High in America, copyrighted 1981 by Patrick Anderson http://www.psychedelic-library.org/highinamerica.htm

Many of the people largely responsible IN OUR OWN CAMP for some of the pivotal moments (i.e. the very first White House Drug Czar Dr. Peter Bourne was ratted out by someone still being hailed as a hero by some in the movement) where drug law reform shot itself in the foot ARE STILL BREATHING.

Had it not been for some of them and their having alienated the Carter White House with their boorish antics, this website and dozens of others like it might not have been necessary. The 'parents movement' would never have been able to blindside us and bedevil us for 20+ years. The whole prison/industrial complex might never have appeared.

I could go on, but I invite all and sundry to read the online book in it's entirety. Like any such work, the author admits bias. I certainly don't admit to any prescience regarding events that I had not participated in personally, but from what I have been able to glean in my own research and later admissions made publicly by those individuals years after publishing much of the book accurately paints a none-too-pretty picture. At many points, the work is very critical of some very major players, some (thankfully) dead and some still present. It's plenty old and dated, but it gives an idea of how we, you and me, dear cannabists, have had to go through so much Hell these past two decades.

*We want to get the word out on Tommy Chong - WHAT THE HELL IS ASHCROFT DOING? (We really aren't going to make any money on this at these prices, especially with shipping and handling - this is more of a public service.) We're going to promote information that will expose the Injustice of this situation and push for his freedom at every opportunity. We're going to set up a section on our site for this purpose.*

The site shows a wildly off-color poster of Chong with the caption:

"Hey, Ashcroft! WHY IS THE ANTHRAX MAILER STILL RUNNING FREE? WHY IS KEN LAY NOT IN JAIL?"

Could you imagine trying to pass a ballot initiative today that would re-criminalize cannabis? Would never happen. The only reason that 1990 Alaska initiative passed was because it happened before the internet expanded beyond universities and government places. It was very primitive and all text too as I remember.

The biggest online service was Prodigy and they were not even connected to the internet. Prodigy had no live chat, unlike GEnie and CompuServe, who charged live chats by the minute. In the beginning, all of the online services were heavily involved in censorship. Real concerns at the time were "criminals plotting together" online. An organized movement against that Alaska initiative would have been censored. Then Prodigy tried charging 25 cents per email, quickly spelling its demise and bringinging rise to others like AOL.

It will be an interesting future, and drug Nazis will look ridiculous in short order. Truly, in the grand scheme of things, they will become irrelevant. Actually it will be fun watching them sink! Thank you for bringing us this, FoM. You are our cannabis lifeline!

E_J You know that political apathy that stoners had in the 70's and 80's has shifted and now its the other way around. Our side is so well armed now, and the prohibitionists have Johnny P Nazi, Von Ashcroft... ummm all the people earning their living from the drug war..drug dealers.. and Joyce Napkla. Oh, and whoever switches sides for the betterment of themselves, like Tommy Chong.

After all, my dad who does not smoke pot never voted. I was only 16 at that time. I don't remember schools teaching me to go out and vote.

And the Vietnam...

All I know was by the time I graduated from High school, I basically do not believe anything in the Government.

Just maybe today things be different with the Internet.. Seattle won and if we look at how many different groups they worked to get together..

We got a chance!

paz

Either rejecting politics, or canceling each other out by fragmenting into different movements on the left and right.

The Grateful Dead had something to do with it too. Jerry Garcia was deliberately apolitical, and while that may have suited him and his music and his community, it was actually bad for marijuana politics to have a huge community of apolitical pot smokers romaing America spreading their apolitical gospel.

Everyone I knew was too busy trying to score coke and find a hot disco to care about what was going on inside NORML.

There was a whole hedonistic coke-snorting apolitical mentality that started in the late seventies, and there was no movement possible then.

And Cheech and Chong was either an expression of that, or a part of the engine that stoked it, I don't know, but nobody I knew ever even heard of Kieth Stroup.

