marijuana | Parallel Narratives

I knew of John Sinclair from John Lennon’s song about him on Some Time in New York City and had a vague idea that he was known for being busted for pot. In fact, I still associate my earliest awareness of the term political prisoner with John Sinclair. I didn’t really know what it meant back then, but I knew it wasn’t supposed to happen here.

Then I saw this book at a local head shop. It was the 70s in a college town, teenagers hanging out in head shops was normal. The book was revelatory for me. It not only contained Sinclair’s writings, which I admit I didn’t read thoroughly at first, but it is also full of radical illustrations, pictures of MC5 concerts and posters, protests, etc.

I pulled it off the shelf today and leafed through it for the first time in decades. The first page (text pictured) pretty much encapsulates perfectly the scene that I would aspire to, for better or worse, for much of my young life, propelling me across thousands of miles to hundreds of concerts and protests and smoke-ins and gatherings and friendships. Definitely for the better.

Much about the country has changed since my youth. One of the things I miss is the 4th of July smoke-in. The Youth International Party (YIP) organized smoke-ins annually across the US through the 1970s and into the early 1980s. The annual 4th of July smoke-in at Lafayette Park in DC became a counterculture tradition, as did the Ann Arbor Hash Bash. We all knew that the cops hated us but we outnumbered them so there wasn’t much they would do, although some did feature cop riots over the years, 1979 in DC comes to mind. The good news is that after all these years much of the country has finally come to its senses, legalizing marijuana to some degree, one of the few changes for the better since the coming of Reagan

https://archive.org/details/July4thSmoke-inAtWashingtonDc