Hemp Revolution!

I had a little time to reflect on the ferry on the way back to the city from Vancouver Island. If one has such a mind spiraling, soul blasting, god shattering experience like I just had on the mountain, your self needs a bit of readjustment to assimilate this new gnosis, and how to interpret it in the context of your own personal historical momentum and present wherewithal. A new who you are, where you came from, and where are you going. Without getting too head-spacey at this point in time, let's just say I was in quite a daze, but all things considered, I was picking up the pieces quite well.

It kind of started like this:
In late August of 2005, I left the USA and the stagnating, toxic culture that was (and still is) brewing. The daily amount of fear that was being propagated by mainstream media forces about war, terror, etc, was infecting the greater populace and transforming American culture into a dis-empowered, disenfranchised state of people, who were generally afraid of apathetic. Cunning greed acted in this vacuum of a democracy where the nonparticipating people were less involved, and used this spell of fear propaganda to insidiously wipe out the middle class' wealth by a slow systematic artificial increase of costs for basic human needs, like food, medical care, and energy prices for housing and transportation. For an example, ask anyone about the current reaming they get every time they fill up at a gas station.

I saw beyond this squalor of greedy corporate mismanagement, as I saw what could be held accountable, and what could help fix it. Just a couple of years prior, when I was in the midst of my own battles with the dominator culture of avarice and control that was extremely aggressively oppressive to me personally, I, for the first time found an ally in nature: Cannabis Sativa.

The effects of ingesting this plant brought me much love laughter and truth in a world that I had felt was becoming devoid of it. Weed brought me to the inner worth of my self, opening forgotten doors of creativity and beauty that had been fused shut by the torturous welding flames of oppression. Far from being a �last stoner�, I these new feeling of self empowered motivation to better my health and lose weight gained by destructive dietary habits, especially my previous form of self-medication for depression, approximately four liters of Pepsi per day, which I dropped entirely.

I became a vegetarian, meditated daily, began studying many new things, and I began writing again, renewing my old creative passion. It was now the Question that drove my Quest:

Why?

Why was this green herb, which had done so many wondrous things and invoked so much happiness and imagination for my friends and I, why was it deemed illegal by our American society?

Jack Herer's The Emperor Wears No Clothes opened my eyes like few others have before or since. It answered many unanswered questions for me. It showed me the very nature of the plant itself poses a problem and threat of the authoritarian hegemonic dominator mentality. The herb's very existence questions authority, and makes hazy the boundaries of control. Jack Herer's book lays out the history of this plant, a history that has been suppressed and erased throughout human history by hierarchal societies seeking to oppress and keep a status quo of inequity and castes.

Having an unfettered growth of Cannabis legal would provide cheap, proven medicines, and a recreation stimulus to the public. Besides the thousands of industrial uses and food potential, the biomass of all the stalks from the hemp could provide enough methanol through means of gasification techniques, for this country's energy independence. A truly revolutionary idea! A cheap, clean, renewable, sustainable source of fuel! Hemp for Fuel! This opposed to over-paying for pills that don't cure to fatten a health industry that doesn't heal, supporting wars and imperialism in foreign countries for essentially robbery of polluting, unnecessary petroleum, and shady deals with "allied" foreign countries with deplorable human rights policies.

But if I wanted to see deplorable human rights, I didn't nee to look further than my small hometown in Maine, USA. If I were to grow this sacred plant myself in the United States, I would be one of the millions of prisoners here supporting a prison industry and a police state.

(Hence, many overpaid pig-cops, sitting at the local donut shop, waiting to hassle a teenager (or ethnic minority) for not having anything better to do and the given power to do it)

But prisons don't begin or end with bars: I grew up in a mill-town that manufactured a 9 to 5 mentality that cages the mind body and spirit of human potential, enfeebling living people into a gear in a machine of monotony. I myself was denied higher education due to my poverty, and was subjected to persecution and harassment by the corrupt local law enforcement for exercising my rights of free speech and spreading my political views on the legalization of Cannabis.

I wrote to my elected officials in all levels of government who are supposed to represent me, but instead they have much more interest in corporate sponsorship and to their wallets. So I participated in marches, peace vigils against the war, etc. I spoke up in Hemp Rallies in my state (which is actually quite progressive in the scheme of things), became involved in several pro-legalization groups, all the while trying to rally the troops to more proactive activism that got shit done, by fighting the good fight.

But a pervading mentality in our society is that Pot-Activism is and oxymoron.

