War-on-drugs vets

Legalized medical marijuana has helped remove the looming physical and mental presence of the narcotics police from our lives for the first time since we started smoking weed. If we have a patient ID card, we're protected from arrest and imprisonment for our daily smoking activities, and we can replenish our supplies from our licensed caregivers without fear of intervention by the police on either end of the transaction.

This breakthrough in the criminally elongated War on Drugs is a great thing for those of us with physical or mental ailments for which we've sought treatment from our physicians and ended up as certified medical marihuana patients.

But it does nothing for the millions of Americans who enjoy marijuana or other criminal substances on a recreational basis but suffer arrest, prosecution, jailing, drug testing, job loss, mandatory treatment programming, draconian probation or parole supervision, and other chilling punishments simply because they like to get high.

When I did my time for marijuana offenses some 40 years ago, the police forces were just beginning to find us as ugly blips on their cultural radar screens, and there weren't very many of us in confinement.

I served six months in the old Detroit House of Correction in 1966 for possession of less than an ounce of weed, and then two-and-a-half years of a 9-1/2- to 10 year-sentence in Jackson and Marquette as a maximum security prisoner of the state of Michigan for the crime of giving two joints to an undercover policewoman from the Detroit Narcotics Squad.

Since the reviled Richard M. Nixon administration seized on the recreational drug issue in a big way and triggered the War on Drugs against an innocent and helpless populace involved in mental and sensual stimulation of various sorts, prosecution of this vicious campaign has stimulated the growth of a vast police state mechanism of almost unbelievable proportions.

"The United States jails, imprisons and correctionally monitors (supervision, probation, parole) more people than any other nation in the world," Charles Shaw asserts in his new online memoir Exile Nation: Drugs, Prisons, Politics & Spirituality, "around six million, or one out of every 50 Americans. Most are for nonviolent drug offenses.

"This 'correctional economy' which comprises the police, courts and prisons, accounts for millions of jobs and billions of dollars. At the same time, state budgets are so overwhelmed they can't afford to hold all the prisoners they have jammed into their systems like animals on a factory farm [while] marijuana is the No. 1 cash crop in America."

I met Charles Shaw in London this past week, when I attended his lecture about the War on Drugs at the Hub in Kings Cross. He was showing footage of his interviews with a wide variety of recreational drug users and victims of the drug wars that he's recorded for his current film project, Unheard Voices.

> Email John Sinclair