By Count Friedrich von Olsen
Merriam-Webster’s second definition of schizophrenia is as follows: a state characterized by the coexistence of contradictory or incompatible elements. Merriam-Webster’s first definition of schizophrenia is as follows: a severe mental disorder characterized by some, but not necessarily all, of the following features: emotional blunting, intellectual deterioration, social isolation, disorganized speech and behavior, delusions, and hallucinations. Accordingly, if we accept Merriam-Webster’s second definition of schizophrenia, I have some bad news for the rest of you: You are all schizophrenics. If the first definition holds true, egad, I’m a schizophrenic…
I have been reduced to the verge of being carted off to a mental institution because of this marijuana thing. No, not because I have smoked too much of it. In fact, I do not smoke it at all. But I am being sent into convulsions over the way everyone else is carrying on about it…
My lone personal experience with cannabis took place three-quarters or four fifths of my life ago when I was in Port Said and imbibed some hashish. Together with a handful of associates and acquaintances, I had smoked a minute amount of this resin together with some Turkish tobacco from a hookah, something of an after-lunch digestif. I am not prepared to say that it was entirely unenjoyable; indeed, it seemed to take me to the threshold of or maybe into the province of euphoria. Unfortunately, that feeling was accompanied by a simultaneous sensation of utter and complete disorientation. That is, I could still, barely and quite possibly with the assistance of gravity, discern up from down, but I am less certain that I could, during the two hours or so that I was under the influence, differentiate between left and right. My recollection these many years later is that forward and backward were similar challenges. Shortly thereafter, I attempted to make my way back to the hotel in which I was staying. I did a competent enough job of setting off in the right direction and managed to put one foot in front of the other along the lion’s share of the way for however many blocks it was toward my destination. The thing was, having arrived at the intersection catercorner from where my hotel was located, my ability to negotiate the double crossing of the street abandoned me. That is, simply getting to the hotel looming in front of me barely 100 feet or so away had become an impossible task, a hurdle I was seemingly incapable of mounting. I simply stood there overmatched, seemingly paralyzed for something like 45 minutes or an hour until it came to me that I merely needed to simply continue easterly across the street, and once there, go left, or north, across the street to put myself where I was trying to go. That the hashish rendered me into such a state in which I was incapable of performing even, it would seem, the simplest of tasks with any dispatch convinced me that seeking refuge in the shelter cannabis provided from the world was not something in my own best interest, given the level of commitment and responsibility I had in running and managing a worldwide shipping, transportation and logistics operation. Given a choice between euphoria and being productive, I chose the latter…
Despite my own avoidance of cannabis, I attempted to remain nonjudgmental. As a man of the world, I fully understood that in places such as the South Mediterranean, the Near East, and the Middle East, hashish was a standard complement to the social scene. And sometime around a half century ago, hashish and its less pharmaceutical and unconcentrated cousin, marijuana, began to gain a growing popularity in the West. To each his own. I did not indulge myself, but within my own circles and among certain of my friends and acquaintances, there were some who did. Nevertheless, the authorities, as it were, had a far different attitude. Marijuana was an illegal substance. It was considered to be a dangerous narcotic, one that ruined lives. There was a policy that included imprisoning those involved with it in any way, including those who grew it, trafficked in it at the wholesale level, packaged and sold it at the retail level, and those who bought it, smoked it or simply possessed it. This was accompanied by an incessant informational campaign in which we were all told of its dangers, that it ruins lives, that it leads to a serious psychological addiction and propels one toward the use of other equally or even more destructive substances, that a lifestyle involving it is to ipso facto engage in moral turpitude, that its use could lead to psychosis, that possessing it was an illegal act that would result in criminal prosecution, that those who were selling it and profiting off of it are societal parasites. And indeed our governmental officials backed that up, throwing, over the last fifty years or so in the state of California alone tens of thousands of people into prison for smoking it, possessing it or selling it, and hundreds of thousands if not millions in the United States into prison for the same offenses over the same time span…
How determined has the government been to keep marijuana from being sold? In 1996, the voters in California said that marijuana could be used for medical purposes. But the federal government has regulatory control over banks, and banks are federally insured. Bank managers ran the risk of not only losing their charters but risked having the insurance on their customers’ deposits outright cancelled if they allowed dispensary owners to deposit money at their institutions…
