'Where'd ya get it?'

When I applied to the state of Michigan for my Michigan Medical Marijuana Patient ID card last year, I didn't designate a particular caregiver, and my card arrived with "NO CAREGIVER" printed across the back.

Then my caregiver and I reached agreement and filed new papers with the state to establish our relationship. Soon a new card showed up in my mail with my caregiver's name and address included with my own.

(There was still no photo, however, just a box with the legend "No Photo Available" — like you were the kid who failed to show up in school on the day the pictures were taken for the yearbook. This is funny because in California, for example, the medical marijuana cards display the patient's photo and state registration number but not his or her name or address. I like that approach much better.)

Smiling to myself while fondling my new card and looking at my caregiver's name on there, it occurred to me that this was truly the end of an era. "Where'd ya get it?" "I got it from the guy whose name and address are on my Patient ID card, dimwit."

Some 45 years earlier, when I first got in trouble with the law for selling a $10 bag of marijuana to an undercover police officer called "Tall Paul" in the fall of 1964, the Detroit narcotics police took me to the 9th floor of police headquarters at 1300 Beaubien, locked me in a holding cell and asked me, "Where'd ya get it?"

I can't remember what I told them, but in the end they wanted me to set up my pal Archie Allen of Ann Arbor, who they were on to through some other means, and I had to tell them that I couldn't do that. But, because I was a graduate student at WSU and it was my first offense of any kind, I was allowed to plead guilty to "possession of narcotics" and sentenced to two years probation.

This was still a couple of years before marijuana use spread like wildfire among American youths who were either college students or working people with jobs but suffered persecution by the police as if they were some kind of hardened criminals and dope fiends.

As the war on drugs escalated under the vicious leadership of Richard M. Nixon and his goons, the full force of the law-and-order establishment was brought to bear against the students, working-class youth and lumpenproletariat elements known as hippies who smoked marijuana on a recreational or medicinal basis without harming themselves or others in any way.

The number of such casualties of the war on drugs has grown and grown over the past 40 years and continues to grow well into the 21st century. As Robert Sharpe of Common Sense for Drug Policy put it, "The drug war is largely a war on marijuana smokers. In 2009, there were 858,405 marijuana arrests in the United States, almost 90 percent for simple possession."

Marijuana smokers have presented a perfect target for the drug police. We're not criminals, we don't understand the police culture, and we're easily intimidated by the minions of law and order. We've got lives and jobs and studies to pursue and we've been willing to give up the little pieces of our hearts required by the police in order to continue our productive pursuits.

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