Bright and windy this early-evening Wednesday on California’s north coast — a simply-gorgeous day, and even with a chilled and sharp breeze, the Ma-‘e’l Dunes in Manila was still a good hike area earlier this afternoon for me and the dogs.. We trekked to the ocean with shifting sand in our faces (wore me out, Cowboy and Kuru wallowed in it).

And today another episode in the long-running, trumped-up, fucked-up hard-case sell of a truly-terrible lie (enjoy the hyphens):

Marijuana in my lifetime/generation has always been an outlaw product. Only in the last decade or so, has the incredible medical properties of cannabis been exploited and showcased for regular folk, and some of the dark, ugly blot on a neat-weed been lifted a bit with the general population okaying its use in multiple polls.
The sway of the country is a rolled-joint exercise.

Yet today a wretched throw-back Jeff Sessions moment. AG Willaim Barr has showed his ass this week in hearings on the Hill, a first-class turd. He continued today before the Senate Appropriations subcommittee, responding to a question of federal-vs-state legal view of marijuana (Newsweek):

“Personally, I would still favor one uniform federal rule against marijuana,” Barr said during the hearing.
“But if there is not sufficient consensus to obtain that then I think the way to go is to permit a more federal approach so states can, you know, make their own decisions within the framework of the federal law. So we’re not just ignoring the enforcement of federal law.”

Although Barr might fall short of a Sessions moment — he’d rather have pot be illegal everywhere, but in the current situation, the feds need to back-off and let each state decide the issue — not much mental growth, but a sight better than ‘“…good people don’t smoke marijuana.”‘
Barr’s the bong…

And another toke on the smoked-up history of ‘cannabis.’ Pot in the news, especially involving racist assholes, reminded me of the real reality of marijuana — last month I got my 215 card, or what’s now called a ‘Verification Card‘ via NorthCoast Medical in Eureka, and also received an uplifting mini-lecture on the medical properties/benefits of marijuana by Dr. Diane Dickinson.
She’s a full-supporter of the way-varied use of marijuana in health and healing: ‘What I offer is an allopathic (traditional medical school training) perspective with a focus on preventative care. The difference I offer is an open mind towards all other therapeutic modalities.’

And she also offers a bit of history to the discussion, mainly the huge push to tarnish and stigmatize the weed, especially in the form of Harry J. Anslinger, first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, who used racism as a weapon against marijuana.
In a most-interesting interview this past February at KHSU, Dr. Dickinson talked at length about the growing field of research-results for medical marijuana, and also touched upon the blacklisting — this note:

“But the way they attacked it was a lot of racism.
And Harry Anslinger really promoted that it was used primarily by jazz musicians in Harlem, and Mexican farm workers.
And that’s really when the word, marijuana, started to be used, which is considered by many to be a racist term.
It was called cannabis all through the 1800s…and if you look at Pharmacopoeia, it is cannabis, not marijuana.”

And cannabis it be…

(Illustration: ‘Cannabis,’ by Michael Creese, found here).