The Politics of Pot
There's no question that when I published the first Tony Lowell Mystery back in 1994, the idea of a private eye who preferred weed to Winstons and Kung Fu to Kalashnikovs was perhaps more than your average hard boiled mystery reader was ready for (the cozies were a different market, and Tony Lowell hardly fit into the Miss Marple role either). I've since learned, at least during that era of the rise of the Religious Right and NRA nationists, that mystery fiction was a mostly conservative genre. At least back then. Which was odd, given that most readers then, as now, were women. Odd, that is, until you see the rapid rise and huge success of the hard boiled female detectives and their authors, like Patricia Cornwell and Sarah Paretsky. My Tony Lowell had a female counterpart, of course: a right wing female police detective. Maybe I should have let her run with the series. But no matter. What's done is done, and I am banking today that a nonconformist P.I. with a Sixties outlook, who refuses to carry a gun, is ready at last to come into his own.
For one thing, I live in a state that legalized medical marijuana, and is now trying to figure out how to reconcile that with a long tradition of "lock 'em up" politics that has demonized that historic medical herb as being a Class A "drug." Even the AMA has come out admitting that marijuana is a. non-addictive, and b. beneficial to many. As for the DEA, their unsupportable and unconstitutional position has always been a reverse equation: crack heads also smoked pot, therefore pot smokers are also crack heads. This charge is of course, in fact, patently false.
The historic truth about smoking pot is very simple. While it has been in common use since Confucius's time (I was greatly amused to see that a casket if still really good cannabis was recently uncovered in a venerated Chinese philosopher's tomb) and may have been the secret ingredient in the rituals of all early religions, not to mention medical procedures, pot was demonized in Nixon's time strictly for political reasons. Smoking pot had become a symbolic act of defiance by young people against their corrupt leaders and government. As a result, when Nixon went to China and made his private deal with Mao Tse Tung, part of the deal was that China, too, would outlaw weed from then on thus avoiding similar protests, as the theory went (although China has not been to forceful about this policy, as I learned while living and working there for three years per my new book to A Billion to One).
Anyway, getting back to Tony Lowell, he, like his author, were Sixties rebels (Lowell went to 'Nam, where everyone smoked weed in order to remain sane), whereas those ideologues who pursued the demonization of that medicinal and spiritually uplifting herb were all draft dodgers, trust fund babies, and members of the Bush Skull and Bones caball who have since plunged moral hypocrisy to never-dreamed-of depths (other than by Dante and George Orwell). So the whole issue since that time has been an effort by right wing Republicans, Neocons, Racists, gun nuts, Neo-Nazis and Religious Conservatives (who have no problem with deadly and really addicting drugs like nicotine and alcohol, from which they heavily profit) to outlaw not just pot, but the very thinking, belief systems, cultural values and open mindedness associated with that totally natural herbal remedy and supplement.
I'm betting on change. I think people are going to wake up to the fact that there are kids doing hard time for smoking a joint while massively corrupt felons take government funding and buy themselves corporate jets and fly off to their million dollar island hideaways to update their off-shore bank accounts, all on the pubic dole while demanding tax cuts for their ill gotten gains. You know that, apart from poor Bernie Madoff, most of them will never spend ten minutes in jail. This is fodder for good detective fiction to come (and isn't good fiction the source of real truth, in the end?). We'll talk about the environment another time. A lot of crimes happen in that arena too, most of them crimes against nature. Tony Lowell will be there, too, fighting the good fight, as always. Stay tuned!
For one thing, I live in a state that legalized medical marijuana, and is now trying to figure out how to reconcile that with a long tradition of "lock 'em up" politics that has demonized that historic medical herb as being a Class A "drug." Even the AMA has come out admitting that marijuana is a. non-addictive, and b. beneficial to many. As for the DEA, their unsupportable and unconstitutional position has always been a reverse equation: crack heads also smoked pot, therefore pot smokers are also crack heads. This charge is of course, in fact, patently false.
The historic truth about smoking pot is very simple. While it has been in common use since Confucius's time (I was greatly amused to see that a casket if still really good cannabis was recently uncovered in a venerated Chinese philosopher's tomb) and may have been the secret ingredient in the rituals of all early religions, not to mention medical procedures, pot was demonized in Nixon's time strictly for political reasons. Smoking pot had become a symbolic act of defiance by young people against their corrupt leaders and government. As a result, when Nixon went to China and made his private deal with Mao Tse Tung, part of the deal was that China, too, would outlaw weed from then on thus avoiding similar protests, as the theory went (although China has not been to forceful about this policy, as I learned while living and working there for three years per my new book to A Billion to One).
Anyway, getting back to Tony Lowell, he, like his author, were Sixties rebels (Lowell went to 'Nam, where everyone smoked weed in order to remain sane), whereas those ideologues who pursued the demonization of that medicinal and spiritually uplifting herb were all draft dodgers, trust fund babies, and members of the Bush Skull and Bones caball who have since plunged moral hypocrisy to never-dreamed-of depths (other than by Dante and George Orwell). So the whole issue since that time has been an effort by right wing Republicans, Neocons, Racists, gun nuts, Neo-Nazis and Religious Conservatives (who have no problem with deadly and really addicting drugs like nicotine and alcohol, from which they heavily profit) to outlaw not just pot, but the very thinking, belief systems, cultural values and open mindedness associated with that totally natural herbal remedy and supplement.
I'm betting on change. I think people are going to wake up to the fact that there are kids doing hard time for smoking a joint while massively corrupt felons take government funding and buy themselves corporate jets and fly off to their million dollar island hideaways to update their off-shore bank accounts, all on the pubic dole while demanding tax cuts for their ill gotten gains. You know that, apart from poor Bernie Madoff, most of them will never spend ten minutes in jail. This is fodder for good detective fiction to come (and isn't good fiction the source of real truth, in the end?). We'll talk about the environment another time. A lot of crimes happen in that arena too, most of them crimes against nature. Tony Lowell will be there, too, fighting the good fight, as always. Stay tuned!
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