[420 Girl]

Somewhere, a dog has bitten a man. And from the desk where I write, I can — by leaning back a little and looking around the orange tree - report that the sun has risen in the east.

Not only that: Some of the local establishments that have been authorized to dispense marijuana for medical reasons may have been dispensing marijuana to individuals who may have partaken of the substance for non-medical reasons. Worse, the establishments may have dispensed the aforementioned substance with full knowledge, or at least, a pretty damn good idea that their customers intended to go straight home and crank up “Dark Side of the Moon,” and don’t even pretend that you don’t know what I mean.

In response, more than a dozen clinics in San Diego County were shut down last month. San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis declared that “These so-called businesses are not legal. They appear to be run by drug dealers who see an opening in the market and a way to make a fast buck.”

She could well be right about that, because that’s pretty much what drug dealers, whether standing on the street corner or paying rent on a storefront, do: see an opening in the market as a way to make a fast buck. (Of course, that’s what most of us do, in a variety of ways, even if the bucks are slower in coming and of lower denominations than we’d like.)

Now the San Diego City Council has decided to — you’ll never guess — actually, you probably will — create a task force to study the medical marijuana problem; appointments to the 11-member task force recommended by Council President Ben Hueso is listed as ITEM-125 on the agenda for Tuesday’s City Council meeting. And, to be fair, the medical marijuana problem is, in fact, complicated. The city has no real guidelines, for example, so the joints can open just about anywhere that’s zoned commercial. Nobody even seems to be quite sure of how many there are in the county. And - can just about anybody run them? Can just about anybody get a prescription? Is it better to use one rolling paper, or two? Is the scene with the apes at the beginning of “2001: A Space Odyssey” supposed to have really happened, or is it allegory?

But the real problem lies in the premise: that what we are dealing with is some kind of special, deadly serious issue, when it most certainly is not. Marijuana is simply not very harmful, and everyone with a lick of sense knows it. Of course it can be abused, but so can dark-chocolate nonpareils, which is why my mother makes sure there’s only a small handful of them in her apothecary jar when I come to visit.

All of the complications, headaches and frustration we’re grappling with right now spring from nearly a century of American society’s ground-level, fundamental bungling . Cannabis was demonized for a goulash of reasons we won’t rehash here, but not one of them passes the Martian test: Could you explain this to a Martian and not sound like an idiot?

Human: “Okay, well, we allow people to ingest liquids that alter consciousness. The negative short-term effects can be disorientation, nausea, and, if too much is ingested, death. Long-term effects can include chemical dependence, organ damage, and death. Adults are allowed to drink it, but its sale is regulated; special licenses must be obtained, one for selling it in sealed bottles and cans, another for ingestion on the premises. It is heavily taxed. Leaders of countries traditionally drink a nominal amount in each other’s presence, for broadcast around the world.”

Martian: “Is the same true for inhaling marijuana smoke that likewise, if in a different fashion, alters human consciousness, but to which not a single death has ever been attributed, and to which some medical benefit has been ascertained?”

Human: “No. There are people who smoke marijuana, and others who grow it and sell it to them. But if we catch them, we put them in cages.”

There’s a line about marijuana in “Dispatches,” Michael Herr’s soul-jarring book on the ground-level madness that enveloped the war in Vietnam. The author hears that, in response to a report that the North Vietnamese are using elephants to carry supplies, the American forces were responding by sending attack helicopters to destroy them. Herr muses that — and dammit, I can’t find the quote, but it goes something very much like — “In a world in which men shoot elephants from helicopters, folks are just naturally going to want to get high.”

Somewhere, another dog has bitten another man. The sun has risen so far in the east that it’s now practically in the west. And, so long as men shoot elephants from helicopters, and have their hearts broken by women and vice versa and any combination therein, and loved ones and pets die, and the rent is due, and life is just too damn complex and weird, folks are just naturally going to want to get high.

Sometimes they do it just for the merry hell of it. And when we don’t want to face this hard fact, when we delude ourselves into thinking there’s something inherently evil about it, we end up spending time and money appointing task forces to look into the matter.

Legalize it. Regulate it. Tax it. And while you’re at it, stop shooting elephants from helicopters.


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