Not A Blog™

It is the state of the union today that I have to preface this by saying I’ve never used drugs, I don’t condone illegal activities such as using drugs, and I’m a horrible, evil person for even thinking these thoughts, much less writing them down here to be ready by any passers-by. Despite the disclaimer, I could probably still get in trouble. It just goes to show how far the war on drugs has come. Usage? Illegal, of course. Possession? A felony as well. Discussion? Subversive.

I’ve recently become aware of a concept which intrigues me. It’s the idea of the trimtab. A trimtab is the leading edge of a larger control surface which moves independently of that surface. It allows minor course corrections and provides stabilization for a large vehicle such as a ship or airplane. I learned of the idea from the Buckminster Fuller Challenge. Fuller explained how the trimtab on a rudder can provide a small amount of energy which makes turning the rudder—and the entire ship—much easier. A trimtab in the cultural sense, then, is a small thing that a person or people can do to change the course of an entire culture.

I just learned about this last week, which is intersting considering my post on copyrights. That is something I believe could be considered a trimtab. The Buckminster Fuller Institute is looking for scientific solutions to problems, which they provide a grant to help develop. I prefer to develop less expensive and more accessible options. Today, I had another thought which is rather trimtab in nature.

I enjoy working in town because of the vast array of lunch-time menu options within walking distance. I was returning from a local cheesesteak joint, walking down the small one-lane, two-way street that runs past the back of the building in which I work. This street has no sidewalk, and as I made my way south, I stepped off the road to allow a car to pass. I ended up walking through some knee-high weeds which thrive in back alleys, and I found myself wondering, I wonder if there’s any pot in here.

Well that’s ridiculous, I quickly told myself, because although there is a low-income tenement apartment on the other side of the block, it’s not like no one would notice a cannabis plant right there along the side of the road. (Sure enough, there weren’t any.) But then I thought: why shouldn’t cannabis be growing there? It’s a weed, like any other weed that grows around here. I don’t know if our area necessarily has the correct climate for it to grow, but if left to its own devices, it would get around like any other plant. If humans weren’t around, or if cannabis didn’t contain psychoactive molecules—or even if cannabis wasn’t illegal—it probably would be growing in back alleys, and fields, and anywhere else weeds grow. It’s just another plant, after all.

By the time I had reached my building, I made a connection between Johnny Appleseed and pot.

Johnny Appleseed was a nature lover and conservationist centuries before the words were invented. Indeed, he was a real one, unlike pretty much every person in America who claims to be these things. He is known, of course, for planting apple orchards around Appalachia, and generally being a nice guy, unless you made him mad.

Now Appleseed didn’t just randomly scatter seeds around. He actually planted orchards and got nearby land owners to agree to take care of them for a cut of the profit from selling apples and shares of trees. It’s actually not a bad plan, and when Appleseed died, he left an estate of some 1,200 acres worth millions. Unfortunately, this part doesn’t translate because growing pot is still illegal.

The last piece of this little train of thought came from a headline I saw in the local paper from the other day. Some people have been going around the city throwing acid on cars. I didn’t read the article, so I don’t know if there was a particular pattern: Hummers and trucks, fancy cars, Fords, etc. But the subhead said there were about 370 incidents since the beginning of the year. Police have no leads. The reason is obvious, of course: acid looks like any other liquid, it is easily concealed. It is easily deployed. And it doesn’t really do the damage until the perp is five blocks down the road. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the newspaper article makes the problem even worse, as the other delinquents in the county go Why didn’t I think of that? and promptly procure a bottle of hydrochloric.

The only conclusion I could draw as I scanned my keycard at the door was, People, if you’re going to do something illegal, you could at least be more productive about it. There’s another way to fight The War on The War on Drugs.

Let me again disclaim by saying that I do have sympathies to the Anti-War on Drugs camp. That is to say, I think it’s absurd that non-violent people are being locked up for decades because they had a small amount of pot; I think the amount of disinformation is shameful; and I don’t think the government should be telling people they can’t altar their own minds on their own time. That being said, I don’t necessarily support a wholesale legalization of marijuana, because we’ve never really seen what it can do on a large scale. Maybe it is benign—or at least not any worse than cigs and hooch—but maybe it’s more dangerous, too. Our sample size is pretty small. I think perhaps decriminalization in tandem with controlled human studies (voluntary, of course) is the way to go for now.

But that’s beside my point. My point is this: marijuana has a marketing problem. For all the grass-roots support that it has (no pun intended), the average perception of the drug is terribly distorted. The propaganda campaign over the past few decades has been very successful. There is this idea among average folks that pot is such an evil, terrible thing that just seeing it around will immediately make curtains morph into strings of beads, shirts will explode in tie-dye colors, and everyone will start saying Dude. It has an evil mystique about it. It’s got some bad PR.

In order to win The War on The War on Drugs, pro-legalization proponents are going to have to convince the average population that pot’s not a big deal. But how can they do this when it’s illegal? Just the fact that it’s illegal is, itself, a big deal. That’s a massive stigmatization which is self-perpetuating. It’s illegal, so it must be bad, and it’s obviously bad or it wouldn’t be illegal. There’s only one way to break that lack of reasoning. Pot needs to be demystified.

One way of doing this is the Johnny Appleseed method—except it’s more like the Johnny Hempfield method because we’re not planting apples. To make it work, you’d need to modify your tactics to account for the illegality of your actions. You need to take a tip from the acid-throwers.

Here’s what I’m thinking. There is a statistically significant number of people who smoke pot, and so have access to it. Where this will work is not in the “professional” pushers who deal for a living, but in the burned out hippies who’ve been doing this all their life, and the active college culture who still thinks they can make a difference. The pot needs to be grown with the intent to cultivate it, not just to get a couple of hits from it. In other words, a certain amount of any given crop needs to be grown for the seed, not the smoking. Then distribute the seed with the weed, with the caveat that the next time the smoker takes a walk, they scatter it.

There are problems with this, of course. Carrying viable cannabis seed is illegal, just like carrying the cannabis itself. But if the sort of people who smoke it aren’t concerned about this, it’s probably not going to stop anyone. Secondly, there’s the issue of people getting in trouble when it starts to crop up on their lawn. You don’t want innocent non-combatants in The War on The War on Drugs to get caught in the cross-fire. It’s important to scout out areas where it can flourish, but not be immediately noticeable (or get grandmas in trouble): back alleys, flower beds in business parks—even just regular public parks for that matter. Also, it helps if the plot doesn’t get mowed on a regular basis. There is the issue of the seeds not germinating, or being eaten by birds, and there’s the issue of procuring enough seeds to make it happen in the first place. But if one can get the ball rolling, this simple action could be a powerful force for change.

Now here comes the tricky part. For it to work, it has to be persistent and relatively wide-spread. The first dozen times, the plants are going to be destroyed as they’re found. (And don’t use it yourself, of course. A degree of self-control is required, here.) But if it keeps happening, eventually people are going to give up trying to fight it. This is especially true if it’s spread out all over town. How much money is the government going to spend to get rid of them all? If there are only a few plants in a small area, this will backfire as good publicity for the local government. But if they are all over the town, people are going to start wondering why town hall is spending so much of the budget on what amounts to weed killing.

And that’s exactly what you want people to think. Cannabis is just a weed. (In fact, that it is a weed is extra help in this, since it will flourish pretty much anywhere. It doesn’t need to be “planted” per se, just scattered.) There’s nothing scary here; it’s a part of nature. It’s another plant. People are going to get fed up with absolutely eradicating it from every nook and cranny in the city—and once it takes hold like this, it’s going to be self-perpetuating anyway.

I believe that would be the start of the end for The War on The War on Drugs. Once the plant is out there—when people see it as a natural substance and it loses its exotic, rebellious air—the resistance to the idea that it should be legal is going to break down. How can you make a naturally growing weed illegal? That’s like making dandelions illegal. You might get fined by an overzealous home-owners association, but it’s hardly going to be a systematic eradication like we’ve seen since the 1930’s.

Besides all that, anyone who does this is directly fighting global warming. Planting a tree is a great, real carbon offset, but a lot of people don’t do it because it’s kind of a pain. So if you’re going to be doing something illegal anyway, why not make it good for the environment at the same time? Planting a hundred cannabis plants might not be as effective as an entire tree (then again, it might be; I really don’t know), but it’s certainly better than not planting anything at all. Even if you think global warming is a crock of shit, you really can’t argue with the value of planting more plants, weeds or not. Even people who don’t smoke pot can get in on this action. Instead of throwing acid on a Hummer in protest and destroying something, why not plant some pot around town and create something instead? You still get your illegal thrill—and you really do get to stick it to the man in a very tangible way.

Of course, if you’re like me, you would never do anything this because it’s illegal. But we still have free speech, right? So even if you’re not the type of person who would try this, you might know someone who is. Tell them. I’m pretty sure there are plenty of people willing to give this a try. It could be the marijuana legalization movement’s trimtab.

-Ted