Tag: Opinion

The image above captures it all for me; the lunacy, the hypocrisy. I know Proposition 19 is not the perfect answer, but what we are doing now is worse. It’s not about encouraging drug use. That happens whether we like it or not. It’s about enabling organized crime, and training young people to ignore our laws based on hypocrisy. Time to send a message about personal liberty, common sense, and some recognition of reality. This step won’t end the argument, but please join me tomorrow in voting to repeal Prohibition again.

The image above shows a business in the foreground named Stoneys that mostly sells pipes for smoking marijuana. They may also sell some Wholesale Vape Pens, but the point stands. An apparently legitimate business serving the needs of the illegal drug using population. The large building in the background is the Shasta County Jail, located right across the street, ready to incarcerate Stoney’s clientele who come looking for the best product to smoke their aaaa weed with. No doubt you and I can rationalize this evident contradiction of black and white laws in a gray world. But what message are we sending our young people, who are trying to make sense of the world and our culture? It would make more sense if the drug was legal and controlled, really. That way at least this confused message will not be sent out any longer. I’m convinced the unintended message is that drug laws are to be ignored, and by extension perhaps all societal laws are just a joke. The hypocrisy is poisonous.

I don’t think of ReallyRedding as a political blog. But in fact, every act of written expression is a political act in this world. The recent award of the Nobel Prize to Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo makes this painfully clear.

“The internet is God’s present to China
by Liu Xiaobo
Today there are more than 100 million internet users in China. The Chinese Government is ambivalent towards it. On the one hand, the internet is a tool to make money. On the other, the Communist dictatorship is afraid of freedom of expression.
The internet has brought about the awakening of ideas among the Chinese. This worries the Government, which has placed great importance on blocking the internet to exert ideological control.
In October 1999 I finished three years of jail and returned home. There was a computer there and it seemed that every visiting friend was telling me to use it. I tried a few times but felt that I could not write anything while facing a machine and insisted on writing with a fountain pen. Slowly, under the patient persuasion and guidance of my friends, I got familiar with it and cannot leave it now. As someone who writes for a living, and as someone who participated in the 1989 democracy movement, my gratitude towards the internet cannot be easily expressed.

I really enjoyed the exquisite weather this lovely Fall Redding weekend. I enjoyed the natural beauty, the freedom to travel freely about the Northstate.

I am enjoying the freedom now to write about this controversial subject. Liu Xiaobo is in jail for for 11 years for the crime of trying to enjoy the same basic freedoms we dare not take for granted. His wife is now under house arrest because of his new international recognition. Here are the words of the man who nominated him:

“The courageous men and women who are challenging tyranny in these countries are looking to the governments and leading non-governmental institutions in free countries for assurances that their fate, and the fate of their countries, depends on something more than the bottom line. To fail to challenge the Chinese government on Liu Xiaobo’s imprisonment is to concede this argument internationally, at enormous peril to peaceful advocates of progress and change not just in China but all around the world. “

You can sign a petition demand to free Liu Xiaobo at this link.

Or not.

Either way, you will be making a political statement.

Freedom of expression, the real prize. It’s ReallyRedding.

The RS ran this article about yesterday’s rally to save Kilarc. Below is a re-run of our thoughts on the Kilarc facility.

We stopped in over at Kilarc Reservoir in eastern Shasta County for a look and took a few shots. It’s nice to get up out of the valley heat. It has a lovely picnic area and lake, maintained by PG&E, who run the electrical generation facility there. PG&E wants to abandon the project, which is one of the oldest in the county. They would demolish the reservoir, power house, and the dam on Cow Creek that feeds it.

The plan strikes us as shortsighted, and a bit sad. This has to be one of the cleanest possible ways to make electricity. It’s been here for years, and seems to have had proportionally small impact. No hydropower comes without cost, but some projects seem to have reasonable cost/benefits, especially when already in place. Imagine the electrical power replaced with a coal fired plant, and it offers some stark perspective.

On the way home, we stopped at a high country ranch we know. The owner let us pick some fruit. These apples are from trees more than 100 years old. Still productive. The people who planted that orchard 100 years ago are the same people who thought electricity made from falling water would be a good idea.

100 years later, they are still right about both ideas.

With a little care, you can grow just about any crop you want in temperate Redding. Outside. Using no electricity. Yet our town boasts enough retail establishments selling hydroponic gardening gear to serve a colony on the moon. You can even see them advertising on billboards in town. Why is that?

Of course the question is rhetorical. The hydroponic shops cater to marijuana growers who prefer to grow their weeds indoors. Making sure you have the right temperature for your marijuana is adamant for many people who sell their weed on. Once these grows have finished, the flowers and many other byproducts of the grows will be used to stock up a dispensary in many legal states and countries. These dispensaries need to make sure that their weed is grown to the highest quality possible, in order to continue to grow their successful business. However, when growing marijuana, it’s important that the growers consider how they’re going to produce their marijuana. The most popular methods of growing marijuana are resin, live resin, and rosin (Read more about the differences here). It’s important for marijuana businesses to understand these as deciding which one to use can impact the success of the business. However, those businesses that aren’t performing as well as they could be might be interested in dispensary application consulting to improve the amount of business they have. When you’ve put all this work into finding the perfect temperature to grow your weed, you’ll want to be selling it on to make a profit! That being said, it is also interesting to note that although setting up a dispensary is one of the most popular marijuana business ideas out there at the moment, there are other ways to enter this exciting industry such as through social media marketing or even party planning. Ultimately, any industry that generates jobs and revenue can support the economy and therefore a lot of people think we should be doing more to support cannabis businesses.

