Straight Talk

The Metro Times "Higher Ground: A Home Grown Event" inside Eastern Market's Shed 3 Friday evening seemed to go off well; the Feds didn't bust in and carry everyone off to jail. For the two hours I was there, it seemed a festive, though not over-the-top, event.

Mostly I wanted to hear what the distinguished panelists had to say, but, since I got there about an hour before their discussion, I strolled around to check out the crowd and the vendors. Early on, it seemed the average age of the attendees was old enough that they indeed needed their medication. Not that the youth corps wasn't represented, but the generation to discover marijuana en masse — baby boomers — was in the majority. There were about 200 people there at any one time, although there were folks constantly coming and going, so I have no sense of the total attendance. I was headed home just as the Ben Daniels Band members began cranking up their Marshall amps, so maybe there was a whole different thing happening later on.

Fire is always a pretty eye-catching phenomenon, and there was a guy making glass pipes with the aid of a torch right in the middle of it all. There was more eye candy: Three young women dressed in fishnet stockings and very tight and short nurse outfits with green crosses stitched onto them wandered through the crowd handing out cards for a compassion club. One of them seemed to be constantly pulling the hem of her skirt down to keep certain parts under cover.

Many of the vendor tables were set up with various pieces of what I considered equipment for growing marijuana — some of it pretty expensive. Most of the rest of them had various pipes and vaporizers (for inhaling medicine without the debris of smoking) for sale. By and large it seemed an industry show for medical marijuana equipment.

I've heard proselytizers for the hemp (a marijuana relative that doesn't get you high) industry talking about all kinds of uses for the plant, from textiles and car parts to edible products and skin lotions. But I was surprised to find one vendor selling Hi T, an iced tea beverage that uses hemp in its brewing process. The sample I had didn't taste bad. Apparently it's available in some convenience stores around town. Although at $2 for a 12-ounce can I don't think I'll be drinking a lot of it. At least that's what they were charging there.

Shed 3 is a big, open space made for farmers selling produce. The problem is it was pretty unforgiving to the PA system used for the panel discussion. Even though it was held away from the vendors, the sounds of people talking reverberated throughout the place, making it hard to hear the discussion moderated by Metro Times News Editor Curt Guyette. I sat up front and listened hard and found it pretty informative. Here are some of the more interesting points made by each panelist.

Dan Solano, a retired Detroit police officer and founding member of the national group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition: Solano seemed the most pugnacious about opposing police coming into your home, saying, "You don't have to give up your rights" just because you're a medical marijuana patient. OK, but when the SWAT team is at your door with a battering ram, it's hard to impress them with talk about unlawful search and seizure. He also pointed out the hypocrisy of how municipal governments have approached medical marijuana during his years of activism. He said that, in the past, when proponents passed a local ordinance friendly to MM, opponents would argue that local law does not trump state law. Now that the state sanctions MM, opponents are using local ordinances to oppose it.

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