Thursday, August 6, 2009

Little Green Houses 3

Third part of the overview here.

Copyright David Anthony Kearns

Little Green Houses: Florida Grown Houses and the Rise of Home-Grown Organized Crime
Non-fiction, current events
circa 300 pages with pictures.
Agent: To be decided
Publisher: To be decided

Kearnspalmbay@Netzero.net

3. Pot: A drug of sometime innocence.The effective ingredient is delta-9 Tetrahydrocannabinol. (THC) known for the euphoric feeling of relaxed bliss, enhanced musical and artistic appreciation, temporal distortion, and the munchies. However, prolonged over-use can also produce depressive withdrawal, lack of interest in grooming, inability to summon short-term memory responses, moodiness, and disruptive emotional outbursts affecting interpersonal relationships.As it is cultivated in high intensity “grows’ across the state, the concentration of the active ingredient is bumped from about 7 percent - your grandfather’s weed smoked at Woodstock - to more than 20 percent.

Much like Bacardi distillers discovered the methods of perfecting their 151, growers have used the four horsemen of the modern-day apotalypse - fertilization, light, water, and air - in order to stoke the organic chemistry fires of the cannabis sativa plants bringing out those tiny, glistening strands of THC resin sap, into those densely compacted green buds, like dew-drops on excellent concord grapes.

In many ways this is all very similar to boot-legged booze during prohibition. Is booze bad for you? Of course, but the substance is considered to be somewhat harmless in moderation, or even medicinal. Not to be overindulged in, but certainly not to be criminalized, either.

Did the legal prohibition of liquor, beer and wine sales reduce crime or increase it during the late 1920s and early 30s? Any eighth grade history student will tell you it accomplished the latter, since the practicality of gaining complete alcohol abstinence was laughable leading up to, and after the Great Depression, especially with the mix of so many diverse cultures and attitudes in this country about it. Does this sound familiar?Replace the word booze with a the word pot, and history repeats with the caveat that, instead of a thing being legal and the state coming along afterwards and attempting to completely eradicate it; here the common practice and proliferation of marijuana, still held in legal contempt, has created a black market of epic proportions. Combine this with a perfect storm of a bad economy and you have a recipe for increased organized crime. Great for criminals plying their trade, and cops looking for a task force to become a part of, yet, hard on taxpayers and the overburdened prison system.

The grow house is today’s answer to the speakeasy and the still. As the law stands now, cultivating pot indoors is the perfectly enticing “gateway” crime in that the perpetrator can easily rationalize his or her involvement, when balanced against future economic uncertainty and the over-all, alleged negligible impact to an already shaky, disjointed society. Where there is a crop of new, inexperienced, would-be criminals who have suddenly seen the light on how to make a quick buck, there is also mid-level of “management” in place, willing to exploit the supply of the naïve; leading the newbies into the weaponized, dark side of felonious behavior from which they find escape very difficult. Still, this country’s fascination, and yet legal disdain for the plant called pot, make it nearly the perfect enticement. In a high-intensity setting, the growing is hardly labor intensive, although the preparation is. The lack of controls, taxes and FDA regulations make it boundlessly profitable in potential.Recently, analysts for CNN announced that strip clubs which are legal, and marijuana sales - conditionally legal in California - could provide the answer to California’s recent economic shortfall.

Those of us between the ages of 35 and 55 were likely surrounded by it in college. We who remember this time of innocence form a quietly grinning, dwindling minority these days. Those upwardly-mobile captains of industry, or the space and defense cabal with advanced government security clearances who should also remember it, somehow have outwardly forgotten the heyday of Lady Dope. And this selective memory about marijuana - hardly a medical condition caused by the drug - perhaps mirrors our nation’s attitude about it.Do it for a little while you’re young, starting out perhaps, but like any adult, give up those childish things when the time comes. And if you get some troubling questions on a polygraph interview, why, a small tack placed in the bottom of your shoe, should do the trick in fuddling the data enough to fool the machine.Similarly, on the distribution end, one wants to be of the Joe Kennedy, Sr. model of trafficking in that which is illegal. Let it be the mere whiff of rumor adding only to the spice of a businessman’s rich and colorful character. In other words, don’t get caught.

Kearnspalmbay@Netzero.net

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