Posted on 10/16/2010 9:34:39 PM PDT by sinanju
It would be easy to assume that all new entrants into the industry are coming to it in bad faith. Not so, I learn from my classmates back at school. There are guys like Bob Nead, a cable-contractor from Ohio who admits he smokes about a quarter of an ounce a week for his shot knee, as he prefers that to popping Vicodin—it helps him sleep. He wants to become a caregiver to his terminally ill aunt and to provide a better living for his two children.
But, he says, after he gets certified, he’s not giving any to friends, and is going to find genuinely sick patients. “I don’t want to break any kind of laws. I want to be totally legit,” he says, even if he thinks it’s foolish to criminalize pot. “It’s not like I’m going to go out and shoot people ’cause I smoked a joint. You’re too lazy to pick up the gun.” (I hear some version of this defense a couple of dozen times over the course of my stay, and it’s probably true, for the most part. Though it’s worth noting that, according to crime statistics kept by the ADAM II law-enforcement database, more people arrested for violent crimes tested positive for marijuana than for any other drug—meaning Bob is wrong that everybody on weed is as peace-loving as he is. At the very least, he owes an apology to heroin and cocaine users.)
Then there’s gray-haired Dave, who is 58, lost his job over a year ago as a general manager of a plastic recycling company, and got into this not knowing if he could go back to work. The last time he smoked pot “was a little, in college.” He doesn’t like it—“it makes me paranoid.” But if this takes off, he’ll run his business “like a Boy Scout.” After all, he’s a pillar of his community, sits on boards, and used to be the head usher at his church. He has a reputation to think about—which is why he’s not telling anyone he’s here.
There’s Bulldog, a 32-year-old Oklahoma City native, so named because he trains dogs. The only time he ever smoked pot was “three or four times in high school after the beer was gone. And I got sick.” He now has bad knees from laying tile and working dogs, and can’t make ends meet even with his college-degree-holding wife, so he’s looking to start over. Lately, he’s been reduced to delivering pizzas to support his family, a job he had in high school, except he made more money back then because “people still tipped.”
There’s Anastasia (“That’s a pretty fake name,” I compliment. “Thank you,” she responds). Anastasia is a sunshiny black woman who wears bright pastel Sunday-morning clothes to class. I tell her she looks like a church lady. “That’s because I am,” she says. She’s actually a reverend’s wife, and is such an innocent, she’s never smoked a cigarette. “We don’t even drink,” she says. “The closest we come is a virgin strawberry daiquiri.”
She and her husband are good Christians, and she only wants really sick patients who are also good Christians. “So that they know they’re buying Christian marijuana?” I ask, somewhat smartly. But Anastasia will not be deterred. She understands people will be cynical. She’s cynical herself, in some ways. But “life has changed for us.” In the last few years, with their family restaurant folding and her caretaker job about to come to an end, they’ve lost the majority of their income and need a new lifeline. So she plans on making marijuana-laced edibles for terminally ill patients. She and her husband prayed over it, and found peace because it’s now legal. Still, she’s not telling anyone, and worries that it looks like “we’re becoming dope dealers. We’re just looking to help others, and ourselves at the same time.”
Not everyone’s quite so innocent. Stoney D (fake name) lost his job as an autoworker about a year ago, and says, “When my boss handed me my pink slip, I smiled.” He was tired “of being strapped to a machine inside of a shop.” Now he says he can do what he loves.
Saul Alinsky's Luciferian "revolutionary" misfits likely agree with you. Never let a good crisis go to waste and all that.Certainly the predators in the mortgage / financial industry will appreciate your contributions toward further stupefying their prey.
Illegal drug use doesn't have to be "regular" in order to invoke the penalties whereby one is excluded from Law Enforcement, Military Clearance, or other venues where TRUST is of value.Like most libertardian pot-heads, you've confused Liberty with the Fatal Liberality presently manifesting itself within the systemic, subversive, corruption of American institutions - Financial, Military, Religious, Social...What it basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.It's a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and is divided into four basic stages.The first stage being "demoralization"....---KGB Defector Yuri BezmenovSoviet Subversion of the Free Press (Ideological subversion, Destabilization, CRISIS - and the KGB)
2. The next stage is destabilization....
This time, subverter does not care about your ideas and the patterns of your consumption. Whether you eat junk food and get fat and flabby doesn't matter any more.
[snip]
3. The next stage of course is crisis...---KGB Defector Yuri BezmenovSoviet Subversion of the Free Press (Ideological subversion, Destabilization, CRISIS - and the KGB)
I’m really not the least bit worried about unleashing such a tempting false-Utopian crutch within a society already teetering on the edge of systemic insanity.
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