VLVL2 CAMP (373)

[pynchonoid]

Pynchon brings the war on marijuana production, begun
by Pres. Richard "Paraquat" Nixon (who was too drunk
to  speak on the phone with the British PM, according
to Kissinger, see
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3754199.stm ),
home in a way that supports the larger discussion of
neofascist America in 1984 that animates Vineland.

[...] The whole scheme is reminiscent of the chemical
warfare that was waged against marijuana twenty years
ago.  In the late 1970s, excess supplies of a military
defoliant called paraquat, left over from the Vietnam
War, were given to Mexico by the U.S.  Government. 
Through a program subsidized by the United States,
paraquat was widely sprayed from airplanes onto
marijuana fields south of the border.  But Mexican pot
growers soon learned that harvesting their crop
immediately after a spraying prevented its
destruction.  The program was discontinued in 1978
when the U.S.  Public Health Service disclosed that
smoking marijuana laced with paraquat could cause
irreversible lung damage.  An eradication program
designed to wipe out marijuana growing instead shifted
much of it to fields within the United States - as
smokers avoided Mexican pot - thereby turning
marijuana into one of America's largest cash crop~. 
The long-term consequences of spraying the new
mycoherbicides are bound to be equally
unpredictable.[...]
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v99.n180.a05.html

"Military ideology, tactics, weapons, and technologies
increasingly came to dominate U.S. domestic and
international drug enforcement policies starting
around 1984, when President Reagan declared that drugs
posed a direct threat to U.S. national security. With
their 'low-intensity conflict' doctrines, military
hardware, and high-tech surveillance and
communications equipment, the drug wars of the 1980s
and 1990s bore a greater resemblance to military
actions than to the U.S. ideal of a civilian police
authority that is at least theoreticaqlly bound by the
rules of due process.  In fact the militarization of
drug enforcement largely dispensed with the
long-standing U.S. distinction between the rules of
war and the rule of law. [...] 
p.249
_Drug Wars The Political Economy of Narcotics_
by Curtis Marez
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/M/marez_drug.html

....this just in:

"It is high time to stop talking about ending
marijuana prohibition, it is time to do something
about it!"
http://www.millionmarijuanamarch.com/mission.htm


	
		
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