From the fantastic DrugWarRant blog:
You may have heard that Utah started encouraging snitching on suspected marijuana cultivators with a special website: http://www.illegalutahmarijuanagardens.com/ (as of this writing, the website is unavailable due to exceeding bandwidth limits).
So Larry wrote a nice, polite letter to the various email addresses listed on the site before it crashed:
Dear Stalwart Investigators,
I do not live in Utah, though I have visited your lovely state. I certainly share your goal of protecting the spectacular countryside of Utah.
However, I am very skeptical that your efforts are doing any good and in fact suspect that they are making a bad situation worse. You see, marijuana cultivators anticipate that a certain percentage of their crop will be seized and they plant extra to compensate. As you step up your eradication efforts, so do they step up the planting. In other words- what little pressure you are able to exert on growers only causes more devastation to the forest.
The futility of the effort is clear once you realize that despite ever-increasing numbers of plants seized by law enforcement the retail price of marijuana has remained steady for a decade. This clearly indicates that “eradication” (quotes are quite appropriate here) has done nothing to alter the balance between supply and demand.
My suggestion to Utah is to concentrate on less harmful routes of law enforcement with regards to marijuana.
Best regards,
Larry SimpsonNice, and well-reasoned. Excellent arguments. What kind of a reply might he get?
From: Jim Whitcomb
Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 2010 10:19 AM
To: Larry Simpson
Subject: Re: Utah marijuana eradicationThink what you might, but until you have seen what garbage your suppliers leave at one of these site, and what it does to our spectacular countryside, don’t condemn us for doing our job. It is against the LAW to grow Marijuana and is being done by mostly Illegal Aliens. I am proud of this COUNTRY and I am proud to be an AMERICAN.
I will do my job to protect this Country and its citizens, even dope smoking, baggie pants and earring wearing shit heads like you. You have no clue what is going on in the real world and probably never will, so don’t tell us what we should or should not do.
That’s the good old Intermountain West mentality I remember! (Well, that’s not entirely fair, as this mentality exists all throughout the country. Maybe it’s just hearing “earring wearing” in my head, spat as an epithet, sounds right out of a bad guy authority figure in a John Hughes movie.) This War on Marijuana is so much more than the criminalization of a plant, it is also a demonization of a certain class of citizens.
After this week’s firebombings of medical marijuana dispensaries in Montana and Missouri SWAT Dog Shooting video it couldn’t be more obvious that we are treading on dangerous ground as a society if we continue to tolerate the criminalization of 22.5 million Americans who enjoy consuming cannabis. The vast majority of those millions also wouldn’t resemble any stereotype you want to call “hippie” and the ones who would are generally peaceful, tolerant, mind-your-own-business type of people that are causing no harm to society.
Back in the day, growing up in Idaho, I recall the rednecks in school trying to decide whether they were going to find a Mexican* or a hippie to kick the shit out of for fun on a Saturday night. Today if they were caught beating the Mexican, they could face federal hate crime charges. If they got caught beating the hippie, unless they’re slurring his religion or sexuality it will just be an assault. Now they apparently have gotten jobs working in law enforcement in Utah.
If all you ever knew of marijuana users was the girl-killing, friend-shooting, Stoners in the Mist villains of government propaganda — or worse, if your job as a cop always put you in contact with the most desperate and addicted to hard drugs — you might begin to believe that all cannabis consumers are like that, or at least that cannabis use is the introduction to an inexorable slide to those ends.
Meanwhile, millions of us write code, bus tables, transplant hearts, fly jets, teach children, enforce the law, serve our country, create art, play music, and landscape your gardens, and we just happen to light a bowl at times when you’d pop a cork or cap. We never kill anyone or sleep our lives away on a couch, we pay taxes and obey laws (well, except this stupid one) and raise our kids. We just want to live our lives in peace and not face loss of everything dear to us for choosing the least harmful substance available.
*Their words, because technically my classmates were first generation Americans. They were born here, sons and daughters of the migrant workers who made some of those redneck kids’ dads very rich farmers.
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Good God in the Morning!!! I thought Virginia was a backwards state! But Utah – what a bunch of inbred morons!!! I truly feel for the intelligent people that find it necessary to live there for some reason…
And I guess this “Policeman” (heh) thinks his offensive reply is appropriate from official his position?
Personally I think his reply alone is grounds for termination. This is a policeman responding like this?
At the very least he should be writing an official apology and asking for forgiveness. These thugs have all lost thier minds. They have so much power they have forgotten thier place in society.
Who is screening these morons before giving them badges and guns?
As a resident of Utah this is not a surprise. The area this cop writes from, which is Garfield county as stated on the website is a small, rural community.
Absolutely not in support of what the cop said however one must understand the mentality of the Mormon population around here. This state is after all 60% Mormon.
Utah will come around, trust me. Although, watch out for Congressman Jason Chaffetz, he is anti marijuana and is talking about running for Senator Orrin Hatch’s seat.
Salt Lake City is a little more pro active with the Sugar House Park area which is modeled after the hippie dippie era actually. And quite frankly one of the most popular areas to be in.
I do hate it here though, don’t get me wrong. I was born and raised in San Diego so the contrast is astounding.
Yo Mikey man, here is an example of what happens when I protest in Utah.
Detained for merely flying a freedom sign.
This is offensive to me on several levels. Being a cannabis user, tattooed, pierced, dreadlocked, AND a shithead (not to mention a New Yorker), I’d probably get lynched in Utah! I’m all too familiar with this maturity level. I have always been a fierce individualist. Unfortunately in our 21st century society it seems to only make it harder to be taken seriously about anything. I have never been to Utah; but even in upstate NY I have problems getting people to get past my appearance and talk to me like I’m human. This is why I’ve never gotten more involved in cannabis legalization. I shied away from getting more involved in the legalization movement because I always knew that regardless of how well spoken I may be, and regardless of the how the facts back up my argument, the fact remains that to so many people (who don’t know me), I am a stereotype. It always seemed like I would do more harm than good to the cause if I tried to be a full on cannabis activist. I never wanted to give that kind of fodder to ignorant xenophobes like this guy to use against the silent majority of normal looking tokers out there. So I’ll donate my money to you “NORML” looking folks and write my representatives and conveniently leave out a picture and hope that someday America grows the hell up.
On the plus side if Russ is ever in upstate NY and decides he wants a big fat photo-realistic cola bud in full bloom on his back I can point him in the right direction.
What a refreshingly candid exchange of ideas! No need to be politically correct in Utah, it seems, but the same type of redneck mentality is alive and well in California. The public officials who hold those views typically do a better job of hiding them, but the enlightened cannabis user shouldn’t mistake silence for tolerance and understanding.
Being a utah citizen, at times, can be a bit undesirable. The people in this state truly have no sense of logical reasoning. Oh well, maybe one it will all change… Maybe….
Beautiful! This illustrates the problem that I have with Utah to a tee!
We are going to be protesting in Utah again the weekend of June 11th.
http://xcannabis.com/2010/05/going-to-utah-to-free-the-fake-people/