There's No Hope Here

   

              You can look in any direction in this town, from interstate off-ramps to downtown street markers, and see clearly it prides itself on being the home of President Williams Jefferson Clinton.  The National Park Service has marked or roped off everything from his birthplace home, his boyhood home and his elementary school.  I can’t tell you how many times in how many local stores I’ve been asked, “So where’s Clinton’s birth home?”  Apparently I look as though I belong, but I will not take offense because most likely I do. The revenue stream must be much stronger now.  What we are not interested in here, among such things as the Mena cocaine deliveries or the odd death of Vince Foster, is that he was the first president to publicly admit to smoking marijuana.  Of all the things to be said about a President, the most this side of the country could come up with was, “I didn’t vote for that dope from Hope.”  But now, two decades later and Hope is glad to call Bill a native. 

                Within those twenty years there is a movement that has been growing and gaining ground, and yes this pun was so much intended.  This is the movement to legalize marijuana.  I feel, like many others, that we as a nation are on the cusp of one of the largest social debates since segregation or at least prohibition.  I’m sure Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream was a lot bigger than mine but we all have our courses.  A record number of states, twenty if I’m not mistaken, have made medical marijuana legal and two states have totally legalized recreational use as well.  Municipalities such as Portland have granted their citizens the right to possess marijuana without the fear of prosecution.  This isn’t the case here in Hope.
                From inside the city you can see that the median populous is around thirty.  This is the Pepsi Generation all grown up.  We were the generation that grew up playing Sega stoned.  Yet here is a town still devoid of alcohol, in a state with some of the harshest marijuana penalties.  Possession of an ounce is a felony charge with up to six years in jail.  A pack of papers without the proper amount of tobacco to fill those papers is a crime within itself.  I know this from personal experience.  I am still paying the state of Arkansas for an “instruments of crime” charge, but in every tobacco shop and convenient store there is always a multitude of ways to help one ingest marijuana.  These stores’ best-sellers and fastest moving inventory are the cigars meant “to split between friends”.  IT is here.  Why not accept it as a commodity?  Why are we still having these old world arguments?
                In a recent conversation with a City of Hope police officer that shall remain nameless, I asked what his thoughts were on the recent legalization of marijuana in other states.  This is not verbatim mind you but his answer was something along the lines of a nervous giggle and saying something like ‘yeah it’s gonna happen’.  I asked him what he thought about marijuana in general and all I received was a sort of half-head-nod, the sign of an unsure person.  After recognizing that this man did not have any beliefs of his own, I decided to shoot for the heart and hit bull’s eye.  I stopped him from leaving for the next one, needing badly to ask just what would he do if he found someone with a small amount of marijuana on them, knowing what he knows and knowing what the feds have said, what would his reaction be, and just as I expected his only answer was to uphold state law.  See he was sworn to this.  No matter how ridiculous the law may be, by his sworn oath, he must carry it out.  This is Stanley Milgram’s experiment on authority figures in real-time.  Everyone involved is just following orders.
                This X-generation or Pepsi generation, whatever people want to call us, we know better now.  Nancy Reagan’s ‘Just Say No’ campaign didn’t work.  D.A.R.E. class might have taught us some things but it did not fool everyone.  Disinformation has been a tool of ‘theirs’ for years, but from my favorite author comes what I believe is the holy truth.  I will end this with a quote from the one and only Hunter S. Thompson during a debate he had while running for Sherriff of Pitkin County Colorado in 1970,
                “Marijuana laws are one of the reasons that there’s in gender this lack of respect that the uh, that cops complain about all over the country.  When you get a whole generation that grows up as felons and they know the law is ridiculous and they’re told all this gibberish about it that uh, it drives you crazy and makes your brain soft and your feet fall off.  Even the police know it’s a silly law.”