Deep Cuts of Weed in Guam – Choogle On! #125

I'm listening to Uncle Eid's podcast.

Let's all have fun and have fun.

Well, I'm going to need a warm bath after all this, that's for sure.

I'm dripping wet and I'm underneath one of the big arches here.

I'm going to need a warm bath.

Helicopters are coming, there's police everywhere.

Afros seem to be the order of the day.

Helicopters are chasing the people away.

Indeed, it's a terrible idea to try and qualify one's work before you jump into it,

but there's no way around it.

What I present.

What I present to you today is a little hard to explain.

It's like a matriska doll of podcasts.

It's like recursive podcast about a podcast about a podcast

because this story begins in 1996 with some AM radio footage from the island of Guam

and then goes to North America some years later.

And then just last year in, what, 2018, went to Okayama, Japan at a goat farm

where I attempted to sew it all up.

And now I'm on the island of Guam and I'm on a much tinier island than the already small island

by North American standards of Guam in Indonesia with the news about a recreational cannabis bill

making its way through government, but there's all the conundrums associated around it

and blah, blah, blah, which I'll, I suppose I'll get into.

Actually, I have no idea what's coming.

You know, I've been waiting for.

An afternoon with nothing on the agenda and a desk and a microphone to sew this episode together.

And it's taken since 1996.

A cassette tape from an AM radio to do this.

The short version is AM radio in Guam talking about my industrial hemp products

and then medical marijuana and now recreational cannabis.

I'm using these changes.

There's an interchangeably because I've done absolutely no preparation, but damn it.

Today is the day that this podcast will be completed.

I have no Internet access.

It's a hot day in February.

I got a cup of tea and a smoke.

Shall we then?

A journey.

Spending decades, continents, islands.

And blah, blah, blah.

10 minutes in front of 9 o'clock on Telecrane.

Your great success.

And we got a special guest in here.

We got Dave.

Dave, what's your last name?

I'm still special.

I don't have a last name.

Special Dave.

From Uncle Weed.

Emporium.

I'm good.

Just call me Uncle Weed.

Okay, Uncle Weed.

I don't know what crazy thing to call me Uncle Weed.

Very cool.

All right.

Do you have, I see you got some information out there in front of us.

How long is it?

I want to ask you.

I see questions about the legal ramifications of having cannabis and things like that.

Now, we all know marijuana is legal.

Is it legal?

Yeah, apparently, yes.

And bad.

Well, not bad, but just illegal.

And how long, I know back in the 20s, up until then.

Well, up until the early.

You do the talking.

Up until the early 40s, hemp was used for almost everything in North America.

Everything.

It was used for everything.

It was used for clothes.

And not just rope.

People, you know, make that.

Clothes, paper, sails.

I mean, the boats that Columbus and Magellan sailed around, you know, did their voyage on,

all made of hemp.

The ropes were made of hemp.

Henry Ford was making cars, like the body panels out of hemp.

Building the sails were hemp.

You could make a car out of hemp?

Yeah.

I got pictures.

I mean, just pictures in his book.

And, I mean, just everything.

It's just remarkable all the stuff they've used hemp for.

Then they went ahead and they said, okay, now this is bad.

And what they did, the reason the term marijuana came up, because if the government starts

calling all the farmers, hemp is illegal.

And they go, what?

Hemp?

What's hemp illegal for?

So they said, it's this weird Mexican term.

Marijuana is just a Mexican word for cannabis, for hemp.

They said, oh, it's this weird stuff called marijuana.

All the weird people are doing this.

And so we've got to make this illegal.

Everyone's going, wow, man.

Hemp?

Well, whatever.

And then as soon as they made it illegal, then they brought it back legal again because

of World War II started up.

And at the time when it was illegal in the States, the U.S. was importing all the hemp

from the Philippines.

Then Japan took over the Philippines, so their hemp supply was cut off.

So they came out with this video, Hemp for Victory, and they had all the farmers in the

Midwest start growing hemp again.

That's why in the Midwest, you still see a lot of ditch weed in Nebraska and Kansas and

Illinois.

