stoned geopolitics

As Gordon Brown moves to consolidate the cannabis trade further under the control of organized crime, a proposition emerges:

Regardless, it suffices to say that the sinister underworld elements who supply our green, represent a challenge to anyone who considers themselves socially liberal. What is to be done? With legalization still a generation away, progressives need to take matters into their own hands. They need to foster a new drug buying culture, and put more effort into the act of acquiring their drugs. In short, they need to buy Fair Trade Weed.

What is Fair Trade Weed? In short, it is marijuana with a known provenance. The end-user needs to know where it has been grown. It is not enough to simply ask – the ethical toker should insist on being shown the supply chain. Ideally, they should buy direct from the grower. This is probably impossible in the case of organized criminals, so the choice to smoke only Fair Trade dope allows small, home-based business to sprout quickly and fill the niche. This is the cannabis equivalent of the corner-shop versus the multinational supermarket. It is low in smoke-miles (like food miles, but for weed) and should be popular with hippie types.

You do get informal dope networks springing up in unlikely contexts: otherwise law abiding motor neurone disease sufferers and their relatives and friends being one I recall coming into contact with once, years ago. But that still relied on criminal supply networks. What you really need here is for autonomous groups of customers to produce their own supplies, under the radar of both criminals and law enforcement.

Perhaps such networks already exist. The reclassification of cannabis a few years ago may have been interpreted as an opportunity here. If so, it’s the only good that came of a measure which kept dope illegal but made it not worth arresting people for – in other words, which kept the professional criminals in control while promoting overt contempt for the law by users. Reclassification upwards makes some kind of sense in this context, though it won’t affect use one iota.

It’s not true to say that dope smokers puff away unaware of their sources. In fact, it probably served as an introduction to trade issues and/or obscure conflicts for many people. I remember earnest discussions back in the eighties. Was it OK to smoke Lebanese? People knew it was funding the war, but on which side? What about Thailand and Nepal? Should you boycott under Zia what you smoked under Bhutto? And how about Morocco? Who are these Polisario dudes, anyway?

Well, whatever you decided it was pretty clear that you shouldn’t skin up using Marlboros – because the pack design contained a stylized Ku Klux Klan logo. Or at least stoned people thought it did.

Comments

[john b]

...and if you turn the pack upside down it says "horrible Jew".

Colin Davies comes close to your integrated-ethical-supply network (although he's perhaps understandably gone a little of the radar since the b*st*rds jailed him...)

[jamie]

Thinking on, I wouldn;t be surprised if there are a lot of dope cooperatives working under middle class deep cover - rotary club, WI and the like. Firm that up and you'd have a great pop sociology book proposal.

[Alex]

I'm sure I've proposed fairtrade cocaine before, possibly on this very blog.

[Robert]

Thanks for the link. In the original piece I doubted the possibility of Fair Trade cocaine on the basis that it needs to be refined in a way that probably demands organized, industrial processing. I may be wrong.

[Chris Williams]

Orange juice is also processed industrially, what's the problem? More to the point, if there's one sector that's dominated by co-ops, it's agricultural processing and marketing: small farmers banding together to control the next step down in the supply line.

Hey, perhaps they could club together some more and get their own speedboats... Or contract speedboat services out. The trouble is, of course, at the point which your supply chain integrates iteself on a large scale (in this cse, purveyors of speedboat services) any illegal operation becomes a sitting target for protection rackets. And once you're packing enough heat to defend against these (Felix Dzerzhinsky WOrkers' Defence COllective, anyone?) alternative business strategies suggest themselves.

Thriving in an illegal competitive speedboat services supply market can be done in three ways:
1) Cut costs,
2) Cut prices,
3) Kill competitors.

The problem remains the League of Nations.