Dell on Reefer Madness

My grand-daughter visits me at the camp for days at a time when she's off work and the weather's fine. For a while she thought I didn't know what she and her friends were up to taking walks in the bush, until I made a point of telling her I hadn't smelled so many skunks around camp since someone threw two dozen eggs in the bushes some years ago.

We had a rousing discussion around the fire that night along with a half dozen of her friends.  Three of them had seen the 1936 black and white propaganda piece Reefer Madness. Corey and his brother Kevin had me laughing until the tears ran down my face as they acted out bits and pieces from the film. The kids said they've made broadway and musical versions of it. Maybe I can get my grand-daughter to see if it's available. She's my IT wizard. Got me all fixed up at camp and the apartment in town. When I asked her about the expense, she said she had a little gardening project that just sort of took off and the total outfit was paid for from the proceeds. I didn't think it fitting to ask just where her little gardening project was located. Knowing her it will be somewhere past my property line.

My grand-daughter and her friends had no idea about Pierre Berton. Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush they knew from school assignments, but they had no idea he was a toker. They went inside, got on youtube and watched him give instructions on how to roll a joint: the one from The Rick Mercer Report six years ago. He was 84 (twenty years older than me) and supported marijuana law reform based on his 40 years of recreational use.

Having read history and understood prohibition, these kids shake their heads at the duplicity and propaganda the 'establishment' engage in with almost no accountability. Our young people are suffering a level of misery inflicted on their generation by the baby boomer and me generation (me, too) who were having such a good time getting divorced, buying and selling houses, cars, cottages and all sorts of toys, the job of social responsibility to neighbour was entrusted into the care of government. In Canada that usually means no one is held accountable in a court of law while acting as a public servant.

A decade ago most young adult Canadians could still dream  of ascending to the baby boomer wealth of their parents: jobs for all, a house, car, university and all the trimmings; that hope is no more. My grandchildren work hard but they will likely never have a home of their own or a new vehicle in their lifetime. It's not that it has to be that way. It's the way it will stay because the ones at the top don't want to redistribute the wealth. Hells bells, there's still a fortune to be made..why would they willingly reform?

Add to that the manic speed people call normal life nowadays, and it's little damn wonder they're mellowing out with Mary Jane. Breaks my heart to see one of them turn a drunk, or get into cocaine or heroine; reefer madness? What a crock of shit. I may be old but I'm not stupid and neither are these young people. Something's got to give and I think I might know what it would take. But that's a story for another day.

I'll close this post wishing everyone sunny days, just enough rain and no hermaphrodites. Excuse me while I spark one up...I'll post after I get back from the clinic tomorrow morning. Damn vampires.