Read the news ... oh, boy

I said goodbye to Amsterdam after a long and productive winter spent living and working in the bosom of my extended family at Radio Free Amsterdam, serving as poet in residence at the 420 Café and daily enjoying the freedom to smoke marijuana at will whether one is sick or not.

Arriving at the London St. Pancras train station, I caught the Piccadilly tube to my modest quarters at the Headpress bunker in Wood Green and picked up a copy of the Evening Standard on the way, only to find a full-blown revival of the Reefer Madness approach on the front page of the Health & Beauty section from a writer named Sophie Goodchild: "OUT OF THEIR MINDS: THE TRUTH ABOUT TEENS, CANNABIS AND PSYCHOSIS."

"The award-winning foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn describes how his son Henry turned from talented artist to disheveled wreck," Sophie reports.

"'He stopped shaving or washing his hair and went barefoot, so his feet became septic. He also soiled his jeans more than once.'

"Author Julie Myerson also knows how excessive cannabis use can threaten to wreck families," Sophie goes on. "Her son Jake became hooked on the potent 'skunk' form of cannabis and Myerson was forced to throw him out of the family home in south London."

Harry Anslinger must be dancing in his grave to hear this drivel. A sidebar titled "CANNABIS: THE LOWS" proclaims "You may have a problem if you answer 'yes' to any of the following:

1) Do you ever get high alone?" Every day, lady, every day!

5) "When your stash is nearly empty, do you feel anxious or worried about how to get more?" Every time, lady, every time — unless I'm in Amsterdam, where they always have exactly what you want at the hash counter, any time you want it. No anxiety there! And in Michigan now, only when one's caregiver hasn't arrived by the appointed hour or it's after closing at the compassionate care center.

Me, I'm addicted to newspapers, and I follow the global cannabis news pretty closely, but it's been quite a while since this particular tack has been taken. Generally marijuana seems to be considered basically harmless and is grudgingly conceded even to have positive medicinal properties, but it gets you high and there's supposedly something fundamentally wrong with that.

Bang! The woodwork squeaks and out come all the freaks of law enforcement to terrorize and abuse the smoking population for several generations, in ways and with means way too vast to enumerate here. Plus which, as they say, there's the "preaching to the choir" factor where the speaker keeps saying the same things over and over again and everyone says "amen" and outside the church the sinners and the greedheads and the money-changers just keep on stepping.

My problem is that the more I think about it the madder I get. Despite the reams of righteous information and reasonable argument against the idiotic War on Drugs and the insufferable ignorance and brutality with which it is waged, hundreds of thousands of marijuana smokers continue to be victimized and persecuted by its relentless minions, dragged through the courts and jails and "treatment programs," imprisoned, stripped of their rights, and treated like vicious criminals.

> Email John Sinclair