Reefer madness
Arkansas is going to pot
WHAT A tangled web we weave when first the idea of “medical marijuana” we conceive. And now the web begins to tighten as the state begins to distribute applications for its now perfectly legal if awfully complicated pot dispensaries and farms. So step right up, all you budding entrepreneurs and users who’d like to make a good thing out of a bad idea. Just fill out the application form(s) for an official Medical Marijuana registry card.
Prospective “patients” will need to be certified by a physician as having one of 18 conditions. For there’s no bad idea the nanny state can’t make much worse by throwing all kinds of bureaucratic hurdles in its way. Also required will be a $50 annual fee and some evidence that you are who you say you are (like an Arkansas driver’s license). Prospective mothers in this state have gotten abortions with less to-do.
While it’s at it, the state of Arkansas will take steps to preserve its monopoly over the lucrative trade in marijuana. As the state’s health department has been kind enough to remind those hooked on the weed, “possession of marijuana is still illegal in the state unless purchased in licensed dispensaries by cardholders” and “there are no licensed medical-marijuana dispensaries in Arkansas.” Maybe not now, but look for one coming to your neighborhood in one of eight zones across the state.
How will those zones be chosen? In a variety of ways, no doubt. But the paper said one way is to show that a dispensary will boost the local economy where it most needs boosting, “in areas where jobs are needed.” Like in the poorest neighborhoods of the poorest parts of the state? In the past, prisons might have been placed there as a local industry; now marijuana dispensaries may wind up performing the same economic function. The state’s Economic Development Commission can be counted on to provide the data about where pot factories could become mainstays of revived economies even as they deaden the mental facilities of those who patronize them. Who knew that addiction would become something to court, not fear, in modern, permissive Arkansas? These dispensaries would not only distribute marijuana but as an extra added bonus, as the oldtime cereal boxes used to say, a generous amount of irony.
By now there may be more names for the different strains of pot than there are potheads, depending on the range of one’s vocabulary and taste in this formerly illicit drug. Lessee now: There’s cannabis, which has a nice, scientific ring to it, while other names for the drug are less formal depending on the user’s or dealers’s taste, preferences and budget. Put all those terms together and the confirmed logophile could compile a whole encyclopedia of slang, beginning with bangh, bomb weed, bud, diesel, ditch weed, ganja, killer weed, locoweed, wacky tabacky . . . And finally there’s the ultimate in both euphemism and legality: medical marijuana.
The deadline for applications for dispensaries and cultivation facilities will be here soon: Sept. 18. Unite, potheads of the world, you have only your remaining wits to lose.
And don’t forget this message from the friendly folks at your ever-obliging state government: Applicants for dealerships in the medical-marijuana business “must demonstrate that 60 percent of the ownership interest in the medical marijuana facility is held by residents of the state of Arkansas who have been a resident for at least 7 consecutive years.” Wouldn’t want any outsiders’ horning in our own home-grown racket, would we? If anybody is going to take advantage of their neighbors in this small, wonderful state, then let it be their fellow Arkansans.