Tag: Cannabis

VIN 17- Cannabis Helps

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

There is nothing wrong with pot. Cannabis itself lacks the association of something so base as even alcohol. It has not been tied to the antisocial behaviors alcohol or tobacco smoking has. Whether this will change is irrelevant now however unlikely. Facts do not align with the required dynamics of an addictive or dangerous system such as they do with the aforementioned.

Behavior changes with Cannabis are too often positive, and recorded as such, to believe its use could become anything more than it is. Alcohol is often connected as cause or result of trauma. Tobacco has killed millions, and continues to– but so do automobiles.

To say nothing of the unfairness of restricting access to what a person might want or need, to experience.

Though the same cannot be said of those things and experiences that might harm others through them, it is no less unfair to restrict them from doing such things in public, within reason. In simplest terms: smoking tobacco in public should be no more restricted than not smoking in public.

In theory, this is only fair. In practice, it’s understandably uneven: I.e, smoking sections in restaurants do not reasonably separate smokers from non as a result of building ventilation, but can if designed to, as in the case of smoking rooms in airports.

Beyond these obviously reasonable effects, unlike Tobacco, Cannabis has little to no market value for “criminal” enterprises if not prohibited. Simply, there is no money in illegally trading a legal product. By that stage in its marketability it is too abundant. Too easy to manufacture, grow, or get hold of. A plant, literally nicknamed for its ability to grow abundantly anywhere, despite medium or climate, is an obvious loss to any unrestricted market.

Again, in simplest terms: certain items, made legal, are unprofitable to trade as illegal ones because they require prohibition to have value.

The only entities that care about such attributes are industry. Industry: the same systemic machine-arm of society that formed the paper-trade that outlawed Hemp. Cannabis, outlawed in the 30s as a result of Immigrant-fueled white-hysteria, became the poster child for anti-criminal law enforcement.

Because such entities excel at that type of contradictory hubris.

A century ago, the fad was packaged and rolled Tobacco cigarettes. This time, it’s Wacky Tobacky cigarettes. No true change has occurred in the system, just in the throughput, and thus its output. Pot’s going into the rolling machines now, not tobacco, that’s it.

The difference lies in people’s use of it. Cannabis, or Pot, is tribal. Ritual. It has an effect Human beings thrive on. That idea, spreading as it is, is powerful. Its zen qualities are reflected in the people whom use it and hope to pass on its values. To the Rastafarians, this is the “Sacred Herb.” One that brings the spirit closer with that of Jah, or God incarnate.

People, learning to think and feel for themselves. No matter the confines of their circumstance, it is they whom dictate its revolving, when and how to grease its wheels to aid in time’s passage. Of course there are elements of systems that oppose that, but only because they fear losing the power their control over it gives them.

Fact is, power exists regardless. They’ll survive: are just scared. Their fear, because of its nature, causes them to exert squeezes on their surroundings. Just as the fearful wise-man grips his armchair these creatures grip their power-bases through small, almost meaningless acts that ripple panic down to the masses. It is in drops at a time, but builds to overflow or spillage.

Like fear, anger is understandable. As are all emotions. Anger however, should never turn to wrath against those seeking goodness in earnest. Like all, they too know fear and can be unpleasantly controlled by it. The danger comes when thousands suffer and die needlessly, from ignorance of these facts as in the case of so-called “Drug Wars.”

So. No person is inherently bad for their use of a thing. Let alone something with as many proven uses as Cannabis. An ill-intended person will be ill-intended despite their day-to-day habits. This is Human Nature.

This knowledge alone is a kind of soul-vaccine, like that usually reserved for the pious or saintly. Yet that vaccine, discovered and deduced easily not only through the effects of Cannabis, but in its name, is of the dual instruments of practice and meditation; observation and recollection. Of one’s self. Their depths.

Such is akin to the essence of Truth. Of Human knowledge. An understanding so deep that only Gods and myths can accomplish its reach and still stand before our suspended disbelief. Yet all the same, it is measured in bits and bytes because it can be: because our world can be. Each of us admits that this is our reality: our Matrix and shared illusion. Science agrees.

Our world can never be as beautiful outside as in until each of us knows, accepts, and works toward that regardless of gratification or not. We must be willing not to see the fruits of our efforts, and so therefore make our species’ inner-beauty shine all the brighter meanwhile. Force, as an aura, to radiate in auras of healing energies; thoughts, emotions, tender actions, no matter how difficult.

We must do this, because otherwise, we deserve nothing as a species. Creator or no. We are wounded. Damaged and in need of repair. No tool, no matter its capacity for danger, should be stripped from our tool box entirely. Merely kept from the hands of those untrained in its use, but in the same, restrained way as any yet-untrained contributor.

This is the task from our Mother– not that of each of us as individuals, but that of all of us: the creating forces of not only Earth, sentience, the universe, but their collective power. For truly, they are inert. Products of circumstance. Effects of natural forces eroding one another like repeated floodwaters of a ravine.

There is no further room for our indifference toward these ideas as a species. No matter how odd it must seem, we as their products must bow before the unseen forces only Science comprehend. Therein, we must accept that it is not each of our places to comprehend it, but that we can if we wish to.

We must trust only in the tangible. Have faith, but based only in what is known to be true: Ideas. Powerful ones. But ideas nonetheless. True ideas. Conclusions. Logical deductions. Theories. Concepts evolved and changed but concluded in their final iteration. The type of aspiration of a species and for a species; to each one contribute something world-changing, however “fallen-short” it might end up.

Cannabis, or pot, does not make one a bad person. Only condemning ideas for change and the betterment of all. If the former led to the latter, condemnation would be understandable. But if it does not, it is irrelevant to character.

Short Story: All in a Day’s Work

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

It was dark, dank. The whole place had a smell of mold and mildew. It was just like the places she’d hung around in her youth; abandoned basements with random, leaky pipes. The only difference was that she was above ground. A few hundred feet above it, actually. She wasn’t even sure what the hell could leak from this old junker. All she knew was that it was, and it felt more homely for it.

Izzy Merritt was twenty. She had all the markings of someone her age who’d lived with the streets and shadows as their home. Her brown dreadlocks, streaked with rainbow highlights, bore bone clasps and pipes interwoven with neutral colors. They accented the other, random objects like dyed feathers and random hemp twine. Enough piercings covered her face and ears for them to glint silver in passing, but not enough that any competed for view-time.

Her body bore the eccentricities of youth and street living too; rail-thin, almost emaciated. A sinuous strength said it spent as much time running from corps and cops as swaying to hypnotic trance beats. It had even infected her walk with a saunter that seemed crafted to tease and tantalize. Most would have called her a free spirit, though some derisively. Izzy, on the other hand, knew that was bullshit.

There was no such thing as freedom anymore. Not really. Either you fought the system, or it swallowed you whole. If there was anything Izzy was, it was a fighter. Maybe not physically, though she could hold her own, survive, but mentally. Brain-over-brawn attacks were just as effective, more so even, provided you knew what you were doing. At that, Izzy sure as hell knew what she was doing.

She presently stood in the bridge of a mostly hollowed-out freighter. Its gnarled corpse of steel and rust had come to rest in an ancient Tokyo harbor. CRTs for radar and informatics displays were still present in the place, despite being out of use for decades. Back in the day, they’d kept the ship on course or from running into others. Now they sat beneath layers of dust, puddles, and trash, as unused as any of the old gear like them. It was obvious the ship hadn’t run in decades.

Izzy figured as much. It was barely standing. It only remained above water because, aside from being taller than the harbor’s modest depth, it had come to a rest at a slight angle. Curiously enough, though it had been scrapped from roughly the mid-point to the stern, it remained sound enough to host a little street kid and her tech without much grief. She sensed she’d found something, if not permanent, temporary enough to call home.

The Bridge’s slight angle meant any thing cylindrical would roll away. She circumvented the issue by laying out her sleeping bag against the rear of a console. Ahead was another, but with enough space between them that she could lay out her bag and gear without issue.

She sat down, tattered backpack before her. She had a place to live now. Tokyo had been unforgiving lately, but it seemed karma was coming ’round to make her even again. Or at least, it would until she finished what she was about to do.

She dug through her pack for a laptop, set it on her lap. The odd protuberance of the battery in the rear bulged out awkwardly. The solar cell collector she’d installed was one of her own design, the battery it serviced even more-so. She’d created both to get around never having power outlets to jack into. The design and juice was more than ample, especially for what she was about to do.

She pulled up a list of net connections nearby, ran a brute-force software crack she’d designed. Thanks to the years of rising security, a WEP-key wasn’t difficult to crack anymore. Not for someone with a program like this. A command prompt opened, spooled out thousands of lines of code with each blink.

She pulled out a bag of Tokyo Cheeba to roll a joint and pass the time. Grass was easy to find now that most of the world had legalized it. Japan was still a ways behind in that regard, but it didn’t stop smugglers, traders, or everyday tourists from bringing the stuff in by the truck-full. It also made it easy for a street-kid to do five minutes of work, make it look like thirty, and walk away with a few ounces as payment for a job well done.

