CALIFORNIA DREAMIN'

=|

Weather & Events still conspire to keep me In California. I shouldn't complain ~ it IS California, after all, where I am safe, warm, legal, relatively pain-free, surrounded by Good & Interesting People ["the only kind worth knowing," if anybody asks] ... what am I bitching about ?!

My birthday is the Winter Solstice, and every year I have a wonderful artist-friend who is just as godless as me and thus does not celebrate xmas ... but he does send a Solstice card, always the hit of the season, always a Keeper. He just went in for a surgery back in Michigan not terribly unlike those that I face and he's right near the top of my visitation list, if I ever get outta here ...

~

Erlinda's daughter is still in Virginia, her flight socked in and pushed back. She's the Navy Wife (age 22!), and hubby Mark is no longer on the deck USS Theodore Roosevelt [CVN-71] in Dubai. Again (age 23). He's down below now, in Aircraft Launch & Recovery reloading the cable that catches those little bugs when they bounce on the deck overhead, keeps 'em from running right off the other end. Talk about Heavy Equipment Operator ... yipes. One of the most dangerous jobs on that ship.

Thanks Mr. Bush ~ how many more daze ? You take care, Mark ...

~

I've got a mid-80's Benz up Goleta waiting for part, that Pacific storm socking the Northwest so hard looks like its gonna dump a foot in the high country of Colorado, and the goddam DEA is "walking thru" my farmacy this afternoon, peremptory to their so-called "compliance" visit at the end of the month ... want to know why ? Real simple bottom line, and it's clearly stated right here ~ there are still cretins out here masquarading as police / public servants who just Do Not Get the concept of 'Rule of Law.' Was going to be up there today but called Owner-Ops to wish them best for what follows this Solstice (they don't do xmas either) ... they were home in bed, feeling poorly, altho not about the DEA nuisance, however much a threat it is to their livelihood, and their own medical needs. The DEA is chock full of Numbnuts, but my Farmacists have Brass Balls.

My communicating with them has long since been via other media. I'm not a 'phone" guy in the first place, and to all the people who tell me I 'need' a cellphone all I can say is that I don't need a trail of gumdrops trailing me wherever I am ... yes everyone assumes the Farmacy is wired, now that DEA has been through a dozen times. They don't wear "cop shoes" all the time anymore, but they're really not nearly so clever as they think.

~

'So, Girls, I was feeling just SO really down, I went & did what most 'Merikans think they're spozed to do at Xmas ~ i shopped and am gonna drop! Drove down the PCH into LA County and loaded up with a nice load of hash, 1.5 oz of mixed 1/8ths, and a box of the sweetest little Cheese clones.

Got a camera just coming off the charger, pix to follow and maybe even a Bud Review.

I mean, if I'm Californicated, may as well lay back and enjoy it, eh ?



ah-oooommmmmmmm .........



= 21 Dec 08

CRAZY WEATHER

=| Snow in Malibu

Said the papers. "First time in memory of residents" as the Snooze was sure to report, semi-truthfully. Don't ask me when but I remember when it snowed in Malibu within the past five years; pipes froze out in the desert at Lancaster, and the lawns (such as they are ~ Water is scarce) looked like an ice carnival. Some of that likely going on as we speak ~ I-15 is closed by snow right at Victorville, where the Pearblossom Highway meets it.

~

My Kitchen Sisters - aka the Pinays who ought to be running the federal Bailouts - went out for cookies & wine tonight. What's this about Midnight Mass five hours early, what's with that ? Early tee-time for the Priests tomorrow, I guess ... you know, i always wanted to ask about the Communion wine ~ "What is this, the House Wine ? No ! Really ? Can I see the label, please ?" but Opportunity just hasn't presented itself as yet. This sort of behavior is no doubt artifact of my association with Mikey the Oenophile ~ can't say it, can't even spell it, and he wants me to Be One ?!

Sounds like someone with a social disease, or maybe a really weird sexual disorder, doesn't it. Turtle used to tell a joke about "cunning linguists" which must have had em rolling in the aisles at his linguistic conventions [that's his Other PhD, btw. Linguistics. In his 60's. For fun. I'll spare you] ... Oenophiliac has a nice ring. Must try it on Mikey, himself an Encyclopedia of Good Cheap Wines and Chief Doofus behind a Genuinely Interesting Blog. He's the guy who got me into this, too. The blog, I mean, not the Cannabis Wars; blame for that lies elsewhere ...

It was Mikey, though, who noodled me this summer into putzing around with a "Best Buds" blog after we had done the Dozens on each other's favorite recreational Manna. He's definetely a Wine Guy who appreciates Bud. I'm a Bud Guy who can't tell the difference between Chateau Muckety '84 and a glass of Tipple on ice "that classic blend of Ripple and Thunderbird, redolent of Sterno with undertones of kitty litter, it brings me back to crisp autumn daze spent under the Overpass ..."

Come on, Mikey, give it up. Ain't gonna happen. Ain't got it ~ no palate for it. I will, however, be writing Bud Reviews in such Spirit ...

Events have, however, dictated they be set aside. Stay tuned.

Trying to beam myself back to Michigan where Winter awaits, but Bad Winds blowing out there.

Not going anywhere for moment.



