Montana Smokes Pot Dispensaries

It wasn't a major story, but in this day of really high unemployment, crippling government budgets with falling  revenues amid no-tax conservative calls for less government interference and regulation I find the recent firebombings of two medical marijuana dispensaries in Billings, Montana ironic.  ABC News has the story.

Apparently two young men couldn't take having pot dispensaries in beautiful downtown Billings. "Not in our town" was spray painted on one of the burned dispensaries, and video cameras caught part of the action.
Priceless.

Frank Zappa did a song with his early 1970s assembled Mothers Of Invention on the album Over-nite Sensation called Moving To Montana. Based on news events this week Montana will join Arizona as places I will avoid doing recreation and retirement in. Not that the fine government officials in both state care.


In California, where huge state budget deficits are now just part of everyday living along with some of the highest unemployment figures in the nation, marijuana gets tossed around as a cure-all for budget and headache relief for battered citizens and legislators alike.  There will a ballot measure this November in California to vote on decriminalizing the persistent and resilient plant. Sales of cannabis would not be fully legalized, but local governments in the state could opt to allow through local ordinances commercial distribution, and collect tax money and/or regulation fees from the enterprises dispensing the weed.

Since this proposal makes so much sense it will never pass. Watch for tons of "reefer madness" advertisements in the golden state starting late this summer. The usual lobby of big entrenched business concerns in alcohol, drugs and tobacco along with major insurance companies will flood the airwaves with killer weed messages if poll numbers indicate passage might be even remotely possible. 

Long ago on a progressive college campus in a galaxy far away, I sat with my girlfriend and smoked my first joint among some college student friends while listening to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Harmonica and guitars never sounded so sweet. All that teen hormonal angst evaporated in a small cloud of burnt green buds. All those evil weed horror messages in high-school class rooms became the subject of immediate laughter and derision.  I would never listen to people who did not have first hand experiences on subject matters open to discussion and debate ever again.

A decade after my first close encounter of a really good kind with the herb,  NORML  had grown from its inception in 1970 to be quite a political force and offered up ballot measures in California to legalize marijuana. I remember a large event NORML put together in San Francisco at the end of the Seventies decade. The Democratic Whip of the California state legislature, and soon to be Speaker, Willie Brown, spoke eloquently and passionately to the assembled pro-pot throng about the necessity to legalize marijuana. Moby Grape performed a dynamic set to the large crowd who set off to get stoned knowing the drug of choice was going to be legalized that fall. The measure was crushed. I'm sure most of the crowd who had gathered that day were also crushed to learn there is a big state called California beyond the progressive little border of liberalism by the Bay.

More than thirty years later the state is far more conservative than it was at the end of the 1970s. People don't torch marijuana dispensaries here yet, but local law enforcement officials continue to make medical marijuana a very dicey way to do business. Common sense might force a person to think a major change in all our government drug policies might be in order, but no evidence can be found that sense or sanity exists in California, or in the rest of the country today.

As I type this sentence I listen to East-West and smile at the brilliance of Butterfield, Bloomfield and Bishop. That tightly rolled relief of angst may elude the ballot box in California and be the cause of hysteria in Montana, but escape into a righteous attitude might  just be a good sound system with the right tune in mind.

Thanks for visiting.