Search Results: utopian (6)

The Utopianist

By Anthony Martinelli
Communications Director
In a recent article published on our website, we explain the key reasons for ending our failed prohibition on cannabis. Doing so would bring untold benefits, and deal a huge blow to our failed war on drugs. However, even if cannabis were legalized, our nation would still be waging the widespread and devastating humans rights violation that our drug war has become.
Even if you don’t condone the use of any drugs, it is difficult to argue that throwing someone into prison alongside murderers and other violent criminals — for simple drug possession, spending taxpayer money along the way — is anything other than bad policy.

Jay Selthofner

When it began 41 years ago, it was an anti-war protest. It soon morphed into a cannabis legalization rally, and the Great Midwest Marijuana Harvest moves into its fifth decade September 30-October 2 at the Library Mall adjacent to the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison.

The festival will feature live music, guest speakers, a parade, vendors, and plenty of good munchies, according to organizers. Sponsors include Wisconsin NORML, Is My Medicine Legal Yet? (IMMLY), and Madison NORML.

Graphic: Lifeboat Foundation
Queen Victoria famously used cannabis to ease her royal menstrual cramps.

​By Jack Rikess

Toke of the Town

Northern California Correspondent

In honor of the 100th anniversary of Women’s Day, I present the Top 11 Women of Weed, ladies I think have made a difference, cannabis-wise, in my life.

11. Queen Victoria
If you are of a certain age, she is the first famous pot smoker that we heard of in the Sixties.
Because she used cannabis for her majestic cramps, she also was the first internationally known medical marijuana patient.
England may be getting a new king soon, but Queen Vicky will always be the royal “oui” to me.

Photo: Ben Watanabe/South Whidbey Record
Captn Blynd sets a pile of marijuana plants and buds ablaze outside his Freeland, Washington home after he said he received threats against his medical marijuana cooperative.

​The founder of Whidbey Island’s first medical marijuana cooperative has followed through on his pledge to destroy his supply of medical marijuana following perceived threats to his wife and himself.

Captn Blynd, of Freeland, Washington, stacked 11 juvenile and mature cannabis plants and a kilogram jar full of a half-pound of dried marijuana buds on top of a pile outside his home last Tuesday, poured a fifth of Monarch 151 rum tincture on it, and drenched it all with gasoline, reports Ben Watanabe of the South Whidbey Record.
“Do I look like a rich guy to you?” Blynd asked. “Somehow I don’t think I am. This is plant matter. It’s not money, it’s not power, it shouldn’t reflect wealth. It’s legalized to make sick people feel better. That’s what it did for me.”

Photo: Melvyn Stiriss
Melvyn Stiriss: “The Farm collective was our attempt to create a utopia.”

Voluntary Peasants Trilogy Tells The Story of S.F.’s Monday Night Class and The Farm

When a ragtag band of hippies set out in a 20-bus caravan from San Francisco in 1970 looking to reinvent society, they rode into the history books with a psychedelic, very weird yet very American tale of idealism and do-it-yourself utopia.
And right there in the midst of things was young writer Melvyn Stiriss. Tom Brokaw once said of himself, “In the sixties, I was a young up-and-coming reporter, and I came right up to the edge of what was happening, and I backed away.” 

“At that time, I too was a rising young journalist,” Stiriss said. “I came up to that same edge as Tom, only I went Wheeee! Over. And that has made all the difference.”
“The fact that I am a trained, experienced journalist placed me in a situation that was both enviable and uniquely challenging,” Stiriss said. “I never entered the hippie world with the idea of writing about it. I was never just a fly-on-the-wall, unattached observer. I was in deep, sometimes over my head.”