Pubdate: Mon, 06 Apr 2009
Source: Chicago Flame (IL Edu)
Copyright: 2009 Chicago Flame
Contact: http://www.chicagoflame.com/home/lettertotheeditor/
Website: http://www.chicagoflame.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/4602
Author: Marcus K. Line
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?420 (Cannabis - Popular)

DEATH TO '4-20'

The term '4-20' is most popularly known as code for  marijuana. Not 
hemp clothing, not hemp oil or hemp  seeds, no, we're talking about 
recreational, spiritual  or medicinal usage of cannabis sativa. 
Internet lore  will tell you six-ways-to-Sunday about how this code 
came to be. Ask yourself, where did you learn it? Did  you overhear 
it from friends or pop culture? Did you  immediately understand it 
meant cannabis? Where you  consuming cannabis at the time you learned 
it? Now  remember this. The time has come to kill the code.  Cannabis 
is a legitimate part of our world and  acceptance of this starts with 
using the proper name.

Regardless of current prohibition, using cannabis is a  freedom that 
millions of Americans regularly feel they  have. Using code for a 
freedom devalues it. A benign  freedom such as smoking marijuana is 
no less worthy  than the freedom to drink beer, which has no code. 
The current era of prohibition is nothing more than a  momentary 
lapse of reason.

Back when my grandfather was a boy, his family lived in  a small town 
near Des Moines, Iowa. He once told me a  story about how his father 
used to brew alcoholic ale  and such out of his own home.

"Now the time must have been between 1919 and 1933," my  grandfather 
clued me in. One night at their home, his  father and a neighbor 
elevated an argument to a point  where the neighbor and his wife 
became disgruntled and  left. Afterwards, my grandfather recalls 
watching his  mother make her husband pour his homemade brew down the 
drain because she was afraid for her family's  well-being. Apparently 
during the argument, their angry  neighbor said out loud, "James, I'm 
going to tell  everyone in town what you've been brewing here."

My grandfather told me he never saw his father so upset  as he was 
when pouring his own expensive work down the  drain. No doubt he was 
sorry, too, for upsetting his  wife. All of this stress and 
embarrassment because he  broke a law that would soon be repealed and 
would be  legal for at least seven times longer than it ever  lasted 
on the books.

It will take less than 420 seconds for the copyright application for 
'4-20' to be filed once cannabis is legalized in the United States of 
America (if it is not already owned by R. J. Reynolds). There is a 
lot of money to be made in a virgin urban term like that. For the 
record, I am no more or less a fan of R. J. Reynolds versus the 
gun-dealin', smack-selling, alley-way dealer. Both of them are 
leaches on society, and both are threatened by a legal cannabis market.

A legal market is a taxable one. Given these recession blues, there 
has never been a better time to revise the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act. We 
can even keep the title (but fix the spelling - it needs a 'j'). From 
farming to rolling, cannabis has great potential to generate new 
local, state and federal tax revenues - $31 billion per year, 
according to a 2007 Jon Gettman article called "Lost Taxes and Other 
Costs of Marijuana Laws." And this consumer cash crop need not be 
imported from China. American farmers are standing by like giant 
Grant Wood paintings. (Add its "Clark Kent" cousin - hemp - to the 
market, and the financial numbers look even better. Hemp is cheaper 
than lumber or cotton because it grows faster, without fertilizers, 
and naturally in all 50 states.)

There are risks involved with taking drugs - all drugs - even when 
taking them in moderate dosage. I own a book called "From Chocolate 
to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs," 
written by Dr. Andrew Weil and Winifred Rosen. You can find it in 
your library or for less than $5 on www.betterworldbooks.com . 
Published in 1998, the book explains drugs (legal and not) through 
the naked lens of science and medicine.

You don't have to look far to find hypocrisies in American drug 
policy (or lack thereof). Recall the Reagan-era "this is your brain 
on drugs" prime-time T.V. commercials. It's too bad they didn't make 
a commercial for the alcoholics living in the household. Life and 
drugs are not so simple; we all mix them to varying degrees of success.

A friend of mine has a plan to host an exposition in the name of 
legalizing and de-stigmatizing cannabis use. He wants to call it "The 
Marijuanalogues." The expo would present short monologues from 
cannabis users within the community - not unlike the format of the 
popular Eve Ensler play. My friend had originally considered opening 
night would be on 4-20, but he's come to realize the need to move 
beyond culture references seeded in an era of pot prohibition.

So on this Apr. 20, whether you take cannabis or not, don't call it 
'4-20.' Just call it my friend Larry's birthday.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom