Doug Fine // Too High To Fail

Too High To Fail

From the bestselling author of Farewell, My Subaru, Too High to Fail is the first in-depth look at the burgeoning legal cannabis industry and how the “new green economy” is shaping our country. “Fine has written a well-researched book that uses the clever tactic of making the moral case for ending marijuana prohibition by burying it inside the economic case.” -Bill Maher in The New York Times “Fine examines how the American people have borne the massive economic and social expenditures of the failed Drug War, which is ‘as unconscionably wrong for America as segregation and DDT.’ A captivating, solidly documented work rendered with wit and humor.”  -Kirkus (Starred Review) “In his entertaining new book…(Fine) successfully illuminates an unusual world where cannabis growers sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to (friendly law enforcement) while crossing their fingers against the threat of federal raids.This informative book will give even hardened drug warriors pause.” -Publisher’s Weekly “An important book.” -Michael Pollan The nation’s economy needs a jump start, and there’s one cash crop that has the potential to help turn it around: cannabis (also known as marijuana and hemp). According to Time, the legal medicinal cannabis economy already generates $200 million annually in taxable proceeds from a mere five hundred thousand registered medical users in just sixteen states. Though thanks to Dick Nixon and America’s longest war — the War on Drugs — cannabis is still technically synonymous with heroin on the federal level even though it has won mainstream acceptance nationwide – 51% of Americans support full legalization (cannabis regulated for adults like alcohol), and 80% support medicinal cannabis legalization. ABC News reports that underground cannabis’s $35.8 billion annual revenues already exceed the combined value of corn ($23.3 billion) and wheat ($7.5 billion). Imagine if the American economy benefited from those numbers, instead of going into criminal drug gang bank accounts.  Actually, you don’t have to imagine: it’s already happening in Canada and Europe, though as yet U.S. leaders won’t heed the call to end the forty-year, trillion-dollar Drug War you have been financing to almost no effect since 1971. Considering the economic impact of cannabis prohibition—and its repeal—Too High to Fail isn’t a commune-dweller’s utopian rant, it’s an objectively (if humorously) reported account of how one plant can drastically change the shape of our country, culturally, politically, and economically. In what can now be called his usual wild, hysterical fashion, and with typically impeccable investigative journalistic result, globe trotting, vegetable oil truck-driving rugged individualist goat herder Doug Fine extrapolates a model for the multi-billion-dollar legal, sustainable, cartel-crippling economy that can result when the failed Drug War is finally called off and cannabis is regulated like alcohol in North America. Too High to Fail covers everything from a brief history of hemp to an insider’s perspective on a growing season in Mendocino County, California, where cannabis drives 80 percent of the economy (to the tune of $8 billion annually). Fine follows one plant from seed to patient in the first American county to fully legalize and regulate cannabis farming. He profiles an issue of critical importance to lawmakers, venture capitalists, climatologists and ordinary Americans—whether or not they inhale. In classic Doug Fine fashion, Too High to Fail is a wild ride that includes swooping helicopters, college tuitions paid with cash, cannabis-friendly sheriffs (a decorated lawman who says, “I woke up and realized the sun still rises and there is still an America with legal cannabis”), and never-before-gained access to the world of the emerging legitimate, taxpaying “ganjaprenneur.” What the critics are saying: Fine examines how the American people have borne the massive economic and social expenditures of the failed Drug War, which is “as unconscionably wrong for America as segregation and DDT.” A captivating, solidly documented work rendered with wit and humor.  -Kirkus (Starred Review) In his entertaining new book…(Fine) successfully illuminates an unusual world where cannabis growers sing “Happy Birthday” to (friendly law enforcement) while crossing their fingers against the threat of federal raids.This informative book will give even hardened drug warriors pause. -Publisher’s Weekly “Fine has written a well-researched book that uses the clever tactic of making the moral case for ending marijuana prohibition by burying it inside the economic case.” -Bill Maher in The New York Times “An important book.” -Michael Pollan http://youtu.be/W-i79S13YPA via Doug Fine // Too High To Fail.    

