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.

The Blues- Bringin' 'em Back-

I snap the remote clicker this afternoon and finish another brilliant look at the American experience captured in an awesome box-set, Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues. This documentary was created for PBS and first broadcast in 2003. Seven filmmakers put their unique stamp on the search for, and pulse of, the Blues.

All the films offer a loving tribute to the Blues, but I most enjoy seeing the Red, White & Blues documentary that Mike Figgis directed with so many of the British blues greats talking and performing a variety of songs. You cannot go wrong having Tom Jones, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Eric Burdon, Chris Farlowe, Steve Winwood, Albert Lee, John Mayall and Georgie Fame give you the low-down on what the Blues scene in England during the Fifties and Sixties was all about. The striking thing is the pride each feels ( and justifiably so IMO) in rescuing the Blues from obscurity and making it a vibrant art form for an entirely new worldwide generation. By the end of the 1950s Americans had discarded the Blues, and all the great black artists of the time in search of Elvis Presley clones and Sandra Dee look-alikes to drive the white society's pop music train. B.B. King, to this day, continues to thank those young English lads for making his long lived career possible.

I'm not sure what happened to our culture here in this country, but the Blues are once again hiding out these days. You have to look for them on little shiny discs, old black vinyl, or on obscure websites. I view the disappearance of this medium, this feeling, this beat as a sad culmination of instant gratification coupled with 24/7 marketing for just-in-time distribution.

This cultural retreat has nothing to do with the Internet.

Some bright artistic creative people who love music have created the ARChive of Contemporary Music. Keith Richards, the world's greatest rhythm guitarist, is an adviser, donor and curator of the Keith Richards Blues Collection for the organization and its website. He just helped get an incredibly rare Robert Johnson recording "Me and The Devil Blues"/"Little Queen of Spades" for the ARChive organization. A cool little obscure Internet site devoted to music and the Blues.

Once upon a time, not that long ago, people reflected before they acted. Maybe a marketing guy with an engineer at some cellular phone division inside some telecommunications conglomerate found the frequency needed to uncork the great id from the bottleneck that restrained total consumption.

How many people do you see in your current day-to-day life are marked with sadness? Sadness takes on a variety of shades but, always takes some time to quietly examine loss and isolation to come to certain realizations of the situation. Sadness, or the Blues, takes a long time to develop.

A lot of emotional feelings take nanoseconds to get expressed. Rage happens instantly. Depression occurs the moment your son son describes dying his hair black and blue to impress the girlfriend of some other guy.

I know today a lot of people are depressed. The economy, the wars, the housing market, Wall Street, the banks, gay marriage, not enough Jesus, blah, blah, blah depress great hordes of society. These are sad people but they do not suffer from sadness. They have been bamboozled by the Pharmaceutical industry and the health insurance industry into swallowing heavy doses of anti-depressants to combat their ignorance in challenging times while ingesting infotainment as a daily news source. Charles Barber wrote a book, Comfortably Numb, which was published last year detailing the meteoric rise of these mind altering drugs. In 2007 over 227 million prescriptions for antidepressants were given out. It's hard to experience the Blues when you're medicated out of your mind.

Blues is a sober feeling with a splash of 80-proof fast moving liquid in a slow moving liquid for companionship. The Blues has no place for anger. Anger is red-hot and immediate. Anger generally finds litigation, or law enforcement close by. Judging by our prison population there might be as many angry citizens as medicated ones going around. And these angry ones now make up more than 7 million people serving in some form of incarceration here in the land of the free. The United States has five percent of the world's population but has twenty-five percent of all the prisoners in the world. That is not a misprint. Click here for a recent CNN story.

I'm a creature of habit. I still subscribe and read the local fish wrap, The Bakersfield Californian. Today the paper had a fine Blues-worthy column by Lois Henry on the state of the parolee population in Bakersfield. It turns out Bakersfield has a little higher percentage of parolees per 1,000 residents than Fresno, and almost twice the percentage of parolees than Sacramento. Of course, Kern County is the prison capital of California with a big prison in almost every little town. Kern County is home to CCI in Tehachapi, the Kern Valley State Prison and the North Kern State Prison in Delano, the Wasco State Prison in Wasco, a federal prison camp in Taft that is privately operated. And then there are the several county jails located in Shafter, Mojave and Ridgecrest. A barbed wire salesman can do pretty well in this county.

All these little cities now live off of what the prisons provide. You know, the jobs that come from maintenance and construction along with the positions securing the prisoners. And those guards will live close by where they work and will get their gas and food and have kids who might work there or be guarded there and so on. Reminds me of medieval castles and a feudal economic system of serfs subsisting on slave labor.

The thought of growing gulags in America could bring back a full case of the Blues, if people would only stop and think about it.