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Quick Hits (page 5)

Shaver Lake Raid Nets 7,000 Plants

By: Louis Galvan (The Fresno Bee)

A two-month investigation led to the seizure Tuesday of 7,000 marijuana plants growing east of Shaver Lake, Fresno County sheriff's officers reported.

The value of the plants, ranging from 3 feet to 8 feet tall and described as of good quality, was estimated at between $10 million and $15 million.

"This is the tail end of the harvest season and in about two weeks this garden would've been gone," said sheriff's Sgt. Rick Pursell, a supervisor with the department's Narcotics Enforcement Team.

The plants were hauled to the Valley floor. A few were kept for evidence and the rest were burned.

Pursell said the plants were found over a wide area on the side of a mountain near Big Creek. The steep, rugged terrain on U.S. Forest Service property is about seven miles east of Shaver Lake.

A team of 11 deputies, six Forest Service rangers and one Fresno County probation officer arrived at the location about 1 a.m. and set up surveillance.

About 3:30 a.m., a man drove into the area. He was arrested later when he attempted to drive away. He was identified as Jose Torres, 27, of Azusa and was booked on suspicion of cultivation of marijuana for sale.

Another man ran away when the team entered the gardens at daybreak, Pursell said.

Pursell said the investigation started about two months ago when the department received a tip about marijuana-growing activity in the area.

Tuesday's raid brings the total number of plants seized this year in the county to about 48,000, said Pursell, including about 12,000 plants found in the foothills near Coalinga.

In addition to evidence that a number of people lived at Tuesday's site for months, Pursell said a firearm was also found.

"People involved in these operations are usually armed and they will protect their investments," he said.

Pursell issued a reminder to hikers and hunters to pay attention to surroundings and to stay away from places where they might notice any suspicious activity.

Growin' Our Own (page 5)

Busted Nuts (part one)

By: General Lee Doofy

(The 'Nuts' characters are a fictional creation by Rodger Beasly. No living intelligent individuals are represented in this writing)

0013 hrs Communique

A good morning or good afternoon to you, or a good whatever time it is when you decide to peruse, read, scan or delete this.

It has been a couple of months since I have reported anything from here on the front lines of the drug war.

I would like to be able to report that the war has been in a state of suspension. Unfortunately that is not the situation. The war grinds on and the casualty count increases.

The daily news headlines appear to reflect a world that is out of control. A world that is ruled by strength and power, as it has always been. A world based on survival of the fittest, a kill or be killed scenario at worst, a control or be controlled scenario at best. In today's world, as well as in yesterday's world, differences of opinion are rarely tolerated. It does not appear to matter what the differences of opinion are concerning. It is, to put it quite simply. "Hooray for me and my way and fuck you and yours."

It would be easy to hide from the reality of our times, as many have chosen to do. Today is reminiscent, to me, of the late sixties and early seventies. That was a time when many who had achieved a comfortable life style, who did not have friends or relatives smoking dope and who were not involved in the Vietnam war wanted to ignore the plight of their fellow Americans. The best way those individuals could find to accomplish their goal of apathy was to trust their government to make all things in life better.

Our government has done that, hasn't it? Today we are all safer, breathing cleaner air, drinking cleaner water, and making more money, aren't we? Well, some of us are. We buy bottled water, we go to the mountains and inhale deeply, and we drive our SUV's while smiling at all of those nice people in uniform that exist for the sole purpose of serving and protecting us. Yes, some of us are doing that. How we are doing it, however, seems to be, in some cases, in spite of our government not because of it.

What put me in such a negative frame of mind? Perhaps some of you remember a story that was printed in an earlier issue of Budlife. The story was entitled "Loose Nuts". Blade, one of the individuals in that story, after more than thirty years remains a friend of mine.

I was relaxing in my billet behind the headquarters building when I heard a light knock on my door followed by "General Lee, are you in there?" I immediately recognized the voice as belonging to Blade.

I laid my bookmark over page 294 in my hard cover copy of POWERS of MIND, where Adam Smith is quoting John Cunningham Lilly.

Mr. Lilly, a noted senior astronaut of inner space, had made the comment "In the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true or becomes true, within limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind, there are no limits."

I placed the book over the current issue of The New Yorker and responded "Come on in Blade." A quick look into Blade's eyes told me that all was not well. "How is that young, pretty, new wife of yours doing?"

"She is prettier than ever and doing all right. General, I got into a bit of a jam the other night."

"What happened?"

"I got busted."

"Busted! For What?"

"It started out as what I thought was a routine traffic stop, but it soon escalated to obstructing a police officer and resisting arrest."

As my mind was wrapping around the information Blade was giving me, I could not help but think back on his past.

"Blade do you remember that time twenty five years ago when we were doing the purple blotter acid and walking through the mall?"

"Yeah, that was when I came to the duck theory. The duck was sitting in that little crate sized, blue glass encased wooden box, waiting for someone to put a nickel in the coin slot. I put a nickel in. When the nickel hit the bottom of the slot it made a little plinking sound. The duck, upon hearing the plink of the coin, waddled over to a toy four key piano and tapped its beak on the keys, thereby playing somewhat of a short tune. After the duck's beak hit the piano keys a small morsel of corn fell out of an adjacent tube and it got to eat. It was a play for its supper deal."

"Yes that's right."

"What has that got to do with the bust that I am about to relate to you?"

"Blade, this may come as a bit of a shock to you but, I am not at all sure that you ever came down from that acid trip. You looked at that duck and said you would never punch a time clock again. Your analysis of the situation has led you to, at the least, make a life defining decision. You have never, since that time, worked for anyone but yourself."

"I do not understand what you are saying General. Is it wrong to try and be your own person? I did learn that, in the world of today, it is impossible not to serve up some type of a tune of shit to someone. I have simply attempted to pick the tune and the person. Other wise I may as well have been the duck in the box, or one of those sheople people that lead lives orchestrated to them by an out of control system. I see them everyday in their god damn retro Volkswagens, the ones with little plastic flowers mounted on the dash. They sit there smug and full of themselves, harboring delusions of having beaten the system, without enough common sense to realize that the only thing they are jerking off is themselves.

They sit there, with their god damn gray haired pony tails, if they have enough fucking hair left on their balding heads for a pony tail, as true legends in their own minds. The entire sight is enough to make me vomit. The only contribution some of those sheople ever made was to buy drugs from guys like you and me. What did we drive back then General? I will refresh your memory of what we drove. We drove bland looking Fords and Chevrolets, with bumper stickers that read support your local police and trunks filled with kilos of Mexican pot that had been smuggled across the border into Texas or Columbian pot smuggled by water or air into Florida. We had red neck haircuts and usually rode alone. We moved a hell of a lot of drugs into the mid-west that way.

Face it general, Our friend Crazy had one of those Volkswagen Beetles back then. The goddamn heater didn't work for shit, a slight head wind slowed the damn thing down, and it wouldn't climb a hill with four people in it, that was if you could find four people small enough to fit in it. No thanks to a retro Volkswagen, General. I wouldn't be caught dead in one. I would sooner have a retro Corvair."

"Yeah, that represents you and your life Blade - UNSAFE AT ANY SPEED. Take it easy and try to contain your tendency to go off on tangents and tirades. Our army of freedom fighting drug warriors needs all the help it can get. That includes balding, gray haired guys in Volkswagens and their female counterparts, the liberal feminazi.

Remember that it is me you are talking to and do not try and bullshit me about this latest bust of yours. I know you Blade, and the fact is, you do not take well to any kind of authority. If I remember correctly, and I believe that I do, you have, over the past twenty five years been charged in every type of court there is. I will jog your memory for you: juvenile court, county court, city court, state court over that little matter of concern to ATF, and federal court regarding some stolen merchandise, not to mention a couple of lawsuits in civil court and divorce court."

"Okay General, you made your point. Do you want to hear about what happened or not?"

"Were drugs involved?"

"Well, sort of."

"What do you mean, sort of? Were they or weren't they?"

"Let me tell you about it, then you can decide if drugs were the problem or not."

"Okay Blade, Go for it."

"Last Friday night I was wrenching on my 1969 Harley XLH over at my shop on the other side of town. It was getting late and I hadn't had any dinner, so when my wife got off work at nine thirty, she picked up a pizza and brought it over to share with me. We ate the pizza and drank a couple of diet cokes. I could tell she was in the kind of mood that would be receptive to some sexual advances. You know what I mean, hot to trot and ready to party. She decided to head for home at about eleven. I told her that I would meet her there.

I draped a blanket over the 69 and rolled my 1999 softtail out the shop door into the warm night air and pulled the door down. I took a quick look at my watch; it was eleven fifteen. I mentally noted the time, went to my bottom tool box drawer, pulled out my small brown pill vial, tapped one out and took it."

"Brown pill vial and pills!? I knew damn well drugs were involved. What kind of pills and how many did you take?"

"You know, the blue pills and I only took one at that time."

"No I don't know. What blue pills? You had better enlighten me."

"General have you been living under a fuckin' rock, or what? Viagra, the blue pill that is currently being hawked on half of the television channels and billboards in the nation."

"Damn Blade. Are you using Viagra to keep up with that young wife of yours?"

"It's not quite like that. I don't necessarily need it to keep up with her or to keep it up. I have honed the use of Viagra down to not only a science but an art form as well."

