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!

Christmas 2008

I shot some B&W photos today (but they still need to be developed) and I ate way too much food. Flo Tiger had invited me to noontime"breakfast". She's been trying to sell the house in South Dade where she and her late husband Spencer had been living. She and her two dogs are now living at her dad's place on one of those ritzy islands along the 79th Street Causeway just east of the Channel 7 studios.

It was an interesting mix of people. Spencer's nephew Robbie was there. Well, since he got hit by a car while bike riding a few years ago he's never really "there", what with a steel plate and drain tubes in his head. He walks OK and his speech is understandable. He pretty much thinks like an eight year old and lives to play computer games. It's all he talks about. Flo's brother, who writes software for a living was there. Two of Flo's friends from South Dade were there. I think the reason for having our "breakfast" at noon was that the two ladies attend a Baptist church near where they live and then had to drive about thirty miles after the Christmas morning church service. They told us that normally the minister's sermons last about half an hour but today it was like he couldn't stop talking.

Flo is a gourmet cook! She made some kind of eggs with spinach and bacon in an egg poacher, as well as some fantastic potato latkes (pancakes) and French toast. I ate way too much, probably because I was eating breakfast so late as much as because it was so tasty.

I gave Flo a framed 11 X 14 print of Spencer when he was maybe 15 years old with his sister Donna, perhaps 17 at the time, sitting on the hood of an old 1950's vintage car on the Miccosukee Reservation. Donna was Robbie's mother. Now both Donna and Spencer are gone. Too soon, too young.