When’s this Reefer Madness going to end?
Trudeau Plants seed for sweet dreams As Oct. 17 nears, says Mark Bonokoski.
July 1 was supposed to be the day that reggae superstar Peter Tosh, one of the original Wailers, was advocating for back in 1975, 12 years before he was murdered in Jamaica during a home invasion. Legalize it
Don’t criticize it Legalize it, yeah yeah And I will advertise it Some call it tamjee Some call it the weed Some call it marijuana Some of them call it ganja Never mind, got to legalizeit
And don’t criticize it Legalize it, yeah yeah. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau never etched it into stone that Canada Day would be the first day that the recreational use of marijuana would be legal in this country, but he sure planted the seed for sweeter dreams. But here we are, Canada’s 151st birthday, and pot possession is still a crime, dealing pot can get you time, and all the pot dispensaries that have popped up across the country in virtually any town of any size are as illegal today as they always were and always will be.
And that’s the God’s truth. If it were not, Haile Selassie would have told us so.
It has been decreed by Trudeau himself that smoking dope just for the fun and the high that comes with it will not be officially legal until Oct. 17, and no doubt will be known as the first Weed Wednesday. When I think of pot, however, the date that immediately comes into my mind is Remembrance Day, for it was on that day back in the 1970s that the door came crashing down, and two long-haired men with guns drawn came storming up the stairs of our rented college rooming house and hauled the four of us away in the back of beatup undercover cars with no inside door handles. After spending a night in the old 52 Division jail, we were taken (again in cuffs, and chained to other miscreants), to have our mug shots snapped and our fingerprints taken before being arraigned in court for the illegal possession of marihuana, which is the justice system’s preferred spelling of the herb.
How did that turn out? Well, it was case-dismissed for me, the result of the wise advice about saying nothing. As for the others? The usual. Bill Blair would have been a young street cop in Toronto back then, a law-and-order poster boy earning his stripes on his way to heading up the drug squad, taking millions of dollars in cocaine off the streets during the ’80s, and later becoming Toronto’s chief of police.
Today, as a Liberal MP, exchief Blair is Justin Trudeau’s point man on the legalization of the same soft drug whose dealers he once pursued, and whose officers under his command made decisions that today have literally thousands, including my three college roommates, with the kind of criminal records that activists now want expunged. There is a certain irony, too, in all the former politicians and ex-cops who have invested in the pot of gold they perceive to be at the end of the marijuana rainbow, whether medicinal or recreational.
Insiders know how to make hay before any sun actually shines.
Bill Hicks, the stand-up comedian and satirist who died from pancreatic cancer in 1994, often wondered why marijuana grabbed the attention of law enforcement and had an American church group in 1936 putting out the now-cult classic warning about the effects of Reefer Madness.
“Why is marijuana against the law?” he asked. “It grows naturally upon our planet. Doesn’t the idea of making (something from) nature against the law seem to you a bit … well, unnatural?”
PS: Don’t Bogart that joint, my friend. Pass it along. Mark Bonokoski is a columnist and commentator with Postmedia News.