I’m not here to pick on this particular establishment, about which I know nothing except that they have the wherewithal to advertise on a billboard in south Redding. I’m all for small and local business. But this growing industry is a lesson in unintended consequences that we ignore at our peril. At the roadside where I stopped to take a picture of the sign, I picked up this empty box.

The litter was a disposed box for earphones. The corporation that marketed and sold this product chose to play on words about an illegal drug for advertising purposes. Another company making money on marijuana. Can you identify the ethical contradiction involved when legal business organizations capitalize on illegality to thrive? Perhaps you cannot, or don’t care. But I submit that impressionable youth is being harmed by the hypocrisy. We are conditioning generations of young people to accept that laws are simply meant to be ‘winked’ at. It’s another unintended consequence of an ill-considered prohibition. We are complicit. We teach our young people that hypocrisy is acceptable, and laws are to be circumvented. In the long term, I expect it’s a cultural lesson we will come to regret having taught.

We have learned this lesson before. Prohibition of alcohol offered a huge boost to organized crime, and yet alcohol remained available. Alcohol abuse has negative effects on our society, but our elders ultimately decided those impacts were dwarfed in comparison to the terrible effects of the prohibition experiment. It seems like we must relearn things the hard way. The costs outweigh the benefits.

I saw a shirtless young man staggering on a Redding street yesterday in the afternoon sun. I wish he had chosen to avoid whatever intoxicant influence he’d used. Drug laws didn’t keep him from using. In any event, those are the same drug laws he’s been conditioned to disrespect. Wink. I arrived home to read that Mexican druglords had murdered 51 people and dumped them in a landfill yesterday. Are these two observances connected? I believe so. I’m just a blogger, and nobody needs my opinion. But please take a moment to read the informed opinion from today’s SF Chronicle of former San Jose CA Police Chief Joseph McNamara as he reasons that the time has come to end this prohibition experiment.

Stop winking.

“I still recall my mother’s first words to me: ‘I haven’t killed anyone in years, but never think that I’ve forgotten how.'”

Warren Ellis

You should have a soft heart as a mom, but if you have a soft head too, your progeny are doomed.

Skip Murphy

Not exactly Hallmark card material, but Happy Mother’s Day, mom. Celebrating tough-minded, soft-hearted moms everywhere.

I wrote on this same topic a year ago. This year, we may vote to remove the marijuana prohibition. Probably, you will soon see campaign rhetoric heat up. When you see arguments against removing prohibition, I ask you to consider who will benefit most from leaving the status quo in place.

Illegal drug cartels
Marijuana dispensaries and their landlords
Alcohol manufacturers and distributors
Pharmaceutical manufacturers
Lawyers and courts
Hydroponic gardening stores
Prisons and their unions
Police eradication budgets

When you see or hear the campaign advertising against legalization, please consider the source carefully. The prohibition has been a complete failure. Criminalization of marijuana has been used as a means to ostracize minorities in the United States, incite fear against them amongst the general populace and to deprive medical patients of the medicine they desperately need. The Florida dispensaries are doing all they can to ensure that final point becomes a distant memory. Clearly, now is the time for the entire country to try something new. If you don’t believe that it could actually be time to end prohibition and allow people that suffer from a whole array of illnesses, whether physical or mental to have access to medical marijuana that could have the potential to improve their lives, then perhaps do some research into locations in which medical marijuana has been legalized. It doesn’t even have to be completely legal for medical or recreational reasons, for instance, if you were to visit a website such as https://cannaunion.com/product-category/cbd-vaping/ or somewhere similar, you’d be able to see that within the UK (where it is still, in fact, illegal to possess or cultivate cannabis) people that wish to benefit from CBD (cannabidiol, a non-psychoactive cannabinoid prevalent in the marijuana plant) can actually still do. This could be just one-way patients can benefit from medicines while still being inside the law. If cannabis is legal where you live and you want to try it, do some research into it first. For example, how would you like to smoke your marijuana? There are many different ways to smoke cannabis nowadays, including bongs, dab rigs, and pipes. You need to make a decision on which tool you’re going to use and how to utilize it, as well as how to look after it correctly. There’s usually many resources online that can help you with things like this, such as this article on cleaning your pipe by fat budda glass. It’s highly recommended that you do this before looking into where you can get your cannabis from. There are already many services offering legal cannabis to patients, for example over in Canada they have many different delivery services such as canadawideweed and others that will complete same-day deliveries for online medical marijuana orders. Such sites are also educational points for those that wish to learn more on marijuana use, benefits, and more. Click on the image for more thoughtful info.