Sign the petition, Be the CHANGE!

go to: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-marijuana-federal-controlled-substance-act-and-allow-states-decide-how-they-want-regulate-it/lzSd9fcG

Bustin Loose with Chuck Brown

http://youtu.be/D780hW7nsas

Chuck Brown: An Elegy for Chocolate City

On the legacy of the go-go pioneer

By Jeff Chang on May 22, 2012

I first saw Chuck Brown in the summer of 1987 at an all-ages show at the Celebrity Hall not far from Howard University. During the day I was working as an apprentice labor organizer alongside a Chicano from West Berkeley and a Japanese American from Santa Cruz, and they had joined me that evening out of boredom. Looking back, the three of us must have presented a spectacle — three non-blacks from California five years above the median age. Earlier that week we had driven across the Anacostia River to knock on doors and leaflet residents in the weed-strewn projects of Southeast. When we came back across the bridge we saw flag-wearing picketers outside the Capitol building carrying signs that bore the image of Oliver North and read, "He told the truth." Washington, D.C. still mirrors America's grand divide. The Celebrity Hall felt like somewhere else entirely — perhaps the vibrant Chocolate City that George Clinton had named. We were now in C.C., not D.C. The kids were pointing and laughing and ribbing us. They asked if we were lost, where our cameras were, did we even know how to dance? We were amused. Then the music started. Suddenly we were allin it together. And here was Chuck Brown, a nearly 50-year-old man with gold fronts, sporting wraparound glasses and a black hat, leading several hundred teenagers cranking — HARD! — to a genius medley of "Go-Go Swing" (a rewrite of D.C. native Duke Ellington's classic), Lionel Hampton's "Midnight Sun," Eddie Jefferson's "Moody's Mood for Love," and the Woody Woodpecker theme. Between songs, the percussion section went off, the dancing got really serious, and Chuck shouted out the kids in the audience by name as if he was Mister Señor Love Daddy. The kids started chanting, "Chuck baby don't give a fuck!" On cue, he'd reply, "That ain't true." "Chuck baby don't give a fuck!" "I love all of you!" The band did not stop for hours. The heat was withering. But you never wanted to leave this kind of joy. http://youtu.be/JM1vSfrQQgQ Chuck Brown was Chocolate City to me. And in C.C., as the real Black Clinton had pointed out, many ironclad laws of pop gravity did not apply. For a time go-go and hip-hop grew up together, close cousins in a time when "breaks" were not a chance for people to catch a quick cigarette outside, but the moment they were working hardest inside. Yet in C.C., unlike in the Bronx, flesh-and-blood musicians still ruled. Dancers moved to two-hour song suites yoked together with steaming fatback breaks of drums, percussion, and bass pulls. DJs played only when the band rested. As they cued up their records, they cursed the day they had refused to take trumpet lessons. Chuck Brown was the reason. He had figured out what bandleaders in other cities would not until it was too late. Instead of the songs, he realized the transitions between the songs— the percussive solos, hyped-up shout-outs, and church-style call-and-response — were the draw. What DJ Kool Herc was doing for the Bronx, Chuck Brown was doing for C.C. But Brown was a general leading dance bands to victory. After reinventing the dance band format, Chuck personally nurtured every notable go-go band of the next three decades. His manager, Tom Goldfogle, once said Chuck had single-handedly created hundreds of jobs. In most cultural movements, there are many authors. In go-go, however, everyone agrees that there was only one Chuck. Chuck Brown was born on August 22, 1936 in Gaston, North Carolina, and grew up singing and playing piano in the Mount Zion Holiness Church. In her excellent new bookGo-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City, former Washington Postreporter Natalie Hopkinson describes the poverty in which Brown grew up: "His calloused hands tell of the cotton he picked traveling from farm to farm in North Carolina and Virginia, living in sharecropper shanty houses. His down-home presence manifests the humility of someone who lived in servants' quarters when his mother worked as a domestic." Brown moved with his family to the District at age 8 and began working odd jobs. "I was a bricklayer, tractor-trailer driver, sparring partner, ex-boxer, you know? A lot of good things: ex-pool player, ex-hustler you might say. Back in those days, the word hustler meant you were a good gambler — pool, cards, craps, and