'WHERE'D YA GET IT?'

When I applied to the state of Michigan for my Michigan Medical
Marijuana Patient ID card last year, I didn't designate a particular
caregiver, and my card arrived with "NO CAREGIVER" printed across the
back.

Then my caregiver and I reached agreement and filed new papers with
the state to establish our relationship. Soon a new card showed up in
my mail with my caregiver's name and address included with my own.

(There was still no photo, however, just a box with the legend "No
Photo Available" -- like you were the kid who failed to show up in
school on the day the pictures were taken for the yearbook. This is
funny because in California, for example, the medical marijuana cards
display the patient's photo and state registration number but not his
or her name or address. I like that approach much better.)

Smiling to myself while fondling my new card and looking at my
caregiver's name on there, it occurred to me that this was truly the
end of an era. "Where'd ya get it?" "I got it from the guy whose name
and address are on my Patient ID card, dimwit."

Some 45 years earlier, when I first got in trouble with the law for
selling a $10 bag of marijuana to an undercover police officer called
"Tall Paul" in the fall of 1964, the Detroit narcotics police took me
to the 9th floor of police headquarters at 1300 Beaubien, locked me in
a holding cell and asked me, "Where'd ya get it?"

I can't remember what I told them, but in the end they wanted me to
set up my pal Archie Allen of Ann Arbor, who they were on to through
some other means, and I had to tell them that I couldn't do that. But,
because I was a graduate student at WSU and it was my first offense of
any kind, I was allowed to plead guilty to "possession of narcotics"
and sentenced to two years probation.

This was still a couple of years before marijuana use spread like
wildfire among American youths who were either college students or
working people with jobs but suffered persecution by the police as if
they were some kind of hardened criminals and dope fiends.

As the war on drugs escalated under the vicious leadership of Richard
M. Nixon and his goons, the full force of the law-and-order
establishment was brought to bear against the students, working-class
youth and lumpenproletariat elements known as hippies who smoked
marijuana on a recreational or medicinal basis without harming
themselves or others in any way.

The number of such casualties of the war on drugs has grown and grown
over the past 40 years and continues to grow well into the 21st
century. As Robert Sharpe of Common Sense for Drug Policy put it, "The
drug war is largely a war on marijuana smokers. In 2009, there were
858,405 marijuana arrests in the United States, almost 90 percent for
simple possession."

Marijuana smokers have presented a perfect target for the drug police.
We're not criminals, we don't understand the police culture, and we're
easily intimidated by the minions of law and order. We've got lives
and jobs and studies to pursue and we've been willing to give up the
little pieces of our hearts required by the police in order to
continue our productive pursuits.

Compared to real police work, surveilling and busting marijuana
smokers is a piece of cake, and the rewards are sweet too: They can
confiscate your funds, take your home and your possessions, lock you
up or sentence you to long periods of probation, drug treatment
programs and other revenue-producing punishments, and blacklist you
from government aid programs and the job market in general.

Then there's drug testing on the job, the stops by the police while
driving your car, and all the associated forms of terrorism in daily
life inflicted on recreational drug users to reinforce the basic
message that they don't want you to get high.

With respect to the marijuana laws, to paraphrase my friend the late
Jack Herer, the emperor ain't got no clothes on. There is no medical,
practical or sensible reason to criminalize marijuana use. It has no
ill effects, it's not addictive, it doesn't kill anyone, and there's
no social benefit to be found in harassing, arresting and jailing
marijuana smokers of any stripe.

Way back in the day, it seemed clear that the only reason we were
being persecuted for smoking weed was because it got us high and
helped us develop and maintain a vision of life outside the industrial
order that might be better for us than buckling down and getting a job
and spending our lives chained to the treadmill that had claimed our
parents.

After sifting through all the layers of obfuscation and bullshit
mythology that've been proposed to explain the need for maintaining
the criminality of marijuana, it seems even clearer now that the
consumer society uses the drug laws to advance and enforce its
relentless campaign to cut the heart out of American life and
transform our citizens into perfect consumers, with arrest and
possible imprisonment awaiting those who don't go along with the program.

Despite all its high-blown rhetoric, the war on drugs has never been
anything more than part of a diabolical scheme to create a social
order on the Soviet model, in which people are pressured to turn in
their friends for crimes against the state, children spy on their
parents, and neighbors rat on neighbors to create an all-pervasive
atmosphere of dishonesty, distrust and betrayal.

The war on drugs has completely undermined the traditional American
way of life and turned the United States into a nation of snitches and
rat bastards who would turn in anyone they know in order to escape a
possible jail sentence.

The advent of legal medical marijuana has blasted a huge chink in the
armor of the police state. In Michigan, where the medical marijuana
model -- with its focus on patients and caregivers as opposed to the
pharmaceutical-consumer paradigm -- incorporates some of the key
elements of the humanist worldview, this hole is even bigger and more
promising.

We've reached an important plateau in what for me has turned out to be
a life-long struggle to end the war on drugs and liberate the
recreational drug user from the clutches of the criminal justice
system. "Where'd ya get it" has finally become an empty threat -- now
let's go the rest of the way.

Last word: In last week's Higher Ground, Larry Gabriel reported that
"Gov. Arnold 'Terminator' Schwarzenegger signed a law downgrading the
possession of an ounce or less of marijuana from a misdemeanor to an
infraction. That means as of Jan. 1, 2011, petty possession is
punishable by a $100 fine and no criminal record."

Larry pointed out that "the Golden State continues to lead the pack in
liberalizing marijuana laws," but this approach was actually pioneered
in Michigan when the cities of Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti and East Lansing
established the $5 ticket for marijuana offenses in the very early
1970s -- oh, almost 40 years ago!