The Dope-Copters

John Butch Preston

johnhprestonauthor.com

My name is Ned. The dope-copters swooped noisily up and down the creek yesterday looking for marijuana plants. Don’t they know that each time they destroy a good ol’ boy’s plot here in East Kentucky the Mexican cartel gets a new AK47? It is simple economics: a lot of people smoke marijuana and if they can’t get it from the locals it leaves a vacuum which has to be filled, and that vacuum is quickly re-supplied by Mexican pot or pot from states that have legalized it. So, who loses out—as usual, eastern Kentuckians.

     I know of at least one crippled-up miner in the area who depends on his plot to supplement his disability income so he can support a wife and two kids. And I suspect it helps a few other people get by in this distressed area. So why is this state government supporting the Mexicans and other states while depriving its own people of these material benefits? I guess it’s just another case of our government working backwards, as usual.

     The pot-copter force must have a quota they have to come up with everyday, because they’ve been known to swoop down and take a single plant out of the backyard of an old woman suffering from arthritis, who needs it to help alleviate her pain. Naturally the government feels it is their duty to destroy a whole field, but how can they justify taking somebody’s stash, i.e., a few plants grown for personal use. Why should that be a crime?

     However, few arrests are made from these pot raids. Even if they find it on your own property, they can’t prove you did it. So mostly it’s just a training exercise for the National Guard. That’s the way, of course, that they can justify the expense of it. The copter force was created because a 1988 Supreme Court decision watered down the Forth Amendment to our Bill of Rights against illegal search and seizer to aid Regan’s war on drugs. Your private land is no longer private, and the pot-copters are basically thieves. But while they may eradicate as many plants as they can find, they can’t eradicate one’s need for it.

     Neurobiologist tell us that the desire to alter one’s consciousness is innate, that we are born with the need to change our perception of reality occasionally. Witness small children spinning until dizzy in order to induce visual hallucinations, or older ones wanting a sugar buzz. Look at all the people who get drunk on Saturday nights. Or why we need to induce a mild euphoria with so much coffee, tea, and nicotine in our lives.

     The ancient Scythians were the first recorded people to inhale Marijuana some 700 years BC. The world’s most famous philosopher, Plato, was said to have indulged in a yearly ritual of ingesting ergot, an organic form of LSD. Carl Sagen used pot to give him insights into human nature. I knew of the head of the American Psychiatric Association who smoked it, as well as a former Chief Justice of the Kentucky Supreme Court who indulged. Why, heck fire, I’ve even seen a Trump supporter smoke it on his front porch here on the creek!

     Marijuana causes a change in one’s perception of reality and intensifies one’s senses, and, as a result, helps one temporarily forget all the burdens one carries about. I don’t see any harm in that if it is done in a proper setting, away from children.

     I personally don’t care whether they legalize it or not—but Kentucky needs to, and should decriminalize it. As for me, I am of the Pentecostal persuasion and we know how to create our own high on Sunday mornings.