women," he told me. "I hadn't made up my mind what I wanted to do." While in his mid-20s, he shot a man — in self-defense, he said — and when the man died, Brown served eight years in Lorton Correctional Complex. The stint focused him. He had a guitar made for him for five packs of cigarettes. When Brown stepped out into freedom, he returned to a D.C. that had become majority black, but was still as segregated as when Leadbelly had sung about it in "The Bourgeois Blues." "Black people didn't really have access to the popular clubs," says Charles C. Stephenson Jr., the co-author with George Washington University professor Kip Lornell of the essential book The Beat: Go-Go's Fusion of Funk and Hip-Hop. "People started using the term 'go-go' to describe where they were going, which really was the physical location. Instead of saying I'm going to a dance, they say, 'I'm going to a go-go.'" Go-gos were held in high school gyms, Knights of Columbus halls, and church centers, and this is where Brown began playing professionally. Brown backed Jerry Butler and Lloyd Price, but the one gig that influenced him the most was Tommy Smith's Los Latinos, a band working at the confluence of black jazz boogaloo and Afro-Latino bugalú. In 1966, he brought the idea of the expanded percussion section into his first band, the Soul Searchers, anticipating the funk fusions of soul, mambo, jazz, and other Afro-diasporic rhythms that would fire the breakbeat revolution. In many interviews, Brown has discussed hearing Grover Washington Jr.'s minor 1974 soul jazz hit, "Mr. Magic" (written by the calypso-influenced Trinidadian American jazz percussionist Ralph McDonald), as the key to the birth of go-go. The beat took him back to the rhythm of the sanctified church of his childhood — "Duhnt duhnt-duhnt da-duhnt duhnt-duhnt-dunht." It clocked in at an easy 99 beats per minute, much slower than the disco tempos of the day that were reaching 140. By slowing the tempo, Chuck could make for syncopation, call-and-response, and a continuous mix with breakdowns. In 1976, he debuted a new groove for his audiences, discarding dozens of lyrics and two drummers to get it right. Three years later, distilled into a seven-minute single called "Bustin' Loose," the sound of go-go went to no. 1 on the Billboard R&B chart, and Chuck Brown became the biggest black artist since Marvin Gaye left the District. http://youtu.be/XHHNXesVW88 One of C.C.'s unwritten laws is that the more successful you are outside of the District, the more hardship you will likely face within it, either from a collective feeling of "they forgot about us" betrayal or a horrible run of bad luck and fuckery. (Call it the C.C. Curse, and blame it for Why Go-Go Never Conquered the World.) For Brown, the latter happened. Former manager Reo Edwards estimates the record made $13 million for the indie label Source Records and that Brown received only $13,000. Source Records went belly-up and the Soul Searchers broke up. While more aggressive young bands like Trouble Funk, Rare Essence, and Experience Unlimited — all of whom Chuck had mentored — began to rise, he fell back into the shadows. But as if to affirm C.C.'s alterna-logic, the older Brown got, the better and more relevant he became. When Brown got the band back together, he slowed the beat down to the proper tempo, took long, tasty, George Benson vocalese-y solos, and highlighted the percussion section. In 1985, at 49, an age when most former pop stars are on a cruise ship, in a free clinic, or opening for Manny Pacquiao, Chuck made a stunning return with "We Need Some Money," a timely bird-flip to Reaganomics built on a groove that he had lifted and extended, DJ Premier–style, from two bars of saxophonist LeRoy Fleming's solo in the fading seconds of "Bustin' Loose." Then Chris Blackwell came to town, hoping that with a movie and some albums he could make go-go the next reggae. But Blackwell's plan crashed and burned, leaving bands like Trouble Funk and E.U. with small national hits and scorched careers back home in C.C. Go-go indeed went global, as the beat was incorporated first into rap and then into jazz and new jack swing. But in C.C. the scene turned ugly. At a Chuck Brown gig in Adams Morgan in 1992, a man was shot and killed. City officials closed up clubs and tried to ban the music. Brown continued to play. He mentored a new generation of harder, gangsta-oriented bands led by Anwan "Big G" Glover and the Backyard Band. He recorded the best-selling jazz and blues album The Other Side with the late Eva Cassidy. By 2001, he was at the height of his popularity, playing three to six times a week to jam-packed venues in the