You hear all this kind of stuff about hemp weed, the ditch weed, which is just old industrial

hemp.

And so now, I think what's going to happen, like a lot of countries now are either tolerating

marijuana and also going ahead and growing the industrial hemp again.

Last year in Canada, they put in seven legal hemp fields, the first legal hemp field grown

in North America in 50 years.

Last year, there was a guy in the States, I got this article here, a guy in California,

and he put in a half an acre.

And he had everything sanctioned by the local government in California to grow a half acre

of industrial hemp.

They're all monitored.

But two or three days before harvest, the feds came in and overstepped their boundaries

and plowed the whole field under.

Plowed the field under and burned the whole thing.

Wow.

I mean, this is just big-tastic.

It was 3% THC.

I mean, you have to smoke the whole field.

You have to get a buzz.

And I mean, in California, I don't think there's much of a shortage of viticology smoking

in Canada.

I come to you from a goat farm where a typhoon has mildly abated for the time being, at least.

I'm surrounded by goats having their lunch while I'm having a smoke.

And I bring you a story from deep in the archive.

Indeed, this transmission comes from 19...

1995, on the island of Guam.

And I'm going to tell you a few stories and a few things about Guam because, like many people

who spent time there, you sort of become an evangelist or a storyteller of some way about

this geopolitical, geographical anomaly in many ways.

And I'm also going to tell you stories to not only inform and edify your brain about Guam,

but also to compensate for the fact that this audio that I'm going to share is quite lousy.

You see, this audio comes from an appearance on a radio show called Deep Cuts.

I'll get to that in a minute.

That was transmitted over AM radio during a power outage.

At that time, well, maybe still, power outages were frequent in Guam because there's these

brown tree snakes and they bite up into the cords and the wires.

Plus, there's frequent typhoons, which I guess the typhoon kind of got me thinking about

Guam today.

Anyhoo.

The power was out and someone recorded this radio broadcast to a cassette tape from AM

radio during a power outage.

I got the cassette tape and then, well, it's been sitting in storage in one way or another

since 1995.

Dug it out a number of years ago.

A buddy did a little bit of audio kung fu to it to try to clean it up, but I'm just

going to say it sounds like crap.

So I'm going to break it up into a few chunks and intersperse with some stories about Guam.

Cool?

All right, let me light a smoke.

I mean, they're pretty ridiculous, but this year they're going to try it again.

They're doing it on native land in Arizona.

They're going to start drawing a few of...

Woody Harrelson, the actor, is getting involved in that.

Yeah, there's all kinds of people getting involved with it.

In some of the hint journals, I get quotes from Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein and all

these fashion people.

There's a lot of politicians.

There's a lot of people.

There's a lot of politicians.

and justices. A lot of the legal people are totally in favor of legalization because you

think of the millions of dollars that's spent on this marijuana trip, you know, incarcerating

people, $30,000 a year to incarcerate someone for a year, a totally non-violent offender,

someone just kicking back at his house. I mean, what's the difference between kicking

back and doing that after work and kicking back with a couple of beers, you know?

And what I think it is, is the government hasn't found a way to make money off it.

Not everyone wants to make beer at home. It's for the taxes, for death, it's for people

to make money. Everyone can grow cannabis at home without much cost. You know, Philip

Morris, and we've seen the last couple of years what kind of power the tobacco companies

have. Absolutely. And so there's just some kind of way to make money with it.

We'll be right back.

Micronesia. Micronesia, as its name implies, consists of thousands of islands. But you

combined all these islands together in one landmass, and it would be smaller than the

state, the American state of Rhode Island. However, these islands are spread across an

area larger than the continental United States. So you have these tiny little islands. So

Guam is the biggest of all of them by a considerable margin. So it's kind of the economic

and transportation hub of the region. Though, and I'll talk about this more later, like

going from island to island is quite an arduous adventure. Back in the olden days, people

would navigate by the stars, great book called Starship and the Canoe, and where the bong

water, bong tree, bong water, where the bong tree goes. Anyway, there's some books about

this you can read about. The ancient navigators would go out on outrigger canoes, and they

would navigate by the stars and their eyes and their toe.