"Blade, how in the hell do you hone the use of Viagra down to a science or an art form? It would appear to me that, in its own way, it is a fairly benign drug. Either you are using it or you are not."

"Bear with me here, General, and I will attempt to educate you on the subtle nuances of the drug and the use of it. Do you remember that short athleticly built gal that I was banging a year or so ago?"

"Are you referring to the curly haired redhead, the one that you put on the ironhead sportster ?"

"Yeah that is the one."

"Christ Blade, she threw a leg over that twenty seven year old Harley and followed you from one end of the country to the other and back again. You taught her plenty about motorcycles."

"That's right General and she paid me off in pussy. As near as I can figure, she was going through some kind of midlife crisis. She wanted to bang all of the time, banging was more important to her than motorcycles or drugs. We had some real differences of opinions when I attempted to introduce her to drugs and the street life. She was one of those that say 'I tried drugs twenty years ago and they didn't do a thing for me'. I have always personally believed that what the people that say that are really saying is 'I puffed but didn't inhale for fear of really getting off which, due to as tight as I have my asshole puckered over the entire situation, frightens the hell out of me'. It leads me to that part of the duck theory that compels me to wonder if the box were to be opened, would the duck, after having lived there during the formative time of its life, leave or would it stay and continue to tap and quack out the tune?

Anyhow, at the same time I was banging the redhead, that other woman, the one you usually refer to as the leader of the local chauvinistic liberal feminazi division, was still living with me. When I was no longer coming home and banging her on a regular basis, she assumed I was having male sexual problems and insisted that I go to the doctor and get a prescription for Viagra. Her being a feminazi, along with her insistence, gave me the impression that she was trying to belittle me and exert her brand of feminine superiority over me. Little did she actually know of the extent of my male problems. Nonetheless, I went to the doctor, got a prescription, picked it up, carried it home, took one, banged her once then threw the rest of the 'scrip up on the closet shelf. I told her that the Viagra made me so sick to my stomach that it wasn't possible for me to take it."

"Blade, what can any of this possibly have to have to do with you getting busted? It is beginning to sound more like you are leading up to telling me that you got busted for some kind of sexual offense rather than drugs. Besides you dumped the feminazi and the biker chic a couple of months before you met that pretty young gal you married last month. Do me a favor and try to get back on track. Had you or had you not been doing any drugs, like meth or pot?"

"I am trying to tell you what happened. You, who professes to know so damn much about me, need to be patient. I will get it all laid out there if you just give me some time. Do you want to kick back for a bit and smoke this joint I have?"

"Sounds like a good idea to me."

To be continued...

Pipeline (page 5)

Government's War on Drugs Fails

By: John Stossel

The government says a third of Americans have at some point - and about 5 percent use them regularly.

The number may be higher, because how many people honestly answer the question, "Have you used an illicit drug in the past month?"

What should America do about this? So far, our approach has been to go to war - a war that police departments fight every day. A war that U.S. politicians tackle in a different way than their European counterparts. And a war that is not going away.

Asa Hutchinson, President Bush's choice to run the Drug Enforcement Administration, travels the world telling Americans that we're winning the drug war. "Overall drug use in the United States has been reduced by 50 percent over the last 20 years," he says.

But it's questionable whether the fall is attributable to the government's policies, or whether it was just people getting smarter after the binges of the 1970s. In the last 10 years drug use hasn't dropped - despite federal spending on the drug war rising 50 percent. And despite all the seizures, drugs are still as available as they ever were.

Hutchinson agrees that there are problems with the government's efforts. "We have flat-lined. I believe we lost our focus to a certain extent," he says. "I don't believe that we had the same type of energy devoted to it as we have in certain times in the past."

Detroit Police Chief Jerry Oliver is not convinced that expending more energy - and making more drug arrests - will help America win the crusade. "We will never arrest our way out of this problem," he says. "All you have to do is go to almost any corner in any city. It will tell you that.

"Clearly, we're losing the war on drugs in this country [and] it's insanity to keep doing the same thing over and over again."

Seduced by Money

We know the terrible things drugs can do. We've seen the despair, the sunken face of the junkie. No wonder those in government say that we have to fight drugs. And polls show most Americans agree. Drug use should be illegal. Or as former "drug czar" Bill Bennett put it: "It's a matter of right and wrong."

But when "right and wrong" conflict with supply and demand, nasty things happen. The government declaring drugs illegal doesn't mean people can't get them, it just means they get them on the black market, where they pay much more for them.

"The only reason that coke is worth that much money is that it's illegal," argues Father Joseph Kane, a priest in a drug-ravaged Bronx neighborhood in New York City. "Pure cocaine is three times the cost of gold. Now if that's the case, how are you gonna stop people from selling cocaine?"

