...And It Still Ain't Legal!

Here we are forty years later and nothing has changed on the legal front. What has changed is that we now have people who smoked pot in positions of power. Everybody from business executives, members of the clergy, people holding political office, judges, cops, all sorts of people! Some no doubt still smoke pot. And I suppose we have to consider them all criminals, but they're not about to be arrested. There'd be no place to put them all and the very infrastructure of the country would grind to a halt.

These days you'd have to be caught with a major load of the stuff for the cops to even give a damned. Most of the nickle and dime busts are situations where they're looking for an excuse to detain somebody while they're investigating something of greater importance.

I'd gotten a call from the editor at the local underground (now we call them counter-culture) newspaper, The Daily Planet. He wanted a photo arranged on the Miami Herald. I could charge "expenses" for the shoot and could keep the "props". Good deal! I already had a roach clip that would look great in a photo, and I figured that since it wasn't my nickle that perhaps some primo Colombian would look better in the photo than cheap Mexican grass. What the hell, it was 1968 and I had a budget of thirty-five bucks to work with. I could get a full weighed ounce!

It was photographed with my Minolta Autocord with a plus 2 close-up lens by window light.