In less than two months, the use of marijuana is to be legal in California. I am not talking about it being used for “medical purposes.” That has been legal for 20 years. What will be legalized is using it for “recreational” purposes, That is, people will soon be free to use it for what everyone has been using it for all along, despite all those warnings government officials have been enunciating over the years…
Now, the State of California and city after city are jumping on the cannabis gravy train. Along the way they are setting up rules under which marijuana can be grown, processed, handled and sold in both the state at large and within each municipal jurisdiction…
In case after case, the laws and statutes and ordinances are being drawn up to so that the cultivation and processing and sale of marijuana will commence seamlessly and without any great fanfare, while at every level the government is moving in to get a piece of the action The state and the cities want the money, that is for sure. They are ready to cash in on a substance just a short time ago they insisted was the source of misery…
The State of California is now looking at layering a 45 percent tax on marijuana. Cities are looking to make money on the product coming and going, that is, in its production and in its sale. Cities are discussing annual fees of anywhere from $3 per square foot to $25 per square foot for space used to cultivate marijuana, or roughly $120,000 to $1 million an acre. And when the marijuana gets sold, cities are looking at a 10 percent to 15 percent tax. The government – the combined levels of government – will make more off the sale of marijuana than the people selling it. The state is set to put restrictions in place that will make sure that every sale is recorded. Oh, and the difficulty of the federal government not allowing legitimate banks to open accounts for customers? The State of California is ready to work its way around that…
State Treasurer John Chiang and his task force are now pressing for legislation that will require that pot shops entrust their proceeds to armored car companies for safekeeping, a stratagem by which the state will know exactly how much each dispensary is raking in. And by the way, the state is looking at imposing an armed transport tax on top of everything else. Mr. Chiang is only trying to keep us all safe, since having bags of cash lying around in the backrooms of these dispensaries just won’t do, and he says using this armored car protection scheme, whereby the money will be transferred to a secure state-run counting and holding facility will short circuit the possibility of the dispensary owners being taken advantage of by unscrupulous robbers and becoming the victims of theft. And this will also ensure that no one cheats the state out of its percentage of the haul. It will also provide the opportunity for the state to cash in, since the staff employed at the counting houses will need to be paid as well, that’s right, from the revenue stream they will be counting…
We’re so lucky to have a guy like Mr. Chiang looking after us!
Estimates are that the marijuana market will run to at least $6 billion in California in 2018, more like $7 billion, and maybe even $8 billion. I don’t know, myself, how the estimators came up with those figures. But let’s take the most conservative one – $6 billion and work with that. What that means is that our state – its morality, its ethics, its principles – are for sale for $6 billion. The devil’s weed that was a bane to civilized society is now to be readily available, as long as it pumps another $3 billion or thereabouts in revenue annually into our government coffers…
Why is it that I am the only one who is troubled by this? In January, our state and local government will be engaging in action which if anyone – today or last year, or five years ago or ten years ago or any time during the last 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 or 90 years – engaged in would have consigned them to prison. It seems I’m headed for the sanitarium for sure. But wait, I think there is a way I can bypass the rubber room and the straitjacket. The way this makes sense is the acceptance that our past policy was a mistake. That is, we can reconcile that what we are going to be doing very soon isn’t illegal and morally wrong when for generations doing just that was illegal and considered morally wrong by simply acknowledging we had formerly made a mistake and that it was never morally wrong and it should not have been illegal. Now that makes sense. But it’s not that simple, it seems to me. If we admit the law was wrong, that means we wrongfully prohibited marijuana possession and use, we wrongfully arrested and jailed marijuana possessors and smokers, we wrongfully prosecuted them, we wrongfully convicted them, we wrongfully fined them, and we wrongfully imprisoned them. What are we going to do about that?
Here is my proposal: Reparations! First we get a comprehensive list of everyone yet living who was convicted and imprisoned under our wrongheaded marijuana laws. Then we expunge their records. Those would be the first two steps. The third step would be to calculate for each of them how much time they spent in the big house over this. The fourth step would be to provide each of them a modest amount of money – say $1,000 – for every day they were incarcerated. That will settle the moral score…
And how will we pay for this? That’s the beauty of it! It’s already in place: the $3 billion per year or thereabouts that these new state and local taxing regimes are going to generate! And if that turns out to be insufficient, then we simply tap into the retirement funds for our state’s legislators, its judges, its prosecutors, its police officers and its prison guards who participated in and themselves profited under California’s now discredited anti-marijuana ethos regime…