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Prez Hillary/Illegal Weed by the Editors
Hillary details, in depth, how to burn a blunt as well as the statistics of the new marijuana industry in this parody photo courtesy of Marijuana Stocks
CINESOURCE MUST MAKE ITS FIRST
political endorsements due to our dire straights and the confusion of our pro-Clinton/anti-herb position.
Even though you desperately want strawberry ice cream—VERY, VERY MUCH ("OMG, do I have the munchies!"), all you are going to get is vanilla or chocolate, at 1:45 am at the convenience store facing the freeway, ‘cause that’s ALL THEY HAVE!
Sure, “Don’t vote your fears” or for "the lesser of two evils” are cute catch phrases but they’re also euphemistic dodges of the standard "realistic choice phenomena" illustrated above and which we all deal with daily. Indeed, Jill Stein will NEVER be president and Gary Johnson never should be, leaving us Hillary or Thrump (sic).
Sure, you have to lay down with swine, on occasion, BUT the two-party system is still WAY more democratic than a multi-party one in such a diverse society as the United States. Yes, multi-party systems can work in more homogeneous and rational societies but, in a closely contested multi-party election, a party/candidate with as little as 2% support—or .002%, as in Bush/Gore 2000, can be the “kingmaker”—simple math, as explained by esteemed historian Hannah Arendt on multiple occasions!
And now that we are talking compromise: how ‘bout pot-growing hippies hopping into bed with police chiefs and Orange County Thrump supporters to"Just say No... on Prop 64,” the California marijuana legalization ballot initiative. While Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom and the liberal East Bay Express support pot's full legalization, for their own convenience, the growers fear “A political injustice will give way to an economic injustice,” as one aptly phrased it.
In other words, while Oregon and Colorado are fun-to-visit, boutique dope manufacturing states, California is a country-sized state with a gargantuan agri business (supplies some 12% of all American food) itching to rise out of the vast Imperial Valley and take a massive toke on the mom-and-pop marijuana industry, which totals nearly $20 billion, about three times milk, and is the biggest in world, let alone the United States.
Indeed, California was the first state to legalize medical marijuana in 1997 because it has been the world’s weed capital since the 1980s. After years of importing Mexican marijuana to provision the hipster, jazz and Latino micro-markets, connoisseurs emerged and quickly graduated from the seedy, stem-y, tightly-packed "dirt weed" to Acapulco Gold and Panama Red in the '60s, Colombian Gold in the mid-70s, and Thai Stick a couple of years later.
While the latter was highly smokeable and lovingly packaged (using the eponymous stick, around which buds were wrapped), A) Why ship and pay for sticks, especially when B) Cali can grow AS GOOD in our backyard? Indeed, that's precisely what happened with the woods hippies getting pretty proficient by 1980.
Although county, state and eventually federal police, replete with agents rappelling from helicopters to raid remote redoubts, started hauling away scofflaws, those friendly neighborhood growers simply gave up on the full "fields of green" right out the back door and retreated to deep woods or hillsides. There they grew plants individually, often under trees, using drip irrigation and fencing, traps and poison to keep out deer, rat and man.
In point of fact, no one did much jail time because Cali was coming to be lifestyle tolerant, the big city lawyers growers brought in ran circles around the police AND the weed business had already cracked a billion by 1980, infusing raw cash into sometimes impoverished Cali communities.
Ironically, the price of weed, retail, has not changed in the interim: $40-60 an eight of an ounce depending on quality. But wholesale it has dropped markedly, going from over $4,000 a pound for the "Number One/Number One" in the mid ‘90s to around $3000 today, a way over 50% slash in three decades when you factor inflation—a drop that could be exacerbated by the Corporate Farm.
And so came the big compromise as hipsters and conservatives joined hands to maintain the status quo: no opening of legal markets for the former and no ads for weed gummy bears on TV for the latter. Although Prop 64 does have language against both of these things, it appears grossly inadequate.
While Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington have fully legalized weed, Arizona, Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada, as well as California, are voting to join them and another four states—Arkansas, Florida, Montana, and North Dakota, NORTH DAKOTA!— are considering medical marijuana status. And those prescription states currently number 25, plus Washington DC, making it well over half the union getting high, medically or otherwise.
And hopefully over half the union will vote to take the higher road with Hillary, who will preserve the Obama legacy of greater equality in health care, justice, the environment and more while bringing her experienced hand to the economy, the Middle East and global warming.