COURAGE

=| The Great Fears of Life ...

... are Blindness and Death, or so I'm told.

Bob certainly thought so, I know.

In 1976 he became the first American to legally use cannabis for medicine and intuitively resolved not to be "the only one in the lifeboat." With partner and soul-mate Alice O'Leary, for twenty-plus years toiled ceaselessly to share the gifts of Knowledge and Power and Medicine bestowed upon Bob by virtue of his own perseverance. Alice occupied a closet at NORML's Washington headquarters, devoting herself to working the medical issues from any & every angle possible, and Bob spent many a week popping from airport to airport, working with lawyers and legislatures and cancer patients living in trailer parks ...

It was Bob & Alice ~ still 'one-word' to me ~ who established the original Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics and ran it from their Washington DC apartment, paying its bills before their own. Bob was a great conversationalist, and we'd jabber the night away when I visited. He'd settle into his easy chair, open a can of those miserable federal joints, and we'd pound down Amstels for hours, swapping snappy stories until the sun came up. Alternately we rollicked with laughter, and froze into private, sorrowful reflection over those left by the trail as we moved on.

He'd work those damn fed-joints down to the nub like he was chain-smoking Pall Malls, twenty a day sometimes, he said, because they were so weak. Nominally around 2% THC, that value was derived from an assay long ago and far away, and I doubt they were half that by time he finished a can. But it was the cannabis that allowed him to keep what remained of his sight, to continue working. Cannabis preserved his sight from glaucoma, scientifically observed and measured. Three times. Bob's interocular pressure was studied with and without cannabis at Johns Hopkins, at UCLA, and at North Carolina. Case closed before the bar of science, if not exactly in what passes for Law down here, south of the St. Mary's & the Pigeon. In 1994 he was diagnosed with HIV, and in 1995 basically died of AIDS ... but came back, surviving his dip in the River Styx, as he phrased it.

"The story of medical marijuana in America," he wrote in MARIJUANA RX, "is about the brutality of the system and banality of bureaucrats who are charged with managing it. Medical marijuana reveals the failure of elites and the success of common citizens intent on righting a wrong. It is the story of a remarkable public consensus which was ignored, denigrated, and trampled on in order to maintain a deeply entrenched policy. It is about the failure of government to trust its citizens and the casualties of that failure."

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My #1 Farmacy caught another DEA visit this week; second in three months. Not sure, waiting to hear, but the Chumash Ethnobotanists may be up in the hills, off-grid again, goddammit.

I'm just marking time, waiting for January 20 and the subsequent ~ inevitable, I hope ~ Executive Order cutting the balls of these Keystone Kocksuckers.

Muzzle your dogs, Barack.

** Let's get this crystal fucking clear ** My total lack of respect for the DEA and their ilk is not indicative of how I feel about cops in general. I don't give a shit what you think you heard, you heard nothing like that from me, nor will you. Someone in my family did forty years in that trench and I really don't need any uninformed opinion about what anyone might think I think about him and his brethren.

Here's the Real Message : most cannabis Law is bad; some cops are too, and one federal agency in particular has run amok in California in a manner not much unlike Blackwater in Iraq.

Tell me how I'm wrong.


= 11 Dec 2008