AFTER THE FIREWORKS

I hope everyone had a great Independence Day. Mine turned out to be fun. Spent the late afternoon lazing at the pool and then stopped into City Cafe for a quick beer. Bitty was there.

Bitty is a local character, a crusty little guy with a gravelly voice and really blue twinkly eyes. He totally disapproves of marijuana but we bonded when he participated in my Vienna Solidarity Launch. He's a disabled Navy vet from the Viet Nam era but looks older. He reminds me of Popeye (the cartoon, not Doyle). He's never sober. Drinks Budweiser from morning to night but he's the best shuffleboard player at the Eagles. He beats me consistently. We were talking about the last game we played when he came up with the quote of the day:

I'm not a legend. I'm an icon

Bitty rocks.

I made my way out of the air conditioning into the sultry evening and found my neighbors had finally responded to my invitation to use the community chalkboard. I returned to find huge words celebrating freedom scrawled across the sidewalk. Later on, drunk guys riding motorcycles set off fireworks in front of the bars in the hood. Altogether a festive and peaceful holiday, not even the usual macho drunken face-offs on the streets at closing time could be heard.

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MAIL CALL

I have 123 unread messages in my inbox. I'm on so many lists that if I let it go for a day it's almost too overwhelming to even start reading them but as my granny used to say, no way out but through, so here goes.

First item off the threads is this article about Rep.(R-Ind) Mark Souder's latest proposal to waste the taxpayer's money. In yet another assault on the medicinal value of cannabis he would like the FDA to declare it unsuitable as a medicine. Aided and abetted by Judy Kremer of Educating Voices (I can't bear to even google the org - I'm sure it's a neo-con (read PAC) think tank), these two would like to spend your tax dollars on a cruel campaign to deny terminally ill patients the right to choose to find relief from their symptoms with a natural remedy from a plant.

Kremer is reported as making the absurd statement, "It's very, very dangerous to be suggesting that this is a medicine and that it should be taken by people who are ill." Excuse me Judy but why on earth would so many sick people be willing to risk arrest to take something that did not make them feel better? The only real danger in the use of cannabis as a medicine is that the pharmaceutical companies will lose their obscene profits. If a natural medicine, a plant that anyone can grow in their backyard is legalized, how will they get patients to continue taking their over-priced toxic concoctions? You think that maybe pharm-co PAC money has any effect on the drug policies of this country? You don't have to "follow the money" far to find a connection to the Bush administration and the family coffers.

Meanwhile Souder conveniently traveling and unavailable for comment, asserts that since this is a medical issue, the FDA must step up to the plate and not let the Drug Enforcement Administration be the only voice of reason.

It's beyond belief that a deparment spending millions of tax dollars on a failed WOD is cited as a voice of reason. This is the agency arresting patients in their wheelchairs, arresting glass blowers for making empty pipes, pursuing court cases to ban ecologically sensible industrial and nutritional uses of hemp, shutting down legitimate political events based on content and by the way is pretty sure that glo-sticks (you know, those things that your kid was probably twirling around in the dark last night while waiting for the fireworks to start) are directly related to the use of illegal drugs and wants them banned also, just to be on the safe side.

I only hope the real reason Mr. Souder is thinking the FDA should get on board is that the building backlash from the public on this issue is becoming apparent, and he wants to spread around some of the political damage. Skewed polls aside, there is a clear majority of the American public that believes medical cannabis should be legal and say what you will about Dennis Kucinich - he has brought this debate into a broader context in his presidential campaign and a lot of his strongest supporters are also involved in drug policy reform activism. You never know with presidential politics. 2004 could be a very interesting election.

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