And undertake enormous journeys, in some cases going from the island of Yap to the islands

of Palau to quarry giant stone wheels that they would bring back to the island of Yap

to use as currency. And still to this day, these stone wheels are used as dowries for

buying property and other significant financial transactions. The value of the stone was determined

by the arduousness, arduity? I don't know, of the journey.

Rather than a mineral compound or a size or anything like that. But you look at these

stones and you think about them bringing them back on an outrigger canoe, and you're like

holy fuck. Especially when you fly between the islands, and you think, oh yeah, I'm up

in the air, I'll be able to see some islands. You go a couple hours without seeing a speck,

and then all of a sudden a speck appears and there's a runway on that speck of land, and

a plane lands on it, wow. Anyway, I digress. So, Guam, um, Guam, um, Guam, Guam, Guam, Guam,

I've been in the news a bit recently, and I usually try not to put any kind of date

stamp on these, but, with geopolitics being what they are, and, uh, missiles and whatnot,

North Korea, um, Guam floats into the news every so often into the mainstream public

consciousness. Yet day to day these people live and exist and go about their, their lives

and every once in a while break that barrier of public consciousness. Because Guam is a

territory or colony, as it were, of the United States. What I mean by that is Guam, uh, they

elect a congressperson who goes to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, yet this

person, like the representative from American Samoa and a few other places, does not have

the ability to vote in the House of Representatives. So remember that thing about no taxation without

representation? Yeah. Yeah, that's not entirely the case.

Um, Guam has its own elected legislature and governor of the island, and they have

this kind of awkward relationship with the U.S. You see, on Guam, there is somewhere

between four and six significant U.S. military bases. There's a giant, um, Air Force base

at the north end of the island that has landing strips big enough for the Concorde, which

I saw there, stealth bomber, fleets of the, I don't know, the big fucking bombers, I don't

know about this stuff, but it's a massive Air Force base at the north end of the island,

the tip of the spear for the Pacific fleet. There's also a huge, what they call, appropriately

enough, big Navy base in Apra Harbor. There's also, was a naval air station that, while

I was there, was decommissioned, and all the housing given to the Guam government, who

then turned it into government offices, so you'd go to, like, get a business license,

for example, and you'd go into an, uh, an office that was once a condo, like an apartment,

so it had a kitchen and a bedroom, so you could, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh,

a bedroom, so you could go up there and take a nap during the daytime, which the civil

servants duly availed themselves of. And, uh, and in the early 90s, I was there from,

like, 94 to 96, more or less, the, the government started to decommission this place and build

up in Okinawa. Now, U.S. military has some conundrums in Okinawa, so they're, again,

building up, uh, Guam. There's also, um, a, a NASA listening station, and, uh, a variety

of other, other, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh,

uh.

There's a lot of, uh, of майor u. I, I, uh, um, lots of stuff that has done over

the years, like, the environmentalists care them. And, um, they,- it's not even all for

the wanted.

is it that you go you know like it's a size of like smaller than most u.s counties how often

do you go out of the county you know like so 30 miles is 30 miles you know um so there's this big

u.s military presence there and there's also a massive tourism industry when i was there

was primarily japanese tourists now it's mostly korean tourists because

you can get there from seoul or tokyo in less than three hours so you knock off work friday

meet the family at the airport uh blaze on over for a quick weekend bender and fly back and be

back in the office on monday you might want to stay longer i would recommend it

this is present day uncle we jumping in to say yes i know this jumps all over the place and the

audio quality is abhorrent but it's important so stick with it stay for the goats people some

people try and separate the

hemp issue and the marijuana issue but i think it's too close in there trying to really do that

i think what's going to happen with the states you're going to keep on stalling and stalling

i mean bill clinton um you know he gets in the office and you know him and al gore were you know

they both were cannabis users at one time and i mean they've been pretty much useless at any kind

of positive uh positive thing and i think what's going to happen in the u.s is all these other

countries canada um england's growing hemp now it's industrial of course um amsterdam like holland

is uh very very relaxed and tolerant have you ever been to the

cannabis cup i haven't been to cannabis cup i hope to go this year i've been to uh i've been to

amsterdam and i mean it was remarkable and i thought before i went there with the toilet i

heard about it was really tolerant but i thought it was going to be city and nothing gets done and

everyone sleeps in the moon and just stumbles down to seven eleven then you fell into the same

stigma and i'm surprised because well i was younger i was living in america you know i was

living in utah at the time you know and so you don't hear much positive things about cannabis

living in utah and i went there and the town just goes on some people are interested some people are

it's no big deal but it's a big deal and i think it's a big deal and i think it's a big deal and i

think it's a big deal people it's all very responsible and the same thing just being down

in palau i mean things get done you know it's not like it's a big deal no one gets hurt and uh

and at the end of the day life goes on you know and do you believe you believe in legalization

marijuana oh absolutely i think there's no question it's time to do it and uh i mean i

think it's time for people to start going stop you know hiding behind everything going oh well

you know but i can't i think the first thing that's got to happen in order to save this planet

though is uh is for industrial hemp for widespread use of industrial hemp you look at all these

things that are you hear about oil spills and even the oil spills and the oil spills and the

i mean go to afro harbor i'm sure afro harbor looks a lot different now than it did years ago

as long as oil and crap is being dumped in here and if you look at all the things that um

that hemp can be used for cutting down the rainforest where i come from in canada 2020

forest and now there's i mean there's 2020 clear cuts i mean there's no it's huge acres and acres

it's pieces of land the size of glom in canada they're all just clear cut it's stump all it is

is stump because they're making paper pulp which is being made into toilet paper which to me is

ridiculous i'm not flying right just gave you that's not hemp paper

and uh the declaration of independence as we just talked about bible turning on hemp paper

why are we letting cutting down mature trees to make paper in order to be doing something i mean

hemp you grow a crop in six months people get hemp grows in every continent on the on the earth

except for uh the north and south pole we can literally turn around the rainforest situation

absolutely so quickly and um it's not like you know people are thinking well it's going to take

a couple years for it to go my goodness last year they gave out seven legal hemp licenses in canada

they didn't give out the license they tried to install it they didn't really

want to do it and said well we'll just give them the license in may because by then it's too late to

plant they've got the license they planted the next day planted an acre of of hemp in one day

six months later it harvested 18 foot plants and um in canada really canada's main exports are um

are uh are building materials like wood wood products and and uh and paper is also wood

part they're really pushing to replace it with that i think all these other countries are gonna

are gonna be going ahead and the us has been going so tied up in their political garbage

that they're not going to get around to doing it and they're going to be left

that left behind so that even in japan i have information here there's a town in japan where

before the u.s occupation after the war it was all there was all uh it goes through plenty of things

there's a town called miyasa which in japanese means beautiful ham which is i mean it was that's

pretty close to heaven and we stayed there for a while and it was i mean it was great this this

hemp that uh the backpack is made out of it comes from hungary and all the soviet army uniforms

before the soviet union broke up all came from hungary it's always going to hungary and poland

uniforms were the soviet union broke up and all of a sudden you had all these farmers the big

fields of hampton nothing to do with it so they some creative people from states and canada went

over and started importing it and now it's i mean this has only happened the last two years and it's

i mean it's ready to go i mean it's there and it's waiting i was always waiting for it from uh

from the politicians i mean i don't think there's i mean bill clinton in college he was doing it so

i mean i think it's time and i think it's uh we just gotta get it get it together okay we're gonna

do and and we'll discuss that we'll get into that deeper in a little while right now we're gonna

take a break and uh we're gonna do some mci time and we're gonna come back with rainy day women

that's the black crows right after this so there's this tourism industry so there's an area of

guam that's completely built up like a little i don't know it'd be like a little miniature

waikiki i suppose a big strip of massive resorty hotels along this beautiful bay that's now overrun

with tourists and duty-free shops and gun shooting ranges popular tourist activity you go in you pay

some money you