Dispensaries, Discrepancies, and Discrimination

  

Marijuana is making its rounds around the web. And it seems like there is more and more movement to try and make it legal and stop the harassment of police at dispensaries.

Here are a few articles worth noting:

SF Weekly's Blog posted "Cops Claim Pot Clubs are Crime Magnets, Won't Provide Evidence To Back It Up" today (Wednesday, May 12, 2010).

The gist of the article is in the headlines. SFPD claims that the medical marijuana dispensaries on Ocean Avenue bring crime to the neighborhood. As someone deeply familiar with Ocean Avenue and the OMI, really?

My dear friend is a community organizer of the OMI. She sits on the Ocean Avenue Revitalization Collaborative, and she is actively involved in creating the OMI's cultural legacy. She has been doing this work since she was born, and she was born in the OMI over 50 years ago. I've worked with her for years, many of which have been supporting her work in the OMI. Never have I heard this issue mentioned. And trust me, I hear ALL the gossip of Ocean Avenue. Currently, the most pressing issue is whether or not Ocean Avenue wants to become a Community Benefit District.

What concerns me about this article is the start of an unsubstantiated assault on medical marijuana dispensaries in San Francisco by SFPD, specifically by Police Chief Gascon. I have lived in San Francisco for over 12 years doing community work all of those years. One thing I have learned in that time is San Francisco is overwhelmingly pro-marijuana.

This assault on legal establishments makes me cringe. It seems only a short step until more local laws are infringed upon.

Need a reminder? San Francisco is, on paper, a Sanctuary City. However, defining what made San Francisco a Sanctuary City, it used to mean city agencies not cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is changing. The new ICE Secure Communities initiative is a prime example. Secure Communities mandates that any time someone is booked by local or state law enforcement their fingerprints be compared to biometrics in the US Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Securities databases. It ties the hands of San Francisco to enforce its own Sanctuary City Policy. (Want more information? Click here and here.)

Then, I came across "Why Ending Marijuana Prohibition Is a Racial Justice Issue" an article in Race in America, a part of Change.org. 

Here are a couple of key quotes:

Of the 1.8 million drug arrests made last year, 750,000 were for nothing more than possession of a small amount of marijuana. That represents more than 40% of all drug arrests. The best available national evidence indicates that roughly the same proportion of blacks and whites use marijuana — but that black people are roughly three times more likely to be arrested for possessing marijuana. [...]

What's difficult to understand is how and why the number of people arrested annually for marijuana possession has roughly doubled during the past 20 years — even as support for ending marijuana prohibition has also doubled during the same period of time. [...]

In California, 61,400 people were arrested for marijuana possession in 2008, a 300% increase since 1990. In California, black people made up less than 7% of the state population but 22% of people arrested for all marijuana offenses and 33% of all marijuana felony arrests in 2008. More black people are arrested in California for marijuana felonies than whites, although there are six times more whites in the state population — and huge numbers of white people involved in growing and selling marijuana.

This is alarming and makes even a stronger case for why SFPD and Police Chief Gascon should stop assaulting legal establishments, especially establishments in historically black and brown neighborhoods. Ocean View was one of the few places after World War II where black/African American families could afford to purchase a home. During the 1960s, more black/African American families moved to the neighborhood. There is cultural and historical significance to Ocean View. Picking on the dispensaries on Ocean Avenue is an assault on black and brown people.

We do need to solve the problems of crime and violence. Discriminating against people of color and legal dispensaries doesn't do this. Instead, it reinforces the tension between SFPD and communities of color, and it continues the cycle of distrust.

Maybe, instead, we could learn something from the dispensaries. I know I have never seen a more diverse group of people communing between four walls. Never. It is amazing to behold. They may be more of the solution than the problem than we even know.

Here's to hoping and toking.

Former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson on Cobert Report: Legalize Pot!

      

I just had to share this. It comes from The Colbert Report. Former New Mexico Governor, Gary Johnson, was on the show last night (May 10, 2010) talking about the pros of legalizing marijuana. Now, I have done a lot of reading and research on the push to legalize marijuana. Mostly, they are pot or marijuana advocates that are academics, users, researchers, and celebrities. Sometimes, you get a local politician. Rarely, do you find a (former) governor, let alone a Republican governor who also supports gay marriage, getting into the public arena espousing why marijuana should be legal, or at least decriminalized. He is articulate and succinct, something I tend to lack. So I will let him tell you why it should be legal. But then again, if you are already on this site, I am preaching to the converted.

You definitely want to check it out.