She sparked up the joint as the program cracked the WEP-key. The computer icon winked in the upper corner of her OS with a notification, “net connection complete on secure uplink: The Varden.”

It was one of the nearby freighters. She couldn’t say which, but calling a net connection something like that was what people hosting public access points did. “The this” or “the that,” or corp-name “guest network–” Things that only made them easier targets.

“Whatever,” she muttered for no reason in particular.

Her thoughts had been hectic lately, especially given her last “home” had been raided. She wasn’t the only one squatting there. In fact, she was one of a few dozen. Some asshole though, had got it in his head to mess with the Yakuza. Instead of just killing the guy outright, they’d sent in their corporate-security. Everyone scattered, scrambled for freedom– or rather, just fled. Some were gunned down. Others were arrested, printed, charged, and wouldn’t see daylight outside a corp-prison’s grounds for another twenty years, if ever.

She pulled up a pair of web browsers side-by side, fished a sheet of old-fashioned paper out of her pack. A list of numbers and words were scrawled on it, neatly spaced. With a series of quick clicks, she brought up logins for administrators of each of the sites. The banks would never know what happened. Her IP was masked, her MAC non-existent, and everything else identifying her a forged or stolen credential.

She flitted over to one window, keyed in an account number, then transferred a few thousand bitcoins into an account she’d memorized. She closed the window, repeated the process with the next, then closed it too. She slotted a chip into a reader on one side of the laptop, then keyed in a few commands on a prompt.

A few lines of code made a rubric with account numbers to one side, “transfer” in the middle, and a bit-currency amount to the right. The account balance below them read, “10,000;” somewhere around $500,000, if the US economy had ever survived.

She took a deep hit off her joint, shut the laptop, and kicked back. The banks could never trace the encryption on her bit-currency account– or any bit-currency account for that matter. That was the point. The black market functioned solely on that encryption, and there were a hell of a lot more people who wanted it that way than didn’t. Didn’t matter if they were on the corp’s side or not, bit-currency was here to stay, and so was the encryption.

She relaxed with a long exhale, felt the stoned haze descend. She gazed up at the dusty, dripping room, “It’ll work. With some new décor, anyhow.”

She laughed to herself. She could afford to buy a ship brand new now. But she wasn’t stupid. She wouldn’t blow all the creds at once.

She took another deep hit, exhaled slow, “All in a day’s work.”

Bonus Short Story: One May Change Everything

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

He was stoned– baked out of his mind actually. He’d been smoking weed for near on four-hours straight from a two-foot water bong. It gurgled every few seconds with heady hits. The stink of skunk was as pungent as the smoke was visible. He’d chonged out the room long ago, was only keeping the rhythm going now so as not to dissipate the fish-bowl haze that had replaced the room’s O2 content.

Most would have said he was a burn-out; that living on a modest inheritance and legal settlement from a hit and run wasn’t living at all. He disagreed. He’d been run over by a car, had all of his ribs broken, both his legs, and one of his wrists. At the time he was nineteen. By twenty, he’d been in traction six weeks, spent another year learning to write, walk, and jerk-off again. The only thing that had gotten him through the boredom was the legal work and bowlfuls of grass. He’d had it hard, and defied anyone whom said otherwise.

He liked his life, enjoyed what he had, and never took more than he needed. He was grateful for all he was given, wanted only to get baked, play video games, and “keep on keepin’ on.”

He was at his latest boss-fight when the air around him began to stir. He didn’t notice it under the darkened lights that kept his aching eyes from throbbing; he’d beaten the game three times already– a seventy-hour epic saga of the life of a former bounty-hunter turned vigilante– but he’d also played his entire library two and three times over too. With a minute budget that only allowed for one game a month around necessities like rent, food, and an ounce of Hawaiian Green, he had to stretch each game as far as it would go, and did.

But he was content in the notion– even as the smoke swirled and a shadow began to encroach on his vision. His mind was focused, mouth-half open and droopy eyes centered ahead. The smoke snaked in front of him from the ingress of something through its presence. He swatted the thickest puffs away with a quick dismissal, unaware of the shadow that phased in and out beside him.

The faint flicker of a reflection caught his eye. Had his head not turned to see himself flicker in and out of form on the adjacent couch, he might not have believed it was real. Instead, his doppelganger solidified with a curious look at his hands. His mouth fell open as the “You Are Dead” screen appeared beside him.