"Yeah man, groovy ideas, lets have a sit-in and a drum circle at the Capitol Building until they hear our ideas. But, first, let's smoke this joint" ---- Hippies!!! It is quite the paradox of having the effects of the high making you too stones to actually do much about the whole being active thing.

What would Mugen do?

There are many comparable elements of this situation that are displayed in Episode #9 of Samurai Champloo. While traversing though the countryside, Mugen stumbles upon a hidden valley in the mountains. In this he finds huge fields of asa, of flowering Cannabis Sativa.

A clan of warrior monks had been secretly growing the herb, under orders of the head priest.

This chief cleric knew the power of the plant, and preached to his weed-smoking clan about his intent to distribute this herb to disrupt the Japanese government�s feudal system and stop the corruption of the police-force samurai. He knew the properties of the herb

and the effect it would have is dispensed to the populace.

My encounters with the American government and hierarchal societies sowed me that they fear this plant and its effects of dissolution of caste boundaries in the minds and spirits of those in its influence. They claim that society would fall into a moral, economic turpitude. Is this true? Would society crumble is this weed were freed?

In Canada, and in Vancouver where I was visiting in a semi-official freelance investigation of a culture of liberal cannabis laws, quality herb was widely available and distributed at cheap prices. The police looked the other way, for they knew that no violent crimes were committed in association with these transactions. I, personally, had never felt safer. The Canadians, to my mind, are by and large a very sane, sensible, compassionate and rational people; even the ones who weren't getting high. By their decriminalization policies in place, Canadians took the criminal element out of cannabis growth and sale. Far from the in the USA where mafia crime syndicates move large volumes of marijuana along with many other hard narcotics such as cocaine and heroin,

the Canadian grower is more of an entrepreneur and their dealers mark up no more than the average goods are in any retail venture.

As a representative of Maine, I felt it necessary to account for the disparities of our two countries and how they deal with this plant. As a member of a pro-legalization force, I sought out the lead activists in the movement, which brought me to the writers and editors of Cannabis Culture Magazine.

But to get to their offices, I had to go through the 'dangerous' part of town in inner-city Vancouver, the notorious East Hastings neighborhood. Local Canadians spoke in hushed tones about the area, I shouldn't go through there at night, as it was run down, and people were known to smoke crack there. I had seen some cracked out shanty towns where I had lived, so I knew the spectre of danger and ugliness firsthand. Walking in the fullest safety I could expect from solar illumination, I bravely strode through, prepared for anything. And what I saw, indeed, did shock me to the core.

This was the most beautiful crack neighborhood I ever saw! The streets were well kept, here was no noticable urine smell and there were even many small gardens hanging from windows. Yes, there were a few junkies in alleys, hitting the glass pipe, but as I passed, they stopped what there were doing, smiled and waved. Flabbergasted... is a word that describes the feeling as I saw the disparity between the real threats in low income neighborhoods anywhere in the USA, and the crack-street of inner-city Canada. I swear, the crack heads looked to happy, and the scene was so surreal, I half expected a group of them to jump up and start singing songs Wizard of Oz style, cuz I most certainly wasn't in Kansas anymore.

I made it to Cannabis Culture HQ, met with some of the heads, and I was invited to a rally:

(Can you find Ergoat in the crowd?)

I saw Canadians who were adversely affected by my governments policies. The United States basically bullied Canada into adhering to the laws of a failed Drug War through treaties. I heard from many Americans who had fled across the border to avoid spending years in a cage for victimless crime. But I saw the war against the oppression had to be fought in the USA, and it would take a radical, revolutionary change in public consciousness for this to happen.

I had to face some hard truths about this.

I'm certainly not accusing Marc Emery, or anyone in that Canadian activist crew of being a sniveling fool. Far from it, they are courageous leaders of an activism scene that has brought much knowledge and good seeds across that border, for which I am grateful.

But, I had to come to terms that this was a fight where it came down to, we have all the better arguments for legalization, but the dominator culture has the better guns, and a willingness to use them to enforce as status quo of oppression.

A whole knew way of seeing society had to be envisioned, and to do this, I had to find and speak with the Visionary Artists and Activists, to see if we could co-create a better future.

The second half of he theme song to Samurai Champloo, Battle Cry, has a verse that goes:

"the quote-unquote code stands the test of,
time for the chosen ones to find the best of,
noble minds that ever graced the face of,
a hemisphere with no fear, fly over."

I wasn't quite sure about being a chosen one, or even a noble mind, but this was my Quest, so I went back to the USA, to see how I could help in the stuggle in my homeland.

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