And help spread the word! It is really simple. Who better than a Republican to deliver a message other Republicans might be able to hear? (Notice I said might. This won't work for tea baggers.)  So send this on to that crazy aunt or conservative grandparent or that friend that just might need a little push. Who knows? They might just actually change their mind.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Gary Johnson
www.colbertnation.com

A Repurposed Coke Bottle and a Few Close Friends

  
I didn't get intoxicated until a year and a half in to my two years of college. It's not that I didn't want to drink or do drugs. It's just that I was more concerned with church and acting and stealing things from stores, convenience and department. I just liked different highs like the kind you get from having the Holy Spirit invade your body and forcing you to speak in tongues. Sure, it seems like an odd way of escape, but it's no different than pull out good ol' Autumn Rose, taking a huge toke from her double-barreled water filtration system, and talking for hours about how the universe is connected. Both, in their essence, are existential. Both are intoxicating. Both are unreal.

It was holy weed from the land of California brought to us by a friend roaming from coast to coast selling joints and telling stories to ear money for his trip that sullied me. I was the only novice out of a handful of comrades sitting in my boyfriend's living room tripping out to Portishead or The Cardigans or some other mid-09's alterna-ish band. The traveller knocked on the door and the contemplative mood ignited momentarily just like a match being struck. He joined us on the couch and began rolling a joint. I was mesmerized by the deftness of his fingers and the gentle wafting green earth smell.

Everyone thought of me as straight-laced. The seminary didn't do much for dispelling that myth. In fact, it outright confirmed that I was dull and a bore, a person comfortable with rules and ritual. On one hand, that is somewhat true. I do have an internal need for order. But chaos and instinct guide my every action. Because of this perception, beers and joints normally passed me by. I didn't really care. My head was crazy enough without added intoxicants.

The joint was passed from lip to lip. My boyfriend looked at me, smiled, and blew a little smoke in my face. I inhaled tasting sage, tobacco, and clove. My foodie palate just beginning, I wanted to taste more. He passed it to me. I inhaled again.

The myths about not getting high the first time or newbies not inhaling deep enough or how weed made you batshit crazy all evaporated in that one long breath. Marijuana reached the bottom of my lungs, and I held it there. Slowly exhaling, a thin stream of smoke made its serpentine escape and danced in the air before finally disappearing. My eyes tickled, my head danced, and I eased back into the couch quiet and relaxed.

"This is what marijuana does? This?" I thought, and then I laughed a small laugh that I thought only I could here, but spilled out of my lips just like the smoke.

My friends started giggling at me, but I didn't care. I just added to their laughter until all of us couldn't remember what started it all. The joint still passed from lip to lip until it and our laughter was extinguished.

Then, our traveller stood up and announced he had one more surprise for us. He swiftly exited the house into the wintry snowy night and returned with a long glass contraption with chambers and flutes and spindly things. A dash of water added to the bottom, and it was set to take us somewhere else entirely. We marveled at its unique form and beauty. Such a thing could easily have had its place in a Chihuly exhibition.

The lighter hit the bowl igniting the tiny green leave as more smoke twirled upward mirroring the abstracted shapes my boyfriend had previously attempted to paint on his walls. I was no longer in his house. I , too, was a traveller riding my high to distant places, imagining California warmth, and a life less ordinary. I was a rebel uniting with comrades and planning some incursion that would never come to fruition. I closed my eyes and felt each fiber of the woven couch between my forefinger and thumb riding its long strands into the cotton of the cushions.

I enjoyed the mixture of enhanced reality and imagination. It was a needed release from the constant clatter of my unaltered hyperactive mind. I was able to ride a thought or an idea until I found another point it connect to. Then, I would explore that point, its edges and boundaries, until the curved circumference broke and unwound into another long line. Another point. Another line.

The glass contraption reached my lips; a lighter already lit; I inhaled again.

Our traveling guest told his tale of the bong. It was a gift or an art project or something of that nature. I don't recall. In a previous life, it was a Coke bottle. The logo stretched beyond recognition, he was the only one who knew for sure whether this tale was true.

The evening ended with a little making out, but not with the boyfriend rather his best friend. He walked in on us and laughed. He was thrilled to see not only my perceptions of drug use open up but also my concepts of relationships. It was that same evening I decided I wouldn't be monogamous. He encouraged a lot of my growth.

I can't recall how the evening ended. Such is the result of pot smoking, time, and distance. It's been fourteen years since that first puff, and rarely have I looked back on it. Now, recording this story, I am glad not only for that evening but also for my willingness to try something new. Risk doesn't come without failure or disappointment or even possibly violence. But risk does stretch one's thinking. That night, thanks to some weed, a repurposed Coke bottle, and a few close friends, I was stretched. And I'm still stretching today.