His doppelganger relaxed back into the couch with a heavy sniff of the air, “Wow. Man, I haven’t smelled that in years.”

His eyes focused through the smoke at himself while he involuntarily swallowed, “Wh-what the fuck?” The continue screen appeared but he was too focused on himself, “Ar-are you… me?”

The doppelganger laughed, “You wish.” He took another deep whiff of the air, “Or maybe I do… Anyway, we’re not the same person, not really.”

“B-but, you’re… me, right?”

The doppelganger, “In blood and name– Curtis J–”

“Porter,” he said with a breathless finish.

He replied with a nod, “Right, but you should know better than anyone, a person’s more than their name and DNA.” The double sensed perplexity across the television’s beam of light. “That’s just where we start. We’re all born ninety-percent the same, but our experiences as we grow are what define us.”

The real Curtis’ eyes glazed over. He blinked hard, unstuck his tongue from his dry mouth. “S-sorry, I’m not… what’s this all about? Why am I– we, here?”

His doppelganger leaned toward him across the coffee table, “Because something went wrong in this place. Here and now. Something inside us changed. And with it, the world changed too. Now, I’m here to ensure things go as they’re supposed to.”

He shook off his dull ardor for complete disbelief, “You’re nuts. What could I possibly do, or not do, that would change the world?”

He watched himself from across the table as his left eye squinted with familiar skepticism, “There are people and places that rely on you to be present in order to nudge future events toward their destined path.”

Real Curtis’ eyes were flat-out wild now, “You’re nuts.” He stood to piss, followed by his phantom self toward the bathroom. It stood in the door jamb as he relieved himself, “Christ dude, invade privacy much?”

“You don’t understand,” he said with a shake of his head. “But how could you? You’re baked out of your fucking mind all the time and all you think about’s fucking video-games.”

He shook out the last few drops, flushed the toilet, “Hey man, fuck you. Don’t go blaming me for your nut-job fantasies.”

He made to walk past himself, was frozen by a cold hand that clasped his shoulder. His own eyes looked at him with a fury he wasn’t sure he’d ever possessed. “You have no fucking idea how important you are.”

Curtis’ vision suddenly went black. Images of rallies and protests outside corporate buildings and state houses appeared.

His doppelganger growled through his teeth, “You’re supposed to be there when it starts to crumble.” Crowds marched, pumped fists in the air rhythmically with distorted chants. “You’re meant to be on the front-fucking-line of a war for freedom– the final war.” Tanks began to roll forward from close, wide angles along city streets packed with protesters. “You’re supposed to be the voice of logic and reason in a new world.”

Curtis was ready to pass out. His head swam as names and dates, and countless vids and images flooded his brain from places and events that had yet to take place. He swayed on his feet.

His own voice was muddy through waters of confusion, “You are meant to be the General in a war that will end with one side eradicated or the other enslaved, forever.”

People rioted in the streets, attacked the tanks en-masse. Their guns smoked. Explosions shook the silent movie-reel. Some people managed to climb atop a tank, wrench its hatch open to drag out its crew. The vehicle turned on the others. More explosions, shaking scenery. Jets rocketed past over head.

“You’re meant to be there,” he said as his vision went black. “To lead the free against their oppressors and take the world back.”

He fell backward, head spinning. His head hit the floor as his vision narrowed to a black cone. His face loomed over him from his doppelganger. Its last words struggled to breach the static of his waning consciousness, “You cannot fail. A thousand men may never change a thing, while one may change everything. You are one.”

His vision went black. Silence engulfed him. In a blink he was once more awake, face hovering over the bong for another hit as the boss-battle began again. He swallowed hard, hit pause to slide the bong across the table. After a moment of aimless steps he found himself before the sliding glass doors of his twelfth floor apartment. They opened, gave passage to his balcony in the sun of a rising morning he once more saw from the wrong side.

He stepped to the balcony’s edge, breathless. Beneath him, the city sprawled outward like a patchwork quilt of humanity composed of all grays and whites. The bits of color were few, far between.

He wasn’t sure what the hell had happened. He’d been baked before, but somehow this was different, more than just a stoned daydream. He felt a tickle at the back of his skull, pulled his hand away to see blood.

“One may change everything,” echoed through his head like a whisper on wind.

But where to begin, and how?

He looked from the crimson on his finger-tips to the drab city. Color seemed as good a start as any. However he was meant to change the world it would start there. He swallowed hard, relaxed, and turned away to begin.