DMV — the name D.C., Maryland, and Virginia residents call the Beltway and its no-longer-vanilla suburbs. That year he cut perhaps the defining set of his career, captured on Put Your Hands Up! The Tribute Concert to Chuck Brown in celebration of his 65th birthday. It began with "Mister Magic," climaxed with performances by Big G and Lil Benny, and concluded with the "Go-Go Swing" medley. He told me, "See, I haven't retired, because I'm still inspired, and I'm still getting hired. And I thank God for that. Haha ha ha ha!" (He even laughed that contagious laugh in rhythm — in this case, clavé.) I got to follow Chuck around for a story for Vibe during a massive (but unsuccessful) grassroots petition effort to have him nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The campaign was about more than a plaque. By now it was clear to everyone that Chuck Brown was the beating heart of Chocolate City, the man in whom everyone saw himself and one whose boundless generosity encompassed them all. I quickly learned that covering Chuck was as much about covering his fans as him. That's how he liked it. There was Kevin "Kato" Hammond, the founder of the pioneering TMOTTGOGO.com website, who said, "Talking about Chuck is like talking about Stevie Wonder, talking about Duke Ellington." There was Barbara McCrea, a grandmother who had frequented Soul Searchers' gigs beginning in 1968, and who shed a tear remembering how her deceased husband would dance all night. There was the 41-year-old Linda Poulson, her shy daughter standing beside her, gawking, who told Chuck, "I tell you what. I got 27 years of dancing to you. I done aged, and you haven't!" There was the super-fly Monica, an advanced-degree speech therapist in camouflage and denim who was singing along as Chuck led the crowd through "Moody's Mood for Love": "Oh, when we are one, I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid!" Four generations of Chocolate City grew up with the music of Chuck Brown. Now demographers debate over whether D.C. is reaching another tipping point, whether it will soon again be majority white. Beneath the grief over Chuck's passing, below the joy of the spontaneous block parties that broke out last week in his honor, is an anxiety that a whole way of life may be passing as well. One night I ended up at a club on a lonely Maryland country road. Its weather-beaten wooden marquee read, "THE CLASSICS, FRI — CHUCK BROWN." It was after midnight and all the way live: sisters in white zebra caps and stylishly ripped and airbrushed tees, bandanna-ed brothers back from college, local hardrocks in shorts and sockless leather shoes downing Moet straight out of the bottle, and a braided girl in the corner over there freaking like an ice skater, left hand on the iron pole, right leg back over her man's shoulder. The band played Barry White, Sunshine Anderson, and Missy Elliott covers, originals like "Back It On Up (Sho Ya Right)," even Rare Essence classics like "One on One." (Rare Essence's James Funk and the brilliant late trombonist Lil Benny were featuring that night.) Down in the pit, the dancers surged with the music. "Tell me what you feel like doing!" And the crowd gave it up: "Wind me up, Chuck!" At the end of the show, the crew packed up the equipment. Some passed Rock and Roll Hall of Fame petitions among the club stragglers. Chuck went around to each of the 10 band members and all of the roadies, broke them off with the night's cut and joked with them. They all called him "Pops." Back in his white Town Car, it was now four in the morning, and he said, "My band, the people that work for me, yes indeed, they're all like my children. They kept the old man going all these years. Some of these kids coming out now — their parents met at my shows 20, 30 years ago. Fell in love, got married, had them, now they coming to my show. And they probably used to sneak out of the house, get whuppings coming to my show. I wish I could take some of them beatings for some of them. Hey, I feel for ya, but I can't reach ya! Haha ha ha ha ha!" Then he said quietly, "That was my dream — to create a sound for this town." I asked him about a saying he often used to end his show, what it meant. He produced a cassette and popped it in. It was an instrumental of a jazz trio playing a ballad — a languid piano and bass, a softly brushed snare and a high hat — and suddenly Chuck was singing those mysterious words in a passionate, spine-tingling vibrato: "No complaints and no regrets, I still believe in chasing dreams and placing bets." "So here's to life and every joy it brings," he sang low with the tape. "Here's to life, to dreamers and their dreams."

Forecasted Mass Growth Curve increasing for Industrial Hemp and Medical … – Stocks.com | GanjaNews.Org

PR Web

Even though the bottles contained only hemp – types of cannabis with really low amounts of active component THC grown for fibre and seed products – labels were considered provocative because, aside from the title, additionally they demonstrated a cannabis leaf coupled with a piece labelled “scratch and smile” which emits a cannabis resin smell.

Police carrying out a routine check from the premises grabbed 20 bottles and billed the dog owner using the “incitement” offence which could carry as much as five years’ prison along with a €75,000 fine.

The incident was at Le Rancy, an eastern suburb of Paris – among the rare well-off districts of Seine-Saint-Denis, a generally disadvantaged area regarded as a hub for drug trafficking.

The manufacturers of Cannabia really are a German firm, Dupetit Natural Items, which states it’s permission to market it within the EU.

The EU recognises numerous hemp types – with low THC – for uses including animal bedding and insulation or (the seed products) for making an edible oil. France is Europe’s biggest producer.

The United States however restrictions the growing of a myriad of cannabis, including hemp.

Photo: world wide web.dupetit.p Read more: http://www.ganjanews.org/police-seize-cannabis-beer-the-connexion.html#ixzz299c7jLu7 Forecasted Mass Growth Curve increasing for Industrial Hemp and Medical … – Stocks.com | GanjaNews.Org.

Soundtrack to paradise on a Friday Night

  http://soundcloud.com/leefoss/lee-foss-modern-amusement  

How To Play With His Balls During Sex

I’m a balls girl. I’ve just always felt comfortable hanging out in the ball region. Even when I first started hooking up below-the-belt with guys and all of my friends only did the absolute basics (ie, just focusing on the shaft), I ventured into ball town. I’m not exactly sure why, but it seemed to come naturally to me. (The instinct, that is. Not the balls.) I take full responsibility for converting my three sophomore year roommates into ballers back in college. Until I talked to them about the topic, they had never gone near the guys. You’re welcome, all future hook-ups of those girls! Anyway, my cojones expertise really shined for today’s positions, the Randy Recliner. Unfortunately, D. and I didn’t have access to a poolside recliner (or the desire to get arrested for public indecency at a public New York City pool), but we did come up with a good substitute. We used a lounge chair with the ottoman pushed against it. We started in position but without penetration while D. stimulated me from behind. Then once I was ready, I lifted my hips and he pushed into me. The whole thrusting thing was kinda weird…I sort of just alternated sliding back and forth and bouncing up and down — very, very carefully. And here’s where the ball play comes in… Just like the Kama Sutra claims, it’s a great position for fondling the boys. So while he used his hands to work on me (gotta love manual stimulation during sex!), I used mine to work on him. I gently pulled them away from his body and traced them with a finger tip. (Sometimes I carefully scratch them with my nails or massage them too.) And the result was — I hate to use cheesy similes, but in this case I think it’s necessary — as explosive as fireworks. Seriously, so, so good. I really think the ball TLC had something to do with D.’s enjoyment. His orgasm just seemed so much more intense than usual. I actually watched D.’s toes curl in pleasure. He also kicked his feet and bounced his knees! Totally different view of an orgasm seeing the lower half of a guy’s body! Definitely try it sometime. (And bonus, I didn’t have to feel at all self-conscious about my O-face. I know, I know — I shouldn’t anyway. But I could really let loose without worrying that I looked like I was trying to open a can or something.) Does your guy have any slightly strange movements or faces he makes when he comes? Do you? Are you into playing with a guy’s balls? Any techniques to share? Read more: How To Play With His Balls During Sex - Cosmopolitan

How Are Vaginas Supposed To Smell?

One of my gynecology patients approached me this week to ask about her "V-pourri," the scent emanating from her nether regions. When I was writing my bookWhat's Up Down There? Questions You’d Only Ask Your Gynecologist If She Was Your Best Friend, I got so many questions about how coochies smell that I was inspired to write a whole chapter about it. With nicknames like "Fish Taco," it's no wonder we freak out. Many women I meet absolutely despise their vaginas, as if they completely buy into whatever childhood messages they were fed about how the vagina is "dirty" and "bad." For these women, any odor wafting up from down there acts as a big stinky banner of how much they hate their girlness. With vagina nicknames such as "fish taco," "crotch mackerel," "cod canal," "fish factory," "fuzzy lap flounder," "tuna town," and "raw oyster," it’s no wonder we worry about how we smell. But I say it's time to change all that. Why should we hate what's normal, healthy, and part of the rich female experience? One of the most common questions people ask me regarding what it's like to be a gynecologist is, "Doesn't it stink?" They wrinkle their noses, furrow their brows, and raise eyebrows, as if there's something wrong with me for loving my job. Lying underneath that question I often see something that borders on misogyny, as if women are nothing more than a vaginal odor to be avoided. From the time we're children, we're taught that normal bodily functions are "yucky." Pee, poop, and privates all elicit a "pee-yew," so it's no wonder we grow up obsessed with how we smell.

