http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0810112000

Bitchiness as the Highest and Final Stage of Whoredom -- the hemp oil attack qualifies for Erofeev's writerly slap.

I also recommend Moscow 2042 by Vladimir Voinovich, a satire with a memorable scene where the exiled writer returns to a Communist Moscow and goes to a brothel where he waits for an hour for service, only to be handed a towel and told that under Communism, all brothels are now self-service.

Another good one is Tales of Kolyma by Varlam Shalamov, who squeezed as much irony and humanity as any writer could squeeze out of a Stalist labor camp.

These kinds of Soviet-era books are good to read because that system was even worse than the one we're fighting now, and it's good to learn the kinds of lessons that sharp and humane and insightful writers can teach about living inside such prolonged self-perpetuating social and political insanity.

First they ignore you, then they attck you,

then you win!

This gives me a chance to remention a good article on the events that led to the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 where they interviewed very few people. The whole process before Congress took only two hours. One was the AMA representative that said he knew of nothing harmful about MJ. One was the rope people that said they could get hem from Asia. The following paragraph talks about the paint people and the bird seed people. You need to read this article and see that the hearings that led to the criminalization of MJ were a farce. Read about the lie that started it all: http://www.pipes.org/Articles/history.html

From the article (actually a text of a speech):

Could a patient just as easily take a seeded bag and make their own oil? Of course!

Now, for Industrial Hemp - there are certain rules you must follow to be allowed to produce stock seed, but this has nothing to do with oil.

And one more thing - when you see a news item, and you see statements you know to be untrue you should comment to that author! Most sites (especially cannabis related) don't really write their own articles - and when they copy/paste from another site they do so without questioning the content. So instead of a SINGLE news site running a really biased story - you see that same article on 30 or 40 sites unchanged.

Constantly stories appear which refer to a scientific paper pointing out useless facts and trying to make them sound significant. (Apparently someone who smokes for 10 years is 'quicker' than someone who smokes for 26 years. They fail to mention the fact (which is indeed in the study) that AGE is the main factor with those results. DUH - Someone who has smoked for 26 year is most likely at least 16 years older than that other subject.)

Do you have to be stupid in order to get a job as a reporter? In business when you don't do any research and make obvious blunders you quickly go broke. I guess the media has different criteria for success, good research skills don't seem to apply. "Oooh, MARIJUANA PARTY - must be bad, let's get 'em!"

Whoops, I just re-read it - it's the Health Canada people that are screwed up!

In 10 years we all need to get together at a coffeeshop in San Fransisco and laugh our asses off for a day or two, remembering the antics of all the morons during Prohibition......

But it's also about religion, Western history, Marxist theory and human emotion and dignity. He's an educated drunk and lectures us about Goethe and Kant and Turgenev on the way.

One of the memorable lines from the play is the title of a paper written by the drunk (in a hallucination involving Louis Aragon and Simone de Beauvoir) that he sends to the Paris Review titled

Bitchiness as the Highest and Final Stage of Whoredom

which is a play on the Marxist idea that Communism was the highest and final stage of socialism.

This hemp seed ban is a perfect example of the kind of irrational bureaucratic bitchiness that is deeply embedded into the system that the drunk is lacerating in his drunken rants on the train.

And the whoredom involved is ordinary bureaucratic whoredom, as in selling yourself for money, selling your value system for your own bureaucratic self-propagation.

I highly recommend the novel, in English the title is Moscow to the End of the Line.