'NEGATIVE ELEMENTS'

An Open Letter to Mike Agguirre and the Morality Police

"We made a decision we're going after every single shop that sells
drug paraphernalia." -City Attorney Mike Aguirre, CityBeat, Nov. 28, 2007

Dear Mike Aguirre: Are you nuts? Do you really believe that anybody
will stop doing drugs if you shut down the paraphernalia suppliers?
We druggies are highly resourceful. Pot smokers can carve apples
into elaborate smoking devices with a nail file they fabricate from
possum bones when necessary. Your typical tweaker can comb an
eight-ball out of the carpet with a pair of chopsticks. These are
imaginative people, sir-they will not be forestalled.

As reported by CityBeat staff writer Eric Wolff, the city attorney
sent letters to 52 smoke shops, ordering them to stop selling drug
paraphernalia.

Question: If I can get all the hash, weed, coke, crack, smack and
speed I need, do you think I'll have any trouble whatsoever finding
devices with which to consume them? Do you really believe, if your
interdict succeeds, that one less bong hit will be sucked or
one less gram snorted, cooked or smoked? As a recreational consumer
of narcotics, I can tell you that I don't see that happening.

Cracking down on head shops is like changing "french fries" to
"freedom fries" or invading Iraq to stop terrorism. It is an utterly
vacuous act designed to swindle people into believing their
government is doing something about a problem which government
exaggerated in the first place.

"They're marketing to younger people," Aguirre said. "We see lots of
youngsters going in and buying… all that crap."

Don't you just love how he pours on the "save the children" sauce and
expects us to slurp it all up without question? I challenge Mike
Aguirre to show exactly where and how they market to kids. As a
person who frequents smoke shops, reads their ads and uses their
products, I just don't see it. OK, maybe somebody out there somewhere
has a Sponge Bob Square Bong on his shelf, but isn't it more likely
they're marketing it as humorous bong irony for adults and not
8-year-olds?

Sponge Bob, as everyone knows, is hilarious when you're
baked.

Also, I find it suspicious when Aguirre says "we see" a lot of
youngsters buying. As a person who frequents the local narcotoriums,
I'm just not seeing it. My experience is that these shops avoid
selling to minors because they're terrified of getting shut down. And
if by "we see" he meant the police, who staked out the shops, I have
to wonder: If they really witnessed clerks selling to kids, why
didn't they bust them right then? It is illegal to sell tobacco
products to minors, right? Why didn't they confiscate the contraband
and arrest the clerks? Certainly, it would be to their advantage to
do so. A few "harmful matter to minors" busts would have gathered
significantly more support for the cause. So, no, Mike, I don't think
you or any of your morality commandos saw squat. I think you're just
playing the "save the children" card to demonize the head shops and
turn the public against them.

Even if it were true that they're selling to kids, well, so what? If
this were truly the problem, then all you need to do is enforce
existing laws about selling to minors and-boom!-exaggerated
non-problem solved.

It's incredible that we're even having this discussion.

How much of a thought policeman do you have to be to criminalize a
product that might be used for illegal purposes? Guess you'd better
ban butter knives, too, because you can break all sorts of laws with
one of those razors of Satan. For instance, you can use a butter
knife to: mug a tourist, torture the neighborhood pets, stab somebody
in the neck, hijack a plane, stir Rohypnol into a drink, cut graffiti
into trees that says things like "Mike Aguirre is a self-involved
power-monger."

Just as a butter knife can be used for illegal purposes, anything
sold in a head shop can be used legally. But it's really not about
the paraphernalia. The issue is the clientele. Nobody's going after
the tobacconists for selling rolling papers? And I'm quite certain
the narcotoriums aren't the only place where you can buy vials,
scales or screens. The problem isn't the individual items-rather,
it's that these items are stocked under one roof, together, a
one-stop shopping mart that attracts drug users, thereby horrifying
the community, which, by the way, has been whipped into a rabid fear
of recreational drug users by their government, who will now step in
and solve the non-problem for them.

"The shops attract a very negative element," said Arthur Schwartz,
president of the North Park Community Association.

Well, what do you know, yet another community leader spreading around
gobs of fear marmalade with the butter knife of moral
superiority.

Dear Mr. Schwartz, as a person who frequents head shops, I can tell
you, I'm not seeing it. In all my years, I never saw no robberies, no
beat-downs, no weapons displayed nor used, no episodes of sidewalk
harassment. In fact, I've seen far more problems in nightclubs,
7-Elevens and Roberto's Mexican joints than I have ever seen in any
smoke shack.

So, piss off, North Park Community Association. I am not a negative
element. Nor are my friends or their friends or the thousands of
people citywide who patronize these stores. We are regular people
with regular jobs and regular families who contribute to this town
in all our regular ways and who have earned the right to consume our
recreational chemicals of choice every bit as much as the smoker, the
boozer, the dipper, the snuffer, the Big Mac eater and the soda popper.

If anyone is a negative element, it's you people. Because you bully
people into obeying your myopic moral code, target small businessmen
to crush their livelihood and use your clout like a cleaver, just
like that sue-happy Mike Aguirre, whose morality I'll hold mine
against any day of the week.