"Roses" via Shutterstock.

Vaginas Are SUPPOSED To Smell!

Ladies, vaginas are supposed to smell. Let me quote my heroine, Eve Ensler, the Queen of Vaginas, whose Vagina Monologues have done as much for the vagina as Martin Luther King, Jr. did for civil rights:

My vagina doesn't need to be cleaned up. It smells good already. Don't try to decorate. Don't believe him when he tells you it smells like rose petals when it's supposed to smell like pussy. That's what they're doing -- trying to clean it up, make it smell like bathroom spray or a garden. All those douche sprays -- floral, berry, rain. I don't want my pussy to smell like rain. All cleaned up like washing a fish after you cook it. I want to taste the fish. That's why I ordered it.

Amen, sister. It's supposed to smell like pussy. Sure, hygiene plays a role, and just like washing your pits and your feet, cleaning yourself down there is part of being an accepted member of society (not to mention being a conscientious sexual partner). Most women even shower, shave, and primp a bit before visiting the gynecologist. I often notice wafts of perfume emanating from the nether regions. I appreciate the respect and notice the effort, but really, it's not necessary. We gynecologists are not as sensitive as you might imagine.

What Should You Smell Like?

So how is the vagina supposed to smell? It depends. When you're straight out of the shower, your coochie may have no smell at all. When you've just finished running a marathon, it may have a strong musky odor from all the sweat glands. When you're menstruating or giving birth, the flinty-iron smell of blood prevails. When yeast overgrows in the vagina, you may smell like freshly baked-bread or a good malt beer. Right after you've had intercourse, you may smell faintly bleach-like, as semen has a classic odor of its own. And when certain normal bacteria overgrow, they release amines that smell -- yup, you guessed it -- like fish. Every vagina has its own special smell -- a combination of the normal bacteria that live in your vagina, what you eat, how you dress, your level of hygiene, your bowel habits, how much you sweat, and what your glands secrete. Remember that the glands near the vagina also secrete pheromones, meant to attract a sexual partner. So you don't want to deodorize your va-jay-jay so much that it smells like rain. Doing so thwarts the primal function of what your smell is supposed to accomplish. Plus, it interferes with the vagina's natural pH balance and can lead to a whole host of gynecological conditions. So own your odor, girlfriends. Sure, if you're worried, see a gynecologist to make sure your vagina is healthy and normal. But as long as everything's kosher down there, accept that your coochie smells exactly how it's supposed to smell.

Want to Know More About Your V-Pourri?

Here are some questions I answer in What's Up Down There:

• My crotch gets extra funky sometimes. Not to quote a douche commercial, but why do I have that not-so-fresh feeling down there?
• Aside from douching, are there natural things you can do to make your vagina smell more fresh?
• What should I do if my partner doesn't like to go down on me?

You'll find the empowering and reassuring answers to these questions and more in What's Up Down There: Questions You’d Only Ask Your Gynecologist If She Was Your Best Friend. Three cheers for vaginas, Dr. Lissa Dr. Lissa Rankin is an OB/GYN physician, an author, a nationally-represented professional artist, and the founder of Owning Pink, an online community committed to building authentic community and empowering women to get -- and keep -- their "mojo." Owning Pink is all about owning all the facets of what makes you whole -- your health, your sexuality, your spirituality, your creativity, your career, your relationships, the planet, and YOU. Dr. Rankin is currently redefining women's health at the Owning Pink Center, her practice in Mill Valley, California. September 28, 2010 10:00 am by Lissa Rankin in Health How Are Vaginas Supposed To Smell? | BlogHer.