Jonah Raskin Gives the Straight Dope on California's Marijuana Industry

By Larissa Archer Mon., Aug. 1 2011 at 10:00 AM

Jonah Raskin reads from Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War.

"If baseball is the opiate of the masses, why aren't opiates given to the masses?"

This was possibly the most cogent question posed to Jonah Raskin on Thursday at Canessa Gallery after he read from his new book, Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War, published by High Times Books. The poser of the question was a young man who spoke with what was (in the context) calm, Harvardian breviloquence about how his family had no problem with his pot-smoking despite their own abstinence from the herb.

He had asked it as a follow-up to a somewhat less calm (and significantly less breviloquent) comment made by one of the older members of the audience, which was that the government -- the Man, what have you -- wants people to enjoy baseball because when you're at the game, enjoying yourself, you're not thinking of how little money you make. (He's apparently never pushed his debit card to its withdrawal limit trying to buy garlic fries and a beer at AT&T Park.)

The audience at the North Beach gallery seemed to be of a mind regarding pot and the ongoing debate over its legalization in California. Strange, however, was that attendees were either very young (in their 20s) or retirement age. What did the absence of people from their 30s to their 50s mean? Do working-age adults not do drugs? Do they simply not have the time to tune out, or do they just prefer booze? Or do they only go to readings if it's David Sedaris or that guy who writes about stuff white people like?

Anyway, what Raskin revealed in his reading and in his book -- in stories of California's history of growing the crop, and in facts about the industry today -- might make one wish it had come out before last November's election, when Proposition 19 (which would have legalized certain activities related to cannabis and allowed its regulation under certain circumstances) failed.

California holds the terminally unhip distinction as the first state to criminalize pot. It was 1913, and the plant was associated with dark-skinned people from lands where it originally grew. It was easy for a (buzz-killer) government to make a (racist) public renounce all the fun it could be having and relegate, in its (unexpanded, Sylvester Squareballs) imagination, the drug and its consumers (artists, writers, jazz musicians), to an underworld of preposterous reefer-madness paranoia and trashy pulp-fiction cover art.

The 1960s saw the transference of the drug's association with "dirty Mexicans" to "dirty hippies," followed by the near-paradisiacal era in the late 1960s and '70s, when pot was de facto legal. But it's the examination of today's growing industry that makes Marijuanaland (and Raskin's discussion of it) a good, possibly even an important, read if you want to know what's going on in an industry whose net worth in California alone experts place at $19 billion to $40 billion.

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Canessa Gallery

708 Montgomery, San Francisco, CA

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Canessa Gallery, Jonah Raskin, literary events, marijuana

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sophie jensen

"? Do working-age adults not do drugs?"Their work schedules or families often take precedence over a book reading. Retirees have significantly more freedom in how they spend the day. or evening.

Larissa Archer

Thank you for pointing that out. However, I found the absence of working-age people at the book reading noticeable because of the contrast with other events where they abound, like movies and ballgames.

malcolmkyle

* A rather large majority of people will always feel the need to use drugs, such as heroin, opium, nicotine, amphetamines, alcohol, sugar, or caffeine.

* Just as it was impossible to prevent alcohol from being produced and used in the U.S. in the 1920s, so too, it is equally impossible to prevent any of the aforementioned drugs from being produced and widely used by those who desire to do so.

* Due to Prohibition (historically proven to be an utter failure at every level), the availability of most of these mood-altering drugs has become so universal and unfettered, that in any city of the civilized world, any one of us would be able to procure practically any drug we wish within an hour.

* The massive majority of people who use drugs do so recreationally - getting high at the weekend then up for work on a Monday morning.

* A small minority of people will always experience drug use as problematic.

* Throughout history, the prohibition of any mind-altering substance has always exploded usage rates, overcrowded jails, fueled organized crime, created rampant corruption of law-enforcement - even whole governments, while inducing an incalculable amount of suffering and death.

* It's not even possible to keep drugs out of prisons, but prohibitionists wish to waste hundreds of billions of our money in an utterly futile attempt to keep them off our streets.

* Prohibition kills more people and ruins more lives than the prohibited drugs have ever done.

* The United States jails a larger percentage of it's own citizens than any other country in the world, including those run by the worst totalitarian regimes.

* The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the urge to rule it.- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) American editor, essayist and philologist.

* In The Land Formally Known As Free, all citizens have been stripped of their 4th amendment rights and are now totally subordinate to a corporatized, despotic government with a heavily armed and corrupt, militarized police force whose often deadly intrusions into their homes and lives are condoned by an equally corrupt, spineless and reprobate judiciary.

* In a Police State, there is No Personal Privacy, Scarce Personal Freedom, Hardly Any Personal Justice and An Ever Diminishing Amount Of Personal Wealth.

* As with torture, prohibition is a grievous crime against humanity. If you support it, or even simply tolerate it by looking the other way while others commit it, you are an accessory to a very serious moral transgression against humanity.

* The United States re-legalized certain drug use in 1933. The drug was alcohol, and the 21st amendment re-legalized its production, distribution and sale. Both alcohol consumption and violent crime dropped immediately as a result, and, very soon after, the American economy climbed out of that same prohibition engendered abyss into which it had previously been pushed.

“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else.” - Winston Churchill

Lysander Spooner

"an industry whose net worth in California alone experts place between $19 billion and $40 billion" -- Which goes to show that if you smoke pot these days you are a sucker. The whole pot scene has transformed into one giant rip off. Too bad because it used to be a very positive social atmosphere.