The Second Greening of America

“Everything is organic and locally grown; I keep all the jars sealed and the strains separated. People are pretty on about that. Most of the strains are between $7 and $10 a gram. The big buds sell as are, I really don’t like to break them up, they’re so beautiful. I’ve got indigoes and oranges and a whole range of body and head hits. It’s a serious thing man”

Brian sells marijuana. A resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, he has sold the drug for decades but does not think of himself as a ‘drug dealer’. “I just supply people with a product they want. Now that weed is kinda legal and the dispensaries have opened, the supply chain has really opened up. Too much is hydroponic though man, people want their weed natural, like, straight from the earth man. Nothing really changed for me though, my customers or suppliers. This has been the cannabis capital of the states for decades man. Its part of Cali.”

The marijuana industry is currently offering major challenge to much of the received wisdom regarding the American economy. California is not the only state to allow some form of legal marijuana but it is the current success story. A title all the more significant due to the state’s enormous debt. Various industries have sprung up around drug and are quickly changing the business and artistic landscape and the changing attitude to drug classification is in fact supporting harder drug legislation and making streets safer.

Despite the various legislations, marijuana is still considered a controlled substance by the federal government at a national level. Even within the legalized states limits are placed on the number of plants which an individual can cultivate – six – and how much an individual can possess – up to 1 ounce in a single container.

Pale green – State with legal medical marijuana

Sludge green – State with decriminalized marijuana possession law

Dark green – States with both medical and decriminalized marijuana laws

Purple – States with full Marijuana legalization

However, a walk around the streets of any part of the Bay Area, from El Cerrito to Embarcadero you will smell the recognizable sweet scent of weed smoke. This is one of the downsides which isn’t being addressed at the moment. Many conservative local and state level lobby groups have claimed that medical marijuana dispensaries are magnets for crime and that a relaxed attitude to soft drugs leads to harder ones – the old ‘gateway’ argument.

Holland has already disproved that theory. When the government decriminalized the drug in 1972 it was part of a policy to treat ‘soft drugs’ – mostly those of natural origin but excluding opiates – separately from ‘hard drugs’. The former is treated as a social issue and legislated against to protect consumers, minimize nuisance and eliminate the black market. This freed up resources for the police to enforce a zero tolerance policy on hard drug trafficking and supply which was praised by Interpol.

Following the voicing of political concerns in America a number of studies took place. In 2010 a Denver Police Department investigation found that crime had fallen by 8.2% in areas around medical marijuana dispensaries. Another investigation in Colorado Springs produced similar results noting significant drops in petty street crime such as vandalism and theft from vehicles. A UCLA study in 2011 found that crime rates had dropped across the most at-risk group, 15-24 year old males. Using ‘routine activity theory’ the researchers found that the delineation within drug legislation and increased sense of ‘guardianship’ had changed the attitudes towards ‘crimes’ and people’s neighborhoods. Some researchers further speculate that it is due to the removal of the gangs from the drugs supply though the report did not officially comment on this.

Only licensed marijuana dispensaries can sell the drug and then only to people who have a valid Medical Marijuana Card but these are readily available to anyone for just $30. Along with this has come a growth in ‘head shops’ which specialize in elaborate pipes and bongs. These shops have sprung up rapidly over the last decade. Mostly owned by independent traders they make most of their profits from the various paraphernalia – the biggest earner and most exciting medium is glassware.

These pipes range in price from $10 to and incredible $30,000. The vast majority are made by individuals or small collectives within whom competition has seen art override simple functionality. Austin’s Salt and Berkeley’s Revere are two examples of the apex of the movement. Their creations are barely recognizable as smoking devices.

“We’re master craftsmen. There is art, great art, in lot of my pieces and across the community but there is also massive skill too.” Dustin Revere told me at his studio. “The whole glass pipe thing is an element of the marijuana scene in the same way that breaking or graffiti is part of the hip hop scene but at the same time it’s an exciting thing in its own right.”

Many studios offer classes and there are other public funded organizations, such as The Crucible in Oakland, teaching young people the skills to one day go into these and other businesses themselves. These are no meager skills too, glassblowing and working is very technical affair with rules and safety at its heart, yet for many young people it is revelation. Suddenly they have skills and are able to create not only beautiful things but saleable, useable products. The documentary Degenerate Art is a fascinating look into this creative and industrial medium.

“It’s a big eye opener to a lot of these younger kids. They see the flames and hot glass and they get scared but when they start doing it they can get creative, make sculptures or jewelry or pipes or anything. It gives them power.” Lance Wright from Newtonian Glass said.

California has many highly respected universities where students pay an average of $32,000 a year for an average of four years to get their degrees. Yet some of the country’s leading glass artists trained for as little as $6,000 and many more of the mediums leaders are self taught.

The current economic crisis is deeply felt amongst America’s recent university graduates with an estimated 1.5 million of the country’s 5.4 million ‘long-term’ unemployed are graduates burdened with debts.

The negative narratives of crime and the positive of business and artistic access, whether you agree with them are not, are the reigning ones. There are increasingly environmental questions surrounding the industry. The legislation on the multitudinous marijuana farms isn’t clear but a story in the LA Times declared, late last year, that marijuana farms were siphoning 18 million gallons of water every year.

There are further allegations of farmers illegally cutting down trees and even grading rugged areas flat causing disruption to water run-off from the state’s sparse rainfall. The effects have even been felt as far away as Yosemite National Park where pesticides and rodenticides have found there way into the food chain, allegedly from Californian marijuana farms.

There is more to marijuana than just smoking though. Its prohibition essentially goes back to face off within American industry at during the interwar years. When Rudolph Diesel invented his engine in 1896 it was planned to run on hemp derivatives. Hemp had also been used for paper across America. The story goes that between Gulf Oil and William Randall Hearst’s lumber and paper interests the once common plant was vilified and criminalized.

Hemp, the non psychoactive train of marijuana is one of the most useful and hardy plant on the planet. Studies have shown that due to the low requirements for herbicides and pesticides hemp paper could be a carbon negative cash crop. The plant has been proved to remove radioactivity from the soil and can stop tumor growth in cancer. As a fibre it can make everything from clothes to car dashboards. As a food stuff it is unrivaled and far less environmentally devastating than soy beans.

Maybe the key to surviving the economic crisis and progress in general is to live in a land of sensi.

Copyright 2013

If Mayans could accurately predict the future…We’d probably still have Mayans.

Once more, the world is facing down a date which some amongst our population have decided is to be the day of our destruction. This isn’t a new thing. It’s not so long ago that we were all being told that at midnight of 31st December 1999 all of the world’s computers would have a collective, digital brain-fart and reset their clocks to 1900 rather than 2000 which would result in planes dropping from the sky, nuclear missiles being launched and all of our bank accounts being reset. Spoiler alert – it didn’t.

In fact Wikipedia lists 83 individual, failed apocalypse prophecies and 9 more, including next week, which have yet to happen. Predictably various Christian sects and American evangelical churches are the worst offenders, being responsible for almost two thirds of the tales of impending woe and destruction, but always offering salvation for supplication.

However, some predictors may surprise you; for example, Issac Newton was part of the Y2K brigade. Botticelli claimed that the year 1500 would be our last. John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church had us penciled in for holy destruction in 1836.

These names though are the respectable side of apocalyptic predictions. There are some more sinister names upon the list. Charles Manson is one that jumps out. In the late 60’s Manson was enjoying a literal orgy or drugs and sex with his followers before he discovered the hidden messages in The Beatles’ White Album. He called his vision of apocalypse ‘Helter Skelter’, after one of the songs. He saw a race war between black and white Americans destroying the country. But he was going to lead his followers to safety in the ‘bottomless pit’ which he believed was somewhere in Death Valley. As the last years of the 60’s unfolded tensions rose with the assignations of powerful black leaders such as Martin Luther King. Yet he grew inpatient and ordered the Tait – La Bianca murders as a way to kickstart the end. In fact, when the Manson family was arrested it was for stealing dune buggies to search for the pit and the arson of some construction machinery they had found. They would only be linked to the murder when family member Susan ‘Sadie’ Atkins confessed to a cell mate.

The 70’s would give the world the largest mass cult suicide at Jonestown, Guyana which left 914 people dead and would make offers of Kool-Aid slightly sinister – the drink actually laced with poison was ‘Flavor Aid’. Lead by yond and charismatic preacher Jim Jones the cult went through a number of transformations as it moved around northern California but Jones outspoken support of communist regimes in North Korea and the Soviet Union had marked his card. Rumours grew and grew about strange practices with Jones’ church and threats made against people who spoke out or wished to leave. Despite holding some sway in local politics Jones became increasingly paranoid and moved his followers to the Guyanan jungle.

Jones would become convinced of plots to kill him, of secret spies lurking in the jungle and of an impending nuclear war. Back in America the cause of the Jonestown families had been taken up by Congressman Leo Ryan. Ryan organized a trip to Jonestown with concerned relatives. When they arrived things seemed in order but gradually people passed them notes in secret asking for help. The next day some people wanted to leave. Jones, clearly angered let them but refused to allow their children of family to go with them. Eventually Ryan gave in and took the few people to the airstrip. Within 45 minutes he and all the members of Jonestown would be dead. They drank cyanide on his orders; the arrival of Ryan was the last portent of the apocalypse. There is an audio recording of the final hour of Jonestown and images from the helicopter which went to investigate two days later why no-one had come home.

The worst offenders of all though were the Bible Student Movement, a milenialist and restorationist Christian sect which is behind organizations such as Jehovahs Witnesses and the Watchtower. They predicted 9 separate apocalypses between 1874 and 1925.

So, we probably won’t see our poles switch suddenly, super volcanoes burst forth or a massive food inundate the world but what are the more serious potential extinction events on our horizon which we are merrily not thinking about. The obvious ones are over population den climate change, both are undeniable. The old classic, nuclear war, is never far away – August 29th 1997 anyone? Or the biggest elephant in the room, peak oil.

The most serious predictions all put the end far off. In 5 billion years our sun will begin to go into its red giant phase which will destroy this solar system. The Big Rip Theory claims that in 22 billion years the universe’s continual expansion will begin to tear it apart. I don’t even know how to say 10600 years but that is when scientists believe the ‘heat death of the universe’ will occur, total and utter game over.

So what does all of this rambling prove? Nothing more than that there have always been those who call out ‘the end is nigh’ on grey and cold mornings or those so riddled with their own madness and arrogance that they lead the weak willed to their own mini apocalypses but, as with most great threats and evils, it comes not from the supernatural or the cosmos but from us. We are the apocalypse.

Maybe that is why our culture enjoys the macabre spectacle of apocalyptic movies and literature more and more. As our news becomes darker than our films where else is there for the consciousness to go than to imagined doom?

If the Mayans could predict the future to such a degree then why weren’t they prepared for Cortez? Why didn’t they see the plants that would give them antibiotics? Why didn’t they work steel or make black powder? I know the hippies like to think of them as some peaceful, pious to their gods and naively welcoming – you can thank Niel Young and Crazy Horse for that one – but they were aggressive and war like, heart munching, chocolate smoking warriors.

For me all the evidence points in one direction - that the Mayans had a finite counting system or a finite amount of rock to write it on and we are all just distracting ourselves again.

Copyright 2012