacco fields ready to repurpose; they’ll even use their green menthol pack when they start selling joints. Someone’s sister knew a guy whose college professor had seen the mockups! What’s weird about this particular wish-fulfillment conversation isn’t how dumb it was; it’s that even a stoned 16-year-old could grok the conflict brewing in the fantasy. Sure, the idea of walking into a store to buy a spliff seemed so far-fetched that imagining it was akin to arguing about who would win a fight between Batman and Boba Fett. But if that day ever did come, we sensed, it would become a commercial battlefield.
Surprise: that’s exactly what happened. After California allowed medicinal use of marijuana in 1996 — and then truly after 2012, when Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize cannabis for recreational use — a new industry sprouted. The “green rush,” as it immediately became known, wasn’t just a financial opportunity; it nurtured the best and worst that U.S. capitalism had to offer. For every underdog, a huckster; for every scrappy botanist, a shadowy billion-dollar concern; for every newly minted entrepreneur, a stinging reminder that even legal cannabis has a way of perpetuating inequities. Whether or not the devil’s lettuce ever becomes legalized at a federal level (and Marlboro finally gets involved), the journalism compiled below makes clear that the stories of post-legalization America are in many ways the stories of the nation itself.
A) The Great Pot Monopoly Mystery (Amanda Chicago Lewis, GQ, August 2017)Few journalists have been covering the weed beat longer or better than Lewis; she’s knowledgeable, well-sourced, and has reported on everything from how Black entrepreneurs have been shut out of the cannabis boom to how the company Weedmaps has cultivated a booming business with a selective attention to legality. But my favorite work of hers might just be this feverish jaunt down the rabbit hole of BioTech Institute, a company that reportedly struck fear into the heart of the industry by trying to issue utility patents on the cannabis plant itself. Sounds dry? Not when it feels like the plot of a noir movie, with Lewis as the dogged detective:
Outside of these patents, BioTech Institute barely exists. The company has no website, manufactures no products, and owns no pot shops. Public records for BioTech Institute turned up two Los Angeles addresses—a leafy office park an hour northwest of downtown and a suite in a Westside skyscraper—both of which led to lawyers who didn’t want to talk.
There’s no definitive aha twist in this movie — no moment that the camera skews to a Dutch angle and the violins screech in the score — but its shagginess is kind of the point. Watching a reporter follow bum leads, spool out her own thinking, and otherwise externalize her shoeleather fact-finding turns this from a Shadowy Conspiracy saga to something somehow far more satisfying: a process story.
B) Half Baked: How a Would-Be Cannabis Empire Went up in Smoke (Michael Rubino, Julia Spalding & Derek Robertson, Indianapolis Monthly, August 2021)In November 2020, Indianapolis Monthly ran a small item on Rebecca Raffle, a woman who had moved to town and opened two CBD bakeries in the city. A few fact-checking bumps aside, the piece was uneventful, the kind of local-business profile that pops up in two dozen city magazines every month of the year. But as 2020 turned into 2021, those fact-checking bumps turned out to be the first in a long saga of upheaval and deception, exhaustively recounted here by a team of journalists that would expose Raffle’s business talk for what it truly was: talk.
None of this seemed in line with the chill entrepreneur with the bubbly personality and perpetual ear-to-ear smile. A gay, Jewish, California-transplanted working mom, Raffle conveyed an endearing underdog quality and a compelling girl-boss backstory. A lot of people bought right into it.
We bought right into it.
Self-mythologizing is nothing new; people often believe what you tell them, and many a business owner has scraped through the lean times by acting as though their aspirations are already reality. But the meta-wrinkle in this particular story — the writers grappling throughout with the role they and their magazine played in elevating this particular mythologist — makes “Half Baked” much more than an exercise in grifter-gets-caught schadenfreude. Whether Raffle’s a Fyre Fest-level charlatan or just a woman whose ambitions outpaced her expertise, you won’t get to the end without a hefty sense of emotional conflict.
C) The Willy Wonka of Pot (Jason Fagone, Grantland, October 2013)“DJ Short’s here!” said a large man in a tie-dyed tank top. He was sitting next to Short on the dais at Hempfest. His name card said STINKBUD. “I was growin’ his Blueberry back in the ’80s,” Stinkbud said. “One of the most famous guys in the entire world! DJ Short! This guy’s a legend.”
It’s not all stoner sycophancy, though. Fagone portrays Short as a man who knows how much he’s contributed to the current state of the cannabis world — and yet finds himself unable to stop that world from roaring by, leaving him behind in its rush to monetize his lifelong passion. Whimsical headline aside, there’s a real melancholy lurking here, even as Short accepts his laurels. A portrait of the artist as a forgotten craftsman.
D) Is Cannabis Equity Reparations for the War on Drugs? (Donnell Alexander, Capital & Main x Fast Company, April 2018)A 2020 study by the ACLU found that in the U.S., Black Americans are 3.64 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession. That same year, 94% of those arrested for cannabis offenses in New York City were people of color. Clearly, legalization has not alleviated the disproportionate burden that low-level drug enforcement has historically placed on the Black community, nor has it prevented Black entrepreneurs from getting shut out of the space. That’s why, in California, a number of cities have attempted to enact cannabis equity, reserving up to half of their marijuana business permits for those living under the median income line or who have a previous cannabis conviction — and in this piece, Alexander chronicles how Oakland’s equity program can set a model for others.
No state has a relationship dynamic remotely like the one between California and marijuana. We officially consume 2.5 million pounds of the drug each year, more than any other state. California produces more than 13 million pounds annually. This means that, even before dipping its toes into the uncharted waters of restorative justice, the legal weed market must contend with vast market and political forces.
Those forces culminated in a near-failure for Oakland’s program; while the city had set aside millions in no-interest funding for these startups, it was having a difficult time facilitating the necessary partnerships between white and Black applicants. The solutions — or people, as the best solutions tend to be — don’t provide much in the way of narrative tension, but they do offer a necessary perspective on what it’s really like trying to change the system in a fundamental way.
E) Inside the Underground Weed Workforce (Lee Hawks, The Walrus, October 2018)In 2010, I quit my teaching job and travelled south of the border to trim massive crops of cannabis
Legal or not, all the cannabis that enters the supply chain starts with the same thing: human labor. Trimmers, those who take scissors to plant to free the psychogenic flower, have long been the backbone of the industry. Yet, as the workforce swells and legalization drives prices down, the livelihood isn’t as dependable as it once was. A blend of reportage and the pseudonymous Hawks’ own experience — numerous trips from Canada to work California’s harvest season — makes his account of “scissor drifter” culture an urgent one.