= 18 Dec 08

IDENTITY CARDS

=| Went to register today

Gotta have another California state ID card ~ not the one you get from DMV, the one my County just started issuing for medical cannabis patients. Its a strange situation.

Let me 'splain ...

California counties are required by law to issue state ID cards to enroll medical cannabis patients, but compliance is far from perfect, both among counties and by patients. My home county just opened up this week, in part due to political sea changes becoming more apparent, and in part due to the perpetual efforts of Mike Meyer of 420Ventura,

Here's the process in Ventura County.

And here's what you get for your $191 ... no, not the bud (its "Mr. Nice").

Is it necessary? Not really ~ matter of convenience, personally. My Jensen Clinic card serves adequately, but I've never been subject to a LEO stop which required it and I'm sure there are farmacies which are so accustomed to seeing State cards that Patients best have one.

And its going to make great for Show & Tell in Meesheegan ...



= 16 Dec 2008

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."

---

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

SEND LAWYERS, GUNS & MONEY

=| the shit has hit the fan.

The Legislature didn't have to do a thing; neither did the Governor.

What comes next? We know we have hearings coming up early in January which state Community Mental Health (of all people) will propose rules regarding their administriviation duties, and probably more. Michigan co-conspirators are concerned with privacy, of course, and with unwarranted restrictions on cultivation and horizontal transfer between producers. Unreasonable or unenforceable rules invite mock- and scoff-law responses, drive producers off-grid and out of the tax base, and will retard development of a supply system based on local production which is necessary to provide safe, effective, cost-efficient medical cannabis. Period.

The Initiative's victory was correctly rubber-stamped somewhere in the bowels of the Secretary of State's office and a clock somewhere started counting down toward the effective date, which came at 21:00 PST on the 3rd. It was duly noted in the relevant Michigan exchanges between co-conspirators, but no fireworks. By now it has settled in on most of the Cannabista that we're nowhere near done with this thing.

Michigan's Proposal 1 was a Marijuana Policy Project initiative ~ they paid to fund an infrastructure, file appropriate language, the massive task of gathering signatures, then assuring the ballot form was acceptable, and for the nominal campaign effort made by the Michigan Compassionate Care Coalition. Thanks to them all, they all got what they set out to accomplish, and they did it really, really well. The validity rate of the signatures was astoundingly good, their campaign filings were all spic & span & on-time, too, and if the Bottom Line is indeed what matters, well ... 63%, Bay-bee! Three Million Votes ! Every County and Legislative District in the state ... like Patton thru the Grand Duchy of Fenwick, it was.

Which isn't to say they didn't leave behind a bit of a mess. Years of local infrastructure building was put on hold or marginalized all around the MPP/MCCC effort. All the Cannabanista behaved like good little boys and girls who should Not Be Heard. I saw the nice pat on the head received by Michigan NORML, which took it in total silence without so much as a blink or any sort of acknowledgment. A state Administrative Rules procedure awaits early in January, and the Future beyond that is Tabula Rosa regarding the construction of a Production and Supply infrastructure. MPP is apparently terrified by the spectre of bad public relations coming along with any positive association or notice for California's system. The Initiative language avoided California's successful structure and is modeled on prior MPP actions in other states which are not so successful as California's citizen action, which was hoped to serve as a Model ... but what do the Fruits & Nuts know, eh ?

Anybody has a rational explanation not based on some level of the great Fear & Loathing, I'm ready for it. When asked why it was "silent" on supply, MCCC's primary spokesperson shrugged her shoulders, went palms up, and waxed rhetorically "Well, they get it, don't they?" referring, apparently, to cancer patients copping their Meds on street corners the requisite distance from a church or school. I was not surprised to hear this, given the source.

California has more or less learned the Value of proper regulation. One estimate of just the sales tax value from dispensary sales alone for FY '07 was $175m ... Most of that is up in the smoke of the DEA's fun & games campaign ~ you remember the spring fires in the historic Golden Triangle, more than 1000 fires springing up in a single weekend? Ask me how many people in the Industry have told me the DEA was up there buzzing around setting those fires ... I don't think that's so, but sure tells you where things stand in some parts.

Thus economically motivated (don't think for a moment it has anything with the enormous level of support the law enjoys here, despite what that poor man Bill Schuette wants you to 'think,' California has more or less arrived at a fairly stable basis for doing the Public's Business the Right Way, sans DEA meddling by the cadres of idiots running around like they're a collective Freddy Krueger, bent on terrorizing the Producer community. Got a note from friend under their gun for what is clearly lawful activity under state law. Piss me off ...

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"If you could hear the Special Agents approach to the dichotomy between state and federal laws and the resulting harassment of Caregivers, you would have been jaw-dropped by the Bushonian level of intelligence - of course they're only 'enforcement officers' but apparently the Fed Atty was cast of the same stone."
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This summer Attorney General Brown's office released Guidelines [PDF] which provide usable knowledge about regulatory parameters, and make clear that co-op and collective business forms are quite acceptable so long as they conform to the scope of state law.

Pretty simple, eh ?

Yes, but ... stay tuned.

Back at the Michigan ranch, the first evaluation clinic opened today in Southfield, not far north of 8-Mile.



= 04 Dec 2008