Meanwhile, environmentalists of the professional class will continue growing fruitless tomato plants in yogurt containers (they call it “permaculture”) while weed workers actually succeed at growing shit in locally appropriate ways every day, and can build and rewire structures in twenty-four hours. Clearly, any effective social movement would find one pot grower more useful than all “anarchoprimitivists” combined.

In conclusion, we must destroy their privileges, their desire, and their neoliberal marijuana as well. We must not lose sight of so much hypocrisy in a fog of corporate-sweetened weed smoke.

The fact is that people grow, traffic, and sell pot outside of the economic mainstream for a reason—the pot sector actually grants living wages whereas legal employment options do not. Everyone who currently makes a living off pot will still be poor and needing to make a living tomorrow when Monsanto buys the DNA sequence for Skunk. For this reason, there will continue to be an underground pot trade, and there is every reason to think that pre-existing pot workers will be persecuted even more heavily than before.

inevitably

Consider further the plight of our typical legal-pot patient, Mary Jane. One reason she originally wanted her marijuana prescription was to avoid buying the typical purchase of a “quarter” (seven grams) from delivery, so she doesn’t smoke more than she needs. But the Licensed Producer was worse: she was told she had to buy her entire thirty-day prescription in one massive load, because the website commands that the next order be thirty days after the last purchase (rather than within a given thirty-day time period). Such a system serves no practical purpose except to mobilize patients’ anxiety disorders—which they are supposedly trying to heal—so that they buy more overpriced product than necessary at any given time.

State-sponsored marijuana corporations say “Vape-Friendly!” when they mean “Shitty Weed That’s Actually Dangerous to Smoke!” and hope the public is stupid enough to feel empowered because they are invited to fill out a sleekly designed web survey.

caricature

That these workers have provided us healing marijuana despite such conditions should be regarded as nothing less than heroic. Instead, authorities dub them “violent” and even some who would call themselves anarchists indeavour to sett the rich people to plunder the poore by selling their Soules to the great Leviathan of Legall Marijuana .

hewing

Do they really not see that the Motley Crew has continued to exist in the shadows all along?

Traditional marijuana workers also constitute the last remaining examples north of Mexico of self-organized small-scale agriculture and autonomous workers collectives, ones that organize group insurance schemes, like the “rider funds” that bike delivery guys often maintain in case anyone gets injured or has to deal with legal fees.

protocols

Throughout the underground pot trade “producers” and “consumers” still often look each other in the face, and know each other as people, wherein one’s relevant “credit” relates to one’s true character and reputation.

It is also pot workers, not the State, who consistently provide interest-free loans (the “fronting” of an ounce, say) to those with no credit at banks, whose only other recourse is the treachery of payday lenders. It is the pot-peddlers, not the State, who provide daily home-check-ups for unemployed youths suffering mental health challenges, and who run errands for seniors when the streets get icy. (Not all pot delivery guys pick up prescriptions for their elderly clients, but most will at least pass by the corner store as they make their rounds.)

Anyone who considers it appropriate to dub these people “violent criminals” surely has a heart two sizes too small.

No doubt most members of the working class have at least one laid-off friend or acquaintance who has been intermittently sustained by pot work.

It is the State that requires, say, a dyslexic laid-off worker to fill out a seventeen-page webform in her second language to receive access to food. It is the State that asks the poor to continually re-live, narrate, and fetishize in proper form the traumatic violence they have experienced in order to convince food-bearing-authorities that their lives might actually have value. It is certainly not underground pot workers who demand such dehumanizing performances of the “deserving poor” in order to acquire a job or a loan. It is the State that offers a cruel minimum wage, demands student interns work for free, and offers welfare checks so small they should come in an envelope saying “Please die as soon as possible.”

Viewed in the light of their actual historical functions, the Canadian and American governments are themselves murderous cartels that rely, in turn, on Mexican cartels to protect their murderous colonial mines.

Of course it becomes hard to sustain such an argument with respect to murderous “cartels,” which is why their stereotypically evil images are constantly waved in our faces.

reciprocity

Marijuana Commons.

Young black men can easily be thrown in jail for some other hackjob charge like “disturbing the peace,” while Mexicans will still live in fear of getting shot.

During the same period, the Drug Enforcement Agency attempted to criminalize Kratom—a plant that thousands of Americans have been ordering from Thailand in their efforts to kick government-approved pharmaceutical opiates.

hydroponic

The Mexican “drug cartels” we always hear about do profit nicely from moving weed around. But they are making the vast majority of their money from smuggling migrants over the border, selling women and children into sex slavery, moving cocaine from Colombia that used to arrive by air, cooking meth, and “taxing” Canadian and American mining companies.

Criminalizing Mexicans then became a priority instead. It was also in the 1930s that at least one state government (Georgia) whipped up a death penalty for selling weed to minors, while other states specifically targeted Mexicans as marijuana vendors.

Cocaine was invented by American and German pharmaceutical companies, and when it was later made “illegal,” this simply meant that every coca grower in Peru should be conscripted into sweated labor for those companies.

It should be no surprise, for example, to hear that the Central Intelligence Agency would have cocaine flown into into the United States while supposedly fighting the “War on Drugs” in Colombia.

The great love affair between imperial conquest and trade in intoxicating substances goes back at least as far as the sixteenth century

bourgeois

maneuver

If a corporation happens to rename a Pink Kush strain “Tranquillamen,” this does not make it that company’s invention.

cohort

intellectual

So they said, "We haven't given up. We look at it every single day."

and the biggest of the empires on this planet. ["The British Empire"]

They made another machine to produce those people: