Let me be honest

The Radicalization of Us

Chapter 1: Welcome to the State

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Chapter 2: Let me be honest

“He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it – namely, that in order to make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.”
Mark Twain – The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

One of the first videos I ever made was for a Church youth group out of Chicago that was going on a mission trip to a nearby inner-city neighborhood called Austin.  The gig wasn’t supposed to pay anything, but it seemed like an opportunity for a great experience on multiple levels.

We helped renovate a school that was attached to a Church.  We helped run a week-long bible camp for the kids.  We brought in every carnival activity imaginable for a block party on the last day.  Through it all, the local Church that hosted us was feeding literally hundreds of people for free.

Each day, they would hold services in this giant carnival tent.  They had giant metal tubs, which I assume were made to be horse troughs, but in the windy city, they were to be filled with water for full body baptisms.  The sermons were intense and interwoven with the pastor riling up the crowd as lead vocalist with a soulful backing band.

But this neighborhood was rough.  Gunshots were heard almost every day.  People were dying on a regular basis.  So nighttime probably wasn’t the best time for me to be carrying a ladder down the street and proceeding to climb into a 2^nd story window, but I locked my keys in my room.  Sometimes you just do what you have to do.  I guess that’s how those kids got through living there, just doing what they had to do day in and day out.  It’s hard for me to even imagine.

One of the kids that came in had a profound effect on me.  We spent the week hanging out, doing crafts, reading, and just talking about the world. Out of the blue one day, he told me he never wanted to become one of the drug dealers he sees on the street corner, because they are the bad guys.

By the end of the week, I had thought about those words incessantly and was finally ready to bring something up privately to Emil, the head of the youth group, who also happened to be a friend of my parents.  You see, I’m one of the “bad guys.”  I smoke marijuana.  Not like once in a while at a party or something, I smoke weed every day.  I told him it was more than just medical use.  It had transformed my spiritual beliefs as well.  I had grown to respect his opinion and wanted to know what he thought I should do.

His advice was to learn everything I possibly could about it and if I still held those beliefs through all that I learned, then I had no choice but to quit lying to everyone about it.  I needed to share my choices with the world and own up to them.

I did just that, reading night and day and watching every documentary I could find.  My beliefs grew even stronger than they were before, so it became time to break the news.  I wrote a 5-page letter to my parents telling them why I smoked pot.  It didn’t take them that many pages before I was kicked out of the house.  But I was following the best advice I’d found.  Living my life based on what I believed was liberating regardless of the consequences.

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It has always amazed me how drastically that little nugget of information changes people’s perceptions of me.  I used to volunteer my time and my camerawork every year to a ragtime music festival.  Filming and hanging out with some of the world’s premiere ragtime musicians until 2 in the morning?  No problem.  But one year, an acquaintance’s mother was in attendance and when she caught a whiff, she stared me dead in the eyes and with the point of a finger shouted, “Shame on you!”

For some people, adding marijuana to the story takes what happened to me in Minneapolis, in Muscatine, and East Lafayette and flips it on its head.  In their minds, I really was the criminal.  I should have known better, I have been told.  It was my fault for putting myself in those situations.  I should have known what I was getting myself into when I chose to break the law.  If I didn’t like the law, why hadn’t I gone and changed it.

More on that later, but let’s start with Minneapolis.  How do medical marijuana patients acquire their medicine when they are out of town?  When they are home, there is usually someone they know willing to risk arrest to help them out, but in other cities, patients don’t have the luxury of those black market connections.  On that particular evening in Minneapolis, I started with a coffee shop.  Sliding into a booth across from some hippie looking girl, I got straight to the point.  “I hate to bother you, but we’re from out of town.  Do you have any idea where we could get some bud?”

“Ahh man, I’m sorry,” she told me.  “Any other day I could help you, but I’m out today.”

Whether that was a lie or not, we’ll never know, but I moved onto a bar down the street that happened to have a couple Rastafarian looking dudes smoking cigarettes outside.  I asked a couple other people, but didn’t have the courage to ask the ones who were stereotypically most likely able to help me out.

So after striking out again, I gave up and started to walk back to the car with my friends.  Our conversation was interrupted a few blocks later as we passed two black guys in puffy coats, leaning against a gas station like they were Jay and Silent Bob.  “You need anything?” they asked.

I was shocked.  “What do you mean?”

“Are you guys looking for anything?”

