By: Jef Tek
This just in: the last episode of Jay Leno hosting the Tonight Show signals the end of an era, and as spring usually brings new awakenings. This year brings us an awful lot of closures, from massive job losses happening to the Michigan auto sector to California’s Eddie Lepp and Phil Spector going down for the count, I sense an end of an era upon us. Even Canada’s own Prince of Pot, Marc Emery is going to have to face the music this year or perhaps risk a harsher penalty.
Don’t get the wrong idea and think that I think it’s alright to off your assistant, even if she was just a “B” movie star; what I’m talking about here is the obvious flaunting of this penal system that captures the weak, stupid or accident prone with no distinction between hardened criminal or social pariah. The Reverend Eddy Lepp was just growing marijuana for the sick and dying, as was his now-deceased wife and long-time companion Linda Senti. She succumbed to the cancer that he was trying to combat with medicinal marijuana last year.
Way-the-hell back in 1978, Stacy Keach’s character, Sgt. Stedanko from Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke movie, said it best, “Marijuana is the last bastion of free enterprise left in America.” The more the world changes, the more is stays the same (in many ways). 30 hellish years later and people still don’t comprehend that cannabis has been used medicinally for centuries — for eons — with dramatic success. We have CB-1 receptors in our brains and nervous systems and CB-2 receptors in our immune systems and these receptors readily bind with THC, or Delta-9-Tetrahydrocannibinol, the primary chemical found in cannabis.
The “union” of THC binding with the two types of cannabinoid receptors can produce everything from euphoria to pain relief. Cannabis has proven itself effective at managing the pain from new nerve growth, which isn’t manageable even with strong and addictive opiates. Opiates depress the central nervous system to the point of death (in the case of overdose), but marijuana/cannabis is easily titrated/regulated, giving the user finite control of dosage and efficacy depending on their circumstances and situation.
Jay Leno will return squeaky clean to prime-time in September and by then old Phil will have slipped on a bar of soap or some other heinous accidental retribution. Maybe he will die from a wall of soap. Okay, bad joke. The spiritualist Reverend Lepp of Northern California’s Lake County has until July 6 to right his affairs before doing ten. Even the judge agreed the sentence was unusually harsh, considering the evidence, but the real deal is that the Cannabis Crusader Lepp hasn’t cooperated with authorities, at all, effectively tying their hands. District Court Judge Marilyn Patel just went with protocol, two ten-year sentences to run concurrently (not sequentially as the judge could have done), to begin on July 6, 2009. After prison, he will have five years of probation, if he lives that long.
Recently, in Abbottsford BC, medicinal marijuana patient/grower Jason Wilcox was a victim of police harassment. While away from his residence, Abbottsford Police broke-in and arbitrarily chopped down more than half of his legal cannabis plants, some of which were merely weeks from fruition. They then left him a card and skedaddled, with no case number and no charges. Jason, who just moved to the area, was not unknown to Abbottsford police or their City Counsel — he had gone to the city with his action plan for a medicinal marijuana dispensary just a week prior, which they overwhelmingly supported and where he was hailed as an asset to the community — but the Abbottsford PD had a hidden agenda.
Arriving on scene, just a day later, Jason and his wife are visibly shaken — I’ve seen that look in the Army before. Both the front and back doors of his rental home are off their foundations and will cost hundreds of dollars to just secure the home again. The visqueen fabric separating his vegetative room was slashed in multiple places, even though there were two obvious zippers for entering. Irretrievable genetics were decapitated and laying in a dried-out pile of unnecessary brown death. Some of these strains were nurtured for over a decade, only to be killed in their prime for no apparent reason.
Jason called the number on the card when he got home. He first imagined that the police interrupted “rippers” or burglars and this was the result. The Police claimed that his alarm company had notice of a “panic” button being pressed within the residence, which gives them a 30 minute window to “look” for a person. No panic button was actually pushed and why they searched Wilcox’s 8 year-old-daughter’s doll house remains a legal question. Apparently ADT, and I’m sure all monitored alarm companies, have a deal with local police; after all, they are just a private company, with no allegiance to their customers who actually generate their payroll in the first place. Nazis, I say! The police representative simply apologized. Lawyers were called. I took photos documenting the tragedy. We mourned. Fire it up!
Jason Wilcox’s Health Canada paperwork was correctly and prominently displayed with the limit of 96 plants, which he had, in various stages throughout the two rooms. Coppers randomly cut, or should I say ergonomically cut, because the cops just hacked down the biggest and healthiest plants within easy reach. Over half his plants, for no reason! What burns me up personally is the arrogant way cops love to pop the electrical panel cover, to look for who-knows-what. Are cops now certified electricians? No – I think not; do they hope to catch Wile E. Coyote “stealing” amps, in the flesh? It is like a dog who chases cars — if he caught one, he couldn’t drive it. This is a clear cut case of cannabis discrimination in my eyes and in the eyes of the lawyers Jason has retained to fully investigate this matter. So, boys and girls, for better or worse, this crooked cannabis case is just starting to unfold.
Tim Felger, also of Abbottsford, B.C., a long time activist and marijuana instigator, was arrested late May and spent the week in jail for allegedly selling pot to minors. His prominent store, “Da Kine,” is now closed while he awaits bail. The future doesn’t look good to be an activist in Canada — just ask Marc Emery, who has been wanted by the U.S. government since July 29, 2005, when an indictment from Seattle Washington’s federal court was served on Canadian soil by the DEA and Vancouver PD, accusing Emery, Greg Williams and Michelle Rainey of seed selling, money laundering and conspiracy charges.
Seeds are still available worldwide.
Are you fired up, yet?
As one door closes another opens. Michelle Rainey and Greg Williams recently accepted a plea agreement wherein they admit guilt but receive two years probation instead of the life sentences these crimes originally called for. Life, man! They are scheduled to receive sentencing in July. Now, the U.S. wants five to ten years for Marc in a federal gulag. The Dude’s cameo drinking partner in The Big Lebowski, The Stranger played by the one-and-only Sam Elliot, said it better than I ever could: “Sometimes you get the bear and sometimes the bear gets you!” That’s how I feel now as I helplessly report from this stinking laptop and watch heroes and champions of compassion, care and circumstance now flailing for the right to walk the streets with you and me. My back aches!
Not now, not with Chocolate Jesus sitting in the White House and Arnie the Governator almost ready to open a dialog with medicinal growers about paying taxes and delivering California from certain bankruptcy! Everything seems to be going so well… Not now, not just as the summer is ramping up and everything wants to grow; not now, don’t put my friends into a grey 10 by 10 hole! Without sunshine, nutrients and a community, nothing blooms. Draconian, paranoid fear-mongering laws that bind the Judge presiding over a case to “mandatory minimums” were the worst practical joke ever played on the justice system. No shoes, no shirt, no justice — no kidding?
Everything I was about to say has already been said before, many times and many ways, more eloquently and by far greater men than me. But please hear my primal scream; I’m just speaking up now, for my brethren, so if the time ever comes there just might be someone left to speak out for me.
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Amen to what you are saying. The stupidity of the people enforcing this prohibition is staggering. You’d think they would want to educate themselves JUST A LITTLE before they ruin lives
I think the day will come when people look back and see all this the same way we see racism, sexism and homophobia: bastions of predjudice that were allowed to run in our societies for far too long, unchecked, and promoted by the supposed pillars of society.