Drugs? What Drugs Officer? No Drugs Here!

Back in the late sixties every Sunday there was a Love-In at East Greynolds Park and whatever major rock group was playing at Thee Image that weekend would put on a free Sunday afternoon concert. It would atract hordes of young people and everybody knows that rock music sounds best when you're stoned, so it also atracted the attention of the county cops. All the cars and vans got searched. Few arrests were made but a fair amount of pot was seized. Everybody wondered justy how much of the stuff got turned in to the property room. After all, no arrest had been made!

The pot was the mellow natural stuff from Jamaica, Colombia, and Panama. It would be a few more years before the Vietnam vets, who learned about the joys of pot smoking while in 'Nam came back to the States and used their G.I. Bill scholarship money to major in agriculture. With all that knowledge on the finer points of selective breeding, hydroponic growing, maximizing yields and so on , domestic pot soon became more potent than the finest Colombian Gold or Panamanian Red.

These days it's the biggest agricultural crop in the state of California. Since everybody knows that it's a harmless high, nowhere near as bad as booze, the state government is seriously giving thought to legalizing it. Why? Because they see it as a great source of tax revenue! California farmers could supply the whole country and do away with all the other state taxes. They'd still have money left over! Maybe they could do away with the city and county taxes as well.

All those kids in the picture today would be ticketed for not wearing seat belts and carrying more people than there are seats. They don't even make convertibles anymore. "Unsafe at Any Speed" as Ralph Nader put it.

What happened to all those pot smoking hippies? The ones who were supposedly "going to hell in a handbasket" for smoking the evil weed, breaking the law, and grooving to the music? Now they're doctors and lawyers, business executives, accountants, investors, mayors, senators, judges, you name it. And the cops? Today a lot of them admit to having smoked it back then, but that was before drug testing came along. I think that Florida could give California a run for its money. We have the room for the farms! We sure could use the tax revenue!