“Yeah.  I’m looking for some bud,” I responded.  They told me their guy lived a couple blocks away, which made sense, because actually carrying weight outside a gas station in the United States is about as risky as you can get.  They also wouldn’t want a bunch of people shuffling in and out of their apartment all the time, just in case the neighbors grew suspect and called the cops.  This was all standard operating procedure that I had grown accustomed to when dealing with the black market.

My friends went their way and I took off with my newfound friends to make my purchase.  As we walked, I asked them where they were from and how they liked Minneapolis.  They said they were from St. Louis or Memphis, I can’t remember which, but I do remember it was pleasant conversation.

When we got to the apartment building, one of them left to knock on his buddy’s window around the side of the building.  I was casually talking to his friend in the parking lot when he returned from behind with brute force.  You can judge my decision making all you want, but I was just trying to get some medicine in an area of the world that spends billions of dollars hunting down anyone that chooses to use or sell it.

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The Muscatine encounter I already mentioned was actually the exception out of the seven times I was detained by police that year.  That was one of the few times I didn’t have marijuana on me.  Which explains why that was the only time I’ve ever talked back to condescending officers.

See cops don’t see drug dealers, drug users, and nonusers the same way that you and I do.  You see someone selling drugs and you say, “That’s a drug dealer.”  You see someone under the influence of drugs and you say, “That’s a drug user.”  You see someone that is not under the influence of drugs and you say, “Maybe.  Maybe not.  But they don’t appear to be on drugs right now.”

Cops don’t see it that way.  That’s because before all other things, most cops see the world first and foremost through the eyes of the law they have sworn to upheld, at least when it works out to their benefit.  So to them, being a drug dealer doesn’t have anything to do with selling drugs and it has everything to do with possessing a certain amount of drugs.  If their suspect has less than an ounce, that is simple possession, but if they have more than an ounce, that is automatically possession with intent to distribute: aka drug dealer.

Even if you stay under the ounce, three possession charges adds up to a felony.  That means you no longer have the “right” to vote.  That means you no longer have the “right” to own a gun.  In Iowa, they have an additional charge for failure to affix a tax stamp.  That’s right.  Long before the states of Colorado and Washington realized they could tax the hell out of marijuana, the state of Iowa was issuing “anonymous” stamps to try to tax an already illegal plant.  Scanning any arrest log throughout the state reveals the tax stamp charge is inconsistently given out, with suspecting Hispanic and black names are more often the ones who drew the short straw.

When I left the bonfire that night in Muscatine and saw the flashing blue and red lights coming up behind me, my thoughts immediately went to which label these cops would give me.  Would they see me as a drug user, since I was under the influence of marijuana?  No, I was theoretically safe.  I didn’t have a bowl or any weed in my possession.  But I knew that wasn’t going to stop them from looking.

I don’t think there was ever a point in my life where I thought it was OK for cops to just walk up to people and search them, even if they do look young in a city with curfew laws.  But this being the week after I was mugged combined with them not having anything they could charge me with, it seemed like the right time to stand up for myself.

For the second time in just a few days, my shoes were being removed against my will.  Commenting on this coincidence led the cop to look closely into my eyes.  “What’s to stop me from arresting you for being high on marijuana right now?”

“I was just walking down the street.  You just searched me out of nowhere.  You can arrest me if you want, but my religious beliefs include the God-given right to this plant and if I have to say that in court, I will.”

The cops laughed me off.  “Weren’t you going to eventually drive a car?  Don’t you know it’s illegal to drive under the influence of marijuana?”

“The United States Department of Transportation has done multiple studies on people using cannabis and driving.  The study with the worst results found it to be the equivalent of at most 0.03% blood alcohol content, which is far below the legal limit to drive.”

They really didn’t know where to take the discussion from there, so after searching my socks, they moved onto my friends.  What I failed to realize was that although I didn’t have any weed on me, that didn’t mean no one else had acquired any as the night had gone on.  When one of the cops was feeling up his leg, he asked what that was in his pocket.  My friend’s quick response still makes me smile.  “My medicine.”

But that wasn’t enough for the cop.  He was making all of us empty our pockets.  He pulled out my friend’s pill canister, a canister that hadn’t held a pill in ages.  The ground up buds inside added up to less than a gram, just 1/28^th of the way to an intent to distribute charge, but enough to bar you from student loans, living in a bunch of rental properties, and put you one charge closer to felony status.

The cop opened the canister and looked him up and down.  “You hold the same beliefs as your buddy?”

“No.  I’m just a college student that’s trying to make his way home.”

The cops told me and another friend to leave.  They didn’t want me to see what they were going to do.  They watched me walk to my car, get in, and drive away.  I later found out they dumped the canister on the street and told my friend to head home.  My outcry had somehow made him look like the softer, more reasonable one.  Whether they still would have let him go without my tirade, we’ll never know.

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The East Lafayette experience once again starts the week before, but this time, right after the car accident.  I don’t know if I got a concussion from hitting the seat in front of me or not, but my mind was definitely in a fog.  Once Tommy took care of the towing arrangements, we hitched a ride in the back of someone’s truck to get to the stadium.

Now that everyone was tailgating, I had a chance to slip off into the woods.  This is not an uncommon sight at a tailgate, since the insane amounts of beer that get consumed always exceeds the capacity of the limited number of port-o-potties available.

But relieving myself was not on my to-do list.  I was sneaking off to get my mind right.  I was sneaking off to smoke some pot.  With just a couple tokes, the fog from the accident was instantly lifted.  Years later, studies would be done that verified this very effect.

A week later, we were at the Northwestern game, just as I mentioned before.  Halftime came around and I got up to go check another location off my list.  It is very common to see people sneaking beer into a stadium, but weed’s another story.  So when Iowa had upset #3 Penn State on a last second field goal and I approached the 50 yard line at a full sprint, along with tens of thousands of other Hawkeye fans, I was ecstatic to find the first ones there were already smoking a bowl in celebration.  I pulled out my bowl and joined them, and my tradition of smoking in stadiums across the country began.  I’ve now toked up in every stadium in the Big Ten, at least, every stadium before Nebraska, and then Maryland and Rutgers all joined the conference.

But at this point, I hadn’t smoked at the shitty stadium that belongs to Northwestern.  I don’t know how it is possible to make a football stadium look like a warehouse, but they’ve done it.  Whether they really needed the storage that bad or that’s just their idea of pleasing aesthetics, I don’t know or care to know.

Halftime came around and I got up to smoke.  I used to just blend in among the cigarette smokers, using a one-hitter designed to look like a cigarette, but the times have changed and fans aren’t allowed to step out of the stadium for a smoke anymore.  I remember when you could smoke a cigar in your seat, but that was when I was just a kid.

In West Lafayette, I just smoked in a port-o-pottie.  In Evanston, I headed to their restrooms.  A few hitters later, I emerged with the newfound perspective that the team obviously would turn the game around and pull out a victory.  The losing halftime score was no longer a bummer, but an obstacle we would obviously overcome.  As I came out of the bathroom, I was distracted by someone walking by, which after a second look, I realized was wearing the exact same coat as me.  Not a very interesting fact unless you know, as I did, that my dad had purchased this coat half a century earlier.  To this day, I have never seen another one like it.

Seeing this two of a kind treasure reminded me of why I had liked the coat so much in the first place: a hidden pocket on the inside of the coat by my chest.  I moved my pill container that was filled with marijuana and my one hitter to this pocket and returned to my seat, screaming my head off for two more quarters, but never seeing the comeback I had predicted.

Cut to that night, with me on my knees, watching that raving lunatic of a cop hold a gun right up to my brother’s head, his finger on the trigger.  After his partner had cuffed me, his search began and a debate raged in my mind of what to do.  Do I stay quiet and risk this madman getting startled when his partner discovers my illegal medicine or do I calmly fill them in on the crime I was committing, hoping for mercy?  As his hands moved up along my legs to my hips, it occurred to me that this decision could determine whether Tommy’s unborn son got to meet his father.

I was petrified.  There was no right answer.  Any movement, any words, anything could set this guy off.  As I said, all it would take was a few millimeters of movement in his index finger.  His partner’s hands moved up my side and along my arms.  He reached around my body, running his hands up my stomach and across my chest, directly making contact with that pill container of pot.

This moment that seemed to last forever eventually passed, like all moments do, and he moved on without the only evidence they could have found to use against us.

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So there’s the truth.  The first time around, I wasn’t lying.  I just didn’t tell you about one aspect of my life.  Maybe that changes your idea of whether justice was served, but I don’t think it will.  And even if it does, I don’t really care.  It’s OK to agree to disagree.  You get to believe what you believe, but since this is my life and I only have one of them to live, I’m going to live it based on what I believe.  That’s the whole point of what that youth pastor had told me in the inner city of Chicago.  Learn everything you can to grow as much as possible, and then just do everything you can to be the best version of yourself you can be.  Unfortunately for some, that advice can lead you to jail…or worse.

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Written by Jimmy Morrison