EVIL BRAIN: I'M GIVING PAUSE TO REFLECT ON WAR ON DRUGS TOO

This Remembrance Day I'm concentrating most of my healing energies on
Afghani civilians ripped apart by made-in-America landmines and cluster
bombs. But I'm also honouring our homegrown victims of The War on Drugs.
And although the poppy is a suitable symbol of infinite pain relief
corrupted by perpetual warfare, I'll be wearing a marijuana leaf on my
lapel this year. I can appreciate the ironic hilarity of a country as
violently steeped in immediate gratification as the U.S. declaring war on
the hemp/marijuana plant which has historically provided all the fibre,
fuel, food, medicine and topsoil, sweet topsoil the people need. However,
the role call of wasting, dead and imprisoned at considerable taxpayer
expense is too long to snicker at.

And so in protest I've returned to my old alma mater: The University of
Dope. Good ol' U Dope. Under the auspices of The Merlin Project, we're
filling PVC pipes with Sunshine Mix, cutting tender clones of lavender,
oregano and others herbs, dipping them in rooting hormone and beaming them
with fluorescent, high-pressure sodium and sunlight.

We're soaping up the mites and boning up on botany, photoperiod and the
mysteries of hermaphroditism. At the core there's the chemical structure of
the miraculous THC molecule and its precursors. Our perfesser could wax on
for hours about the evolution of the related cannabinoids when subjected to
the heat, solvents and hand-welded vats and tubes of his weed-oil extractors.

Sure, it's all fascinating and fun but it's in the interests of resuming
research, bypassing pharmaceutical companies and providing medical grade
organic cannabis to the needy. And it's now approved under the new Health
Canada Regulations, which are disappointing in their insistence on keeping
ignorant and pharmaceutically-biased MDs as the gatekeepers of the herb.
Regardless it affords the stakeholders an opportunity to bury the
bureaucrats with a choking wave of paper that may inch us along on the
crooked path to decriminalization.

Sure, education brings pain in the form of fascinating and infuriating
glimpses into the suppressed cure for cancer. That's the big C, people. Go
straight to http://www.projectcensored.org/c2001stories/22.html to read of
the shocking THC tumour-shrinking experiments censored by the DEA in 1974,
recently repeated by Spanish researchers.

But when the hard learnin' is done nothing compares to hashing out a big
sociological question over a pipeful. For instance, are we drawn to placid
marijuana as a self-defence mechanism against our own violence as a
species? What effect does marijuana consumption have in enacting pain
avoidance behaviour? Are pot-smokers more or less likely to do the busy
work society considers useful? Will they hump the 60-pound pack 10 miles to
the screams of a drill sergeant? Or venture out into inclement weather when
an errand can be postponed till a brighter day?

So much depends on the mood, on the mind at the time...but if the prize
were rich enough there was no typhoon or bubble gum/hash plant hybrid that
could slow me down.

But if you want a generalizations, you got 'em. Sure, regular marijuana use
demotivates people from the back-breaking, knee-busting and brain-wearing
tasks. It may indeed pervert a whole strata of society to scorn the vile
tax of government dependency and cruel usury of the banks. It may in fact
enlighten the mind to spin gold from hempstraw.

What a dangerous notion to have citizens considering. No wonder the feds
want kids hepped up on nice safe stimulants like speed-oops I mean Ritalin,
caffeine, refined sugar and first-person shooters. We need people who will
accept the agony of algebra, the fatigue of 10,000 keystrokes per minute,
the compressed spine of 10 hours spent dancing on a concrete floor. We need
shallow minds to endorse the war on terrorism based on a page of sketchy
allegations.

So on the 11th minute of the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of
this sorry year 2001, self-medicate those feelings of stress and depression
with a couple high-powered bong tokes.

And remember that bombing civilians from the stone age into the gravel age
is an insult to the notion of enduring freedom.

The only enduring freedom we need is from the corporate terrorism that
blackmails our government into criminalizing what was furnished to nurture us.