Even the people whom NORML helped stay out of jail back then didn't give a damn about Keith Stroup or the movement, they forgot about NORML the minute they left the court building with their probation.

The dude had no money but always had kind bud, so we know (wink wink) that he was the generation that discovered you could grow your own.

But he didn't really care about politics, or legalization.

Mr. Hand had to follow him home on prom night and keep him from graduating just to get him to acknowledge the Bill of Rights.

That guy was a guy who was pretty much defenseless against the system.

It would be interesting to speculate on what happened to Spicoli when the war against him intensified.

Maybe he's in federal prison for cultivation, waiting to see a live performance of Cheech and Chong, without Cheech.

Where were all the pot smokers, he wondered. Why can't we organize a protest?

We were all kind of into the Cheech and Chong mentality, which was about smoking weed, not about fighting back. Politics was uncool, man. For geeks and narcs.

It pains me to think of the look on my friends face being hit by the new reality of the eighties.

The marijuana legalization movement reached a peak in 1976 when the marijuana movement decriminalized marijuana in California. Everyone thought that legalization was a few years away. Everyone put the Eagles on the stereo and lit a joint of Colombian and kicked back.

But then disco reared its ugly head, and everywhere in disco music there was coke. Nobody had formed any political ideals around coke in the sixties, except for Easy Rider which was against thinking that the freedom to make money from it was actual freedom that could protect you from oppression.

In 1978 Up in Smoke came out and put forward the idea that we already were free, as long as the cops remained suitably dumb, and all we needed to do for the rest of our lives was continue to listen to the Eagles and get high.

Well, disco ended but the coke kept going and people stopped having a good time on it, and the cops got smarter and started learning to earn their living from specifically from controlling it.

Then the Reagan administration took the growing war on disco and coke and decided that there needed to be a war specifically on the Cheech and Chong subculture of potheads.

Which is how urine testing came along.

Why wasn't there a political uprising by the millions of marijuana users in America?

I can't say for sure, I cannot blame it on Cheech and Chong, let's just say that for some reason Up in Smoke signified the complete and utter loss of political direction from the marijuana movement.

Signified, enabled, caused, stimulated, respresented after the fact -- I don't know.

The marijuana movement had depoliticized by then to the point where it was actually uncool to care about legalization.

When Reagan attacked, the troops fighting back were pretty meager.

The way I would process that whole period from early victory to intensified war is to say that Wyatt was right, and Billy blew it.

That is...if They let him.

I can almost see the "older, newer Cheech and Chong". In this movie, poor Chong is in prison stripes. He's gray, and grizzled and wearing trifocal John Lennon glasses. He's dressed in prison stripes and shackles, shuffling along..."Hey, man...what's the hold up?", as he gazes at a mile long line of people in prison stripes and shackles being processed ahead of him. (camera pans back to mile long line behind him).

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

C. S. Lewis

compare that with:

Lawyers for Chong, 65, one half of the famous Cheech and Chong comedy duo and more recently a television actor, claim the US attorney general, John Ashcroft, chose to prosecute him for the publicity value. The glass pipes, or "bongs", that Chong has been offering for sale are the same as those that have been sold for years by thousands of "head shops" all over the US and Europe, and Chong has regularly been paying taxes on their sales.

Tommy Chong is guilty for selling pipes. Convicted and sentenced. The death sentence is'nt a severe enough penalty in this case, in the eyes of Mr. Ashcroft. If Mr. Ashcroft could, he would have Tommy Chong in Camp X-ray.

I don't know if the sky is falling, but something is here.

Mr. Ashcroft is violating a law. He has to be; if not in violation of any law, the ethics of it are atrocious.

The term 'with bias' can be applied here, which would nullify the trial. A 'with bias' as evidence, the trial is dismissed.

Mr. Tommy Chong could then sue Mr. John Ashcroft for 'defamation of character'. Mr. Ashcroft's cynical smirk isn't funny. Tommy Chong can entertain and make you laugh. In spite of all of his faults, he is funny. Mr. Ashcroft isn't funny. He doesn't make me laugh.

my meagre two cents.