More Tex, less Mex

[David Casseres]

I was gonna try to stay out of this, but Peter Giordano sez

>... What turned me off to the drug culture was a very sad segment on NPR a
>few years back - They played a tape of a Federal DEA agent being tortured
>to death by "friendly marijuanna growers" - I figured if those guys are
>willing to murder and maim just to defend my right to toke up maybe I want
>to find another form of recreation

Steady, big guy.  Generalizing from one story on the radio to "the drug 
culture" is pretty bad procedure.  Whenever something popular is illegal, 
some of the people involved will become vicious.  A few marijuana growers 
may even become almost as vicious as DEA agents, and by the way, I've 
heard more stories about *their* unbridled criminality than you will ever 
hear against pot growers in your whole life.

Anyway, the drug dealers Jules was talking about were from an entirely 
different era.  California's Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP) 
was still a mere gleam in the eyes of a few right-wing l
aw-enforcement 
sickoes and a cadre of ex-DEA agents who'd lost their cushy and 
profitable assignments in Southeast Asia.  Back in the 60's, marijuana 
growing and dealing in Northern California was a low-profit, low-volume 
(but growing) activity involving almost exclusively non-violent 
individuals, many of whom were really just financing their dirt-poor 
lives out in the boonies after leaving the Bay Area.

By the 70's, pot farming was a lot bigger, and becoming a little more 
profitable, but still almost entirely peaceable.  And under the 
Governorship of Flak-Jacket George Deukmejian, CAMP went into high gear, 
conducting a highly technological air war against peasant subsistence 
farmers, just like the Nam, really, and with a whole lot of the same 
people flying the search-and-destroy missions in the choppers and 
dropping the defoliants and destroying the fruit orchards and the 
farmhouses with mini-gun fire (Puff the Magic Dragon, hey hey!).  For a 
true oral history of this era, read _Cash Crop_ by *my* old classmate, 
Ray Raphael.  Probably out of print now, as it made a lot of people 
mighty uncomfortable.

By the 80's and 90's, CAMP had made the marijuana trade REALLY 
profitable, and the original non-violent farmers began to be replaced by 
-- or to become -- a much scarier breed of people.

If you're gonna be morally indignant about the marijuana trade in 
California, my advice is to learn a hell of a lot more than you now know 
about it, and then think a lot more carefully about which side you're 
going to favor with your indignation.



Cheers,
David