Kane has come to believe that while drug abuse is bad, drug prohibition is worse - because the black market does horrible things to his community. "There's so much money in it, it's staggering," he says.

Orange County, Calif., Superior Court Judge James Gray agrees with Kane. He spent years locking drug dealers up, but concluded it's pointless, because drug prohibition makes the drugs so absurdly valuable. "We are recruiting children in the Bronx, in the barrios, and all over the nation, because of drug money," he says.

Besides luring kids into the underworld, drug money is also corrupting law enforcement officers, he argues.

Cops are seduced by drug money. They have been for years. "With all the money, with all the cash, it's easy for [dealers] to purchase police officers, to purchase prosecutors, to purchase judges," says Oliver, the Detroit police chief.

The worst unintended consequence of the drug war is drug crime. Films like Reefer Madness told us that people take drugs and just go crazy. But, in reality people rarely go crazy or become violent because they're high.

The violence happens because dealers arm themselves and have shootouts over turf. Most of the drug-related violence comes from the fact that it's illegal, argues Kane. Violence also happens because addicts steal to pay the high prices for drugs.

An Alternative to Prohibition

There's no question that drugs often wreck lives. But the drug war wrecks lives too, creates crime and costs billions of dollars.

Is there an alternative? Much of Europe now says there is.

In Amsterdam, using marijuana is legal. Holland now has hundreds of "coffee shops" where marijuana is officially tolerated. Clients pick up small amounts of marijuana the same way they would pick up a bottle of wine at the store.

The police regulate marijuana sales - shops may sell no more than about five joints worth per person, they're not allowed to sell to minors, and no hard drugs are allowed.

What has been the result of legalizing marijuana? Is everyone getting stoned? No. In America today 38 percent of adolescents have smoked pot - in Holland, it's only 20 percent.

What Amsterdam police did was take the glamour out of drug use, explains Judge Gray. The Dutch minister of health has said, "We've succeeded in making pot boring."

The DEA has said legalizing cannabis and hash in the Netherlands was a failure - an unmitigated disaster. Not so, say people in Amsterdam. And Rotterdam Police Superintendent Jur Verbeek says selling the drug in coffee shops may deter young, curious people who will try marijuana one way or another, from further experimentation with harder drugs.

"When there are no coffee shops, they will go to the illegal houses, where the dealer says, 'OK, you want to have marijuana. Good. But we have cocaine as well. And we have heroin for you,'" Verbeek argues.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Still, in America, there's little interest in legalizing any drug. President Bush says "drug use threatens everything." And officials talk about fighting a stronger war. Some say it shouldn't be even talked about.

In 1991, Joycelyn Elders, who would become President Clinton's surgeon general, dared to suggest legalization might reduce crime. Critics almost immediately called for her resignation. "How can you ever fix anything if you can't even talk about it?" Elders says.

What the Dutch are doing makes sense to Gray. "They're addressing it as managers," he says. "We address it as moralizers. We address it as a character issue, and if you fail that test, we put you in prison."

Experiments with being more permissive of drugs have spread beyond the Netherlands. Today, police in most of Europe ignore marijuana use. Spain, Italy and Luxembourg have decriminalized most drug use.

That's not to say that all the experiments succeed everywhere. Switzerland once tried what became known as Needle Park, a place where anyone could use any drug. It attracted crime because it became a magnet for junkies from all over Europe.

Critics say the Netherlands has become an island of drug use. But while illegal selling still happens, the use of drugs in the Netherlands and all Europe is still far lower than in the United States, and European countries are proposing even more liberalization.

American politicians have shown little interest in that.

"We in America should have a different approach," explains Hutchinson. "You do not win in these efforts by giving in."

Hopeless Fight?

Still, how many wars can America fight? Now that we're at war against terrorism, can we also afford to fight a drug war against millions of our own people? Is it wise to fight on two fronts?

The last time America engaged in a war of this length was Vietnam, and then, too, government put a positive spin on success of the war.

But today more people have doubts. Judge Gray questions the government's ability to protect us from ourselves. "It makes as much sense to me to put actor Robert Downey Jr. in jail for his drug abuse as it would have Betty Ford in jail for her alcohol abuse. It's really no different."

Gray advocates holding people accountable for what they do - not for what they put into their bodies.

Why not sell drugs like we do alcohol, he says, though maybe with more restrictions. "Let's make it available to adults. Brown packaging, no glamour, take the illegal money out of it and then furnish it, holding people accountable for what they do," he suggests. "These drugs are too dangerous not to control."

Legal drugs - that's a frightening thought. Maybe more people would try them.

Gray says even if they did, that would do less harm than the war we've been fighting for the past 30 years.

"What we're doing now has failed. In fact it's hopeless," he argues. "This is a failed system that we simply must change."

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