by Howard Marks
Maintenance
A sizeable and powerful portion of the electorate believe that the taking of all drugs (in which category they include cannabis but usually exclude alcohol, tobacco, tea and many legally prescribed pharmaceutical products) is inherently immoral and that the rest of the population should abide by this ethic even if they do not subscribe to it. Articulate and well-reasoned arguments advocating cannabis legalisation and decriminalisation have resoundingly failed to convince these anti-drug crusaders of the irrationality of their position. Unless the concerns of these moral dictators are properly addressed, one cannot expect them to do other than vigorously maintain their prohibitive stance.
The administrative agencies and bureaucracies of all countries have self-protective vested interests in maintaining the mythology of the perils of cannabis use. Many British customs officers, policemen, coastguards, solicitors, barristers, judges, probation officers, prison officers and ancillary and secretarial staff directly benefit from the current prohibition of cannabis.
Immensely powerful industrial groups such as the tobacco, alcohol, synthetic fibre, pharmaceutical and fuel industries are terrified of the competition a legal cannabis industry might provide. Cannabis gets one high, is non-addictive, is completely harmless, and it grows virtually anywhere. Neither God nor Nature wishes to sell the patent. One doesn’t have to drill mines into Mother Earth nor destroy rainforests to harvest the prolific herb, so some multinationals could go broke.
Many responsible and concerned parents have pointed out to me the only argument against legalisation of cannabis with which I have any kind of sympathy, i.e., it gives their children a mode of rebellion and taboo participation that is absolutely fabulous and harmless. The parents discreetly smoke joints when the children aren’t around and pretend a show of disapproval when the children behave likewise. Necessarily, such an attempt to fool the young is short-lived, and I doubt whether the parents in question would offer serious opposition to the legislation of cannabis.
A LEGAL CANNABIS MARKET
Advantages
There are countless advantages to legislation. It will no longer be necessary for cannabis consumers to acquire cannabis from illegal sources that force law-abiding citizens to adopt mantles of crime. Prohibition-related crime (which commonly includes murder, violence, kidnap, theft and fraud) and its pathological consequences will disappear. Sufferers of asthma, glaucoma, epilepsy, cancer, constricted bronchioles, AIDS, multiple sclerosis, migraine, pruritis and insomnia will be more likely to obtain relief. Nasty side effects caused by medically prescribed tranquillisers, sleepers, analgesics and antiemetics will be replaced by getting pleasantly stoned.
Regulation
Virtually all proposals for the legalising of cannabis share the common grounds of (1) assuming the cannabis market is irrepressible, (2) insisting that marketed cannabis carry a strictly worded, government-approved health warning, and (3) maintaining the illegality of the sale of cannabis to children. The areas of disagreement in legislation proposals tend to occur when consideration is given to the degree, if any, of government intervention.
Monopoly or near monopoly is obtained when the bulk of services is provided by one, or very few, business enterprises or government administrative agencies. Some legislation models have proposed a state monopoly of supply with all advertising illegal. Such a system more often than not leads to a relatively stable but hopelessly bureaucratised structure in which people perform routine roles as functionaries.
In an oligopoly a handful of enterprises constitute a cartel and dominate the market. This system seems equally hampered by bureaucratic paralysis.
At the other extreme, others have suggested that production and distribution be undertaken by a large number of relatively small competing private enterprises subject to government regulation.
Yet others have explicitly limited state participation to zero, or as near as possible, to punish them for having unleashed the violence and evils of prohibition on a well-meaning, peace-loving generation.
Although fettering the cannabis market is no more justified than fettering any other market, the governments that tend to exist in Great Britain and elsewhere are unlikely to consciously vote themselves out of taking, through the administrative vehicle of regulation, a hefty slice of the action.
As far as possible, regulations should be closely linked and totally dependent upon obvious and agreed failures and mistakes committed by the hitherto unregulated producers and suppliers. The government should be allowed to intervene with its cudgel of regulation only if there is good reason to believe an improvement in consumer satisfaction will be achieved.
Eventually, cannabis should be available in the same way as tea, coffee or medicinal herbs. There is a general move back to medicine based on organic compounds. This is partly due to the great dissemination of Asian herbal treatments and partly due to the public distrust of money-grabbing pharmaceutical companies that deliberately exclude the use of vegetable compounds for their own commercial gain of patenting synthetic chemicals. Agricultural products are generally exempt from legislation covering processed food. Psilocybin magic mushrooms, for example, are free from drug and excise laws. Cannabis should be equally blessed.
Unfortunately, legalised cannabis is more likely to be regulated in the same way as tobacco and alcohol. Organisations advocating legalisation have been reluctant to argue against this, probably feeling that their goals would be impossible to attain without such concession.
Who is going to do it?
Since the 1960s, there has been an almost universally prevalent belief that large tobacco companies, such as Philip Morris, in anticipation of cannabis legalisation, have registered trade names such as Acapulco Gold and Panama Red. I have known many swear this to be true. In fact, it is not. In 1970, a group called Amorphia went through the files of the United States Patent Office and found that nobody had registered the name Acapulco Gold. Amorphia applied for the name, hoping to use it to market rolling papers. The application was refused because Acapulco gold is a generic name for a kind of marijuana, and generic names cannot be copyrighted. It doesn’t really matter, of course, because Marco Polo’s Bullshit will outsell Panama Red if it provides a better smoke.
This copyright mythology has helped engender the belief that tobacco companies will be the ones to market legal cannabis. Actually, there is no reason on earth to think that tobacco companies rather than other companies are more likely to get into the legalised cannabis business.
I think it appropriate for the running of legalised cannabis supply to be carried out by some of those who have already committed themselves to, or have experience in, the current illegal supplying of cannabis. Although different skills might well be required in the importation and retail distribution areas (driving ability, commercial freight expertise and shopkeeping prowess, rather than street-wisdom and deviousness), the same cannot be said to be true of the production process, where the same skills will be in demand. Nor is it true of the exportation of cannabis from most of the countries where it has been grown for millennia. From these countries, exportation of illegal commodities differs in little or no way from the exportation of legal commodities: officials are paid, and the job is done. It would be a great pity not to salvage the many honourable, trust-laden and fruitful relationships and alliances that have been established between growers (and other participants in the countries of origin) and importers resident in the destination countries.
THE TRANSITION PERIOD
Likelihood of change
There are more marijuana smokers of voting age than ever before. Also, a greater number than ever before of non-users are now aware of what cannabis is, its harmlessness and the irrational objections to the abolition of its prohibition. Older, generally more conservative people are, albeit far too slowly, leaving the political system. Although the contributions to sanity made by the young replacements have so far been few, political leaders prepared to admit the inhaling of what they
smoked are bound to eventually emerge. Meanwhile, evidence of cannabis’s therapeutic qualities continues to pile up and be endorsed by respected and authoritative members of the medical profession.
It remains only for cannabis to become socially acceptable. It has been held that lower classes tend to use cannabis as a general intoxicant while upper classes use it as a stimulant. The working classes, therefore, remain criminal while the aristocrats continue to be merely decadent. As cannabis becomes more and more of a middle-class activity, the distinction between decadence and crime blurs, and legalisation is inevitable.
Mechanics of transition
The transition from the current legal market to a regular market will not happen overnight, and it will not happen smoothly. Large sections of the public will be resistant to the change and are certain to demand what they regard as protective measures before allowing legalisation to be initiated. Sales might be restricted to licensed dealers, or even qualified pharmacists. There will be coercive attempts to enforce regulation along the lines of that governing alcohol and tobacco. Drug-testing will probably skyrocket, particularly for some occupations, and there will be all sorts of penalties for driving or engaging in paid employment when traces of cannabis are detected in urine.
Although I have never known of anyone seeking medical treatment for the effects of cannabis use, some of those who oppose legalisation inexplicably envisage legal cannabis putting an additional burden on the National Health Service. Who knows what suggestions might be made from those quarters with respect to taxation and regulation.
The constant media bombardment of carefully selected phrases such as ‘drug-related crime’, rather than the accurate ‘prohibition-caused crime’, will also give rise to spurious concerns that might have to be addressed by a certain amount of transitional regulation. Some of this interim regulation will insist on informative and accurate labelling giving the cannabis’s THC content, impurities, origin, date of production and other characteristics. I doubt if there will be too much in the way of objection to this from those in favour of legalisation.
There will also be resistance to legalisation from unexpected quarters. The hardened and heavy pot smoker is often convinced that should cannabis be legalised, either government or big business or both will inevitably wreck the quality and the quantity of the product available. Many consumers will continue to prefer to buy cannabis in the manner to which they are accustomed. Commercialism and other capitalistic characteristics might turn cannabis into a bland, ineffectual, designer-produced non-entity, just like non-tox beer and sliced bread. Make it legal, and then stop it from getting one high. There is no need to adopt these trappings of American Puritanism. Getting high is OK.
Everyone lives by selling something
Robert Louis Stevenson
Eleusis
The Hive Chemist
THIS IS THE tale of a character named ‘eleusis.’ Think of it as a work of fiction in the first person by a humble narrator, and if it seems a bit strange, remember that only the truth itself is stranger than fiction. Eleusis, for those of you unfamiliar, was the name of an ancient Greek city where the Spring Mysteries were held: a city-wide festival where consumption of mind-altering substances was the central activity in a celebration of the return of spring.
Organic chemistry intrigued me. It tempted me with its secret language of symbols, its demand for (nearly) blind faith in unseen collisions. MDMA intrigued me as well, with its strangely universal experience, its ability to make even the hardest soul empathic. I had tried neither organic chemistry nor MDMA, so I decided to try both. In the spring of 1994, appropriately enough, I began my chemical journey and by late winter I was already posting to a.d.c. It took so much work to learn how to make MDMA that I decided I was going to share what I learned so that others would not have to repeat my labors. However, I had serious misgivings about sharing because my quest was one for knowledge and experience while, I knew, for most others it would be for purely economic reasons. You can see my struggling in practically every post I made, the schizophrenic vacillations in tone between erudite dissertation and egomaniacal evisceration. Though I knew my posts would be put to use by those less scrupulous, I posted nonetheless, for the benefit of those who were. And now on to the experience.
I broke every rule in the book, and I did so knowingly. I ordered glassware from Aldrich with my real name and credit card. I ordered chemicals from all over with my real name and money orders. I had boxes shipped to my parents (and, later, my co-conspirators). I spent hundreds of hours in the library and posted everything I found that sounded remotely useful to the process of making MDMA. I conducted my experiments in a freakin’ apartment complex, of all places, but none of these mistakes got me busted.
I did all of this in blind faith because the first time I took MDMA was my own.
Days after the reference for converting safrole to isosafrole was sent to me I made my first batch of MDMA, strictly by the book (Shulgin’s, that is). Mid-November of ’94, a good friend of mine and I took 110mg each from that batch and rocketed into an internal space beyond description, but not beyond comprehension. She was suitably impressed, I was ecstatic (pardon the pun), and we just happened to be doing it at a friend of hers’ who dealt the stuff. Needless to say, that was the beginning of a very good business relationship.
Fast forward a year, give or take a few months.
And the next question is:
So why did I leave a.d.c.?
Perhaps some of you were present back then. If so, then you probably remember a vociferous bastard named Yogi Shan who thought eleusis was about as full of shit as the Augean stables (cf. Hercules’s twelve labors). Well, a couple of weeks prior to the fit hitting the Shan, so to speak, I had visited a friend in Texas and while there I bought a bunch of fairly innocuous chemicals. I packed them up in a box and went down to the local mailboxes, etc., to have them shipped back.
The box never made it.
After two weeks, I was convinced that it had been confiscated, and likely sent to either the DEA, the DOT or the BATF, so I used the ruse of Yogi’s incessant criticism of ‘eleusis’s bad chemistry’ to bid my farewell to a.d.c., as it was clearly time for me to quit the game.
This, of course, meant that ZWITTERION had to leave too, since even if he and I weren’t the same person (and we were), he wouldn’t have anyone to pick on anymore (didn’t you notice that ZWITTERION only seemed to try out the things that eleusis posted?). As a side note, if you find it hard to swallow that ZWIT and eleusis were the same individual because of the wild difference in writing styles, keep in mind that I am an English major.
So what happened to ‘eleusis’ after that?
I packed up my lab in a blind paranoid fury. I canceled my icubed e-mail account. I encrypted and compressed every computer file, e-mail, etc., that was even remotely related to drug chemistry. I woke up every morning before 5.00 a.m., rumored to be the time the DEA would strike if they came a-knockin’. But I also knew that the paper trail was immense, that even if there wasn’t anything left in my apartment when the DEA came crashing in that I would still have a lot of explaining to do. Then there was the realization that if I was under surveillance that they would already know where I put everything. I struggled to wipe my fingerprints from everything I had ever touched, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw away nearly $12,000 in glassware, chemicals and equipment. I just couldn’t destroy everything, though I knew that I should. Besides, how does one get rid of 11kg of safrole or 201 of THF? I’m no tree-hugger, but I’m not so environmentally unconscious that I’d pour shit like that down the drain or onto the ground.
Months went by with no sign of the DEA. Slowly but surely my co-conspirator convinced me to start up again. She used the very persuasive argument that since I had started manufacturing, no one would buy anything else (I was fanatic about quality, I never cut my MDMA, and I made sure that every dose was 100-110mg for the best possible experience). It really didn’t take much convinc
ing, though, because once you start, I don’t believe you can stop until you are caught. It is too seductive, way too seductive. Viddy well, little brothers, viddy well (cf. A Clockwork Orange).
So I started up again, but I tried to make the lab as spartan as possible – no unrelated chemicals on the premises, no massive quantities of class-1 precursors, and definitely no product for any longer than the time it took to dry. It was futile, of course, and as I came to realize that, I took the attitude of ‘fuck it’. I cranked out a 2,000-dose batch of 2-CB and gave it all away. I mustered up a 16g batch of mescaline and gave that away too. TMA, DMT, 4-Methylaminorex, et al., just to know that I could and to see what they were like.
On June 23, at around 5 p.m., the phone rang. It was Special Agent Higgins of the DEA. He was at my parents’ house and wanted to ask me a few questions about all the chemicals I had purchased. I told him I would be right over, hung up, then looked at my apartment. Chemicals everywhere, glassware everywhere. There was no way to destroy enough of it to matter in the time frame allotted. I did destroy the twin lOOg batches of MDP-2-P that were just starting (literally fifteen minutes prior) and dump out 500g of methylamine HCI (yes, made by decomposing hexamine), but nothing else. I just hoped that I would be able to smoothly talk my way out of the problem – at least for long enough to be able to destroy everything else.
When I arrived at my parents’ house there were a dozen agents wandering around with guns, bulletproof vests, the whole enchilada. They were sorting through my old room and found maybe two documents related to chemistry and, unfortunately, a bottle of sodium in petroleum ether that I had long ago forgotten. They told me that they had all of my receipts from a certain chemical company that I used quite often and asked what I did with all of those chemicals. Well, I felt pretty confident then because I never ordered anything listed or even terribly suspicious from that company – I synthesized all of the naughty precursors myself – so I calmly answered, ‘I make photographic developers with them.’