THAT HIPPIE SACRAMENT

On Believing in Personal Freedom and Living Outside the Social Mainstream

Larry Gabriel's Higher Ground column last week painted a frightening
picture of the atrocities perpetrated by the Oakland County law
enforcement community in its last-ditch attempt to preserve and
extend the scope of their prosecution of the War On Drugs by
persecuting medical marijuana patients and licensed caregivers whose
activities are protected by state law.

The legalization of medical marijuana by means of a ballot initiative
approved by 62 percent of Michigan voters in the 2008 election
signaled the end of the drug war that's raged unchecked for almost a
half-century without appreciable positive effect. Any fool can see
that the use of recreational drugs by our citizens has not been
diminished or in any way abated by the efforts of the legions of
police, prosecutors, judges and jailers sworn to stop us from getting high.

In my last column I surmised that perhaps the War on Drugs wasn't
really about drug use per se but was launched as an attack on certain
sectors of our citizenry whose commitment to social change was seen
as presenting a threat to the dominant order and the political,
economic and cultural imperatives established as the foundation of
corporate consumer society.

During the decade from 1965 to 1975, hippies turned their backs en
masse on mainstream America and its perverse value system, refused to
fight its wars, and attempted to create an alternative way of life
based in sharing, tolerance and self-realization through collective
effort and creative production. Their withdrawal from the reigning
social contract presented a real challenge to the consumerist system
and its operators: Until defecting to the hippie ideal, these young
Americans had been expected to inherit and manipulate the machinery
of exploitation and control devised by generations of rich white
people to maintain their privileged existence at the top of the social order.

It's hard for people today to picture the world the hippies populated
as our numbers grew from a few isolated pockets of bohemianism and
weirdness in disparate parts of the country into a movement of
millions of determined young white people demanding a new and better
world for all Americans and a swift end to the militarism, racism,
sexism, economic exploitation and banal popular culture at the core
of the established order.

Hippies were united by their belief in personal freedom and its
manifestation in the way they looked and acted and conducted their
daily lives outside the social mainstream. As a general rule, hippies
had long hair, wore funky clothes expressing their disdain for the
consumer ideal, opposed the war in Vietnam and increasingly refused
to join the armed forces, didn't have a real job and didn't want one,
often embraced collective work for the common good and lived as
equals in communes and creative groupings, actively appreciated
diverse forms of artistic expression and lived with music at the
exact heart of their lives.

Hippies loved to gather in the thousands at concerts in the parks
where the bands played for free and the people danced and laughed and
had a ball together over and over again. They also turned out in
ever-increasing numbers for rallies and demonstrations in opposition
to the war in Vietnam and in support of racial equality and social justice.

Hippie musicians created startling new forms and imaginative
extensions of the African-American musical idioms introduced into
their lives through the magic of repeated radio airplay of 45 rpm
records by innovative artists such as Chuck Berry, Little Richard,
Fats Domino, Bo Diddley, Ray Charles, James Brown, Aretha Franklin
and Marvin Gaye. But what bound hippies together above all else was
marijuana as a component of everyday life. A hippie smoked weed,
everybody knew that, and hippies smoked weed together, in every
possible circumstance.

Despite the positive and progressive aspects of the hippie philosophy
and the hippies' committed social practice in pursuit of its
principles, despite the brilliance of their music and art forms,
despite their heartfelt visions of a better world based in peace and
love and social equality for all, hippies were demonized as criminal
narcotics users to be apprehended, brought before the bar of justice,
convicted and sent to prison or scrutinized by the narcotics police
and courts for years as felonious probationers.

Nothing else the hippies did was against the law. Even our protests
and demonstrations were protected by the First Amendment to the
Constitution of the United States. Our lifestyle, our living and
working arrangements, our music and cultural practices, our
gatherings and public celebrations, however unusual or offensive to
mainstream values, were well within the strictures of the law. Only
our mass recreational, medicinal or spiritual smoking of marijuana -
which we well knew was at the very least not a narcotic, and very
possibly a beneficial natural healing resource with no discernible
negative social effects - brought trouble with law enforcement and
provided the police with a socially acceptable way to punish these
renegades from the American Way whose very presence seemed to violate
every established standard of normal behavior.

My own case exemplifies this. I was a socially active poet,
performer, underground journalist, cultural organizer and community
broadcaster who also spoke out for the legalization of marijuana
starting in 1964 and actually smoked marijuana on a daily basis. I
was arrested by the Detroit Narcotics Squad three times for
possession and sales of narcotics - very small amounts of marijuana
in fact - and served a total of five years probation, six months in
the Detroit House of Correction, and 2-1/2 years of a 9-1/2- to
10-year prison sentence before my legal challenge to the
constitutionality of Michigan's narcotics statutes eventually
resulted, in 1972, with the existing law declared unconstitutional;
marijuana was then removed from the narcotics category and possession
of small amounts of marijuana reduced to a misdemeanor with a
one-year maximum sentence.

My writings and public activities, however offensive or disturbing to
guardians of the social order, were constitutionally protected. But
my use of marijuana as a righteous component of daily life branded me
as a criminal - a felon - subject to the brutal invasion of my life
itself by the criminal justice system and its enforcers in uniform or
plainclothes.

I'm out of space for this installment, but with your permission I'll
continue to pursue this line of thought here in seeking a full
understanding of the destructive impact of the War on Drugs on
harmless marijuana smokers and on the fabric of our social order
itself. Our lives - and our national life as well - have suffered
immeasurably from the imposition and unbridled growth of the
police-state mechanism that's been built up on our backs.

Me, I've been sick of this shit for all of my adult life, and I just
hope I'll live long enough to see the War on Drugs dead and buried
and the full range of its punitive apparatus dismantled and finally
discredited once and for all.

Finally, I'd like to say it's been kicks being in the D for the
frigid month of April, the Hash Bash and the 4:20 celebrations, but
I'm on my way back to London and Amsterdam and I'll be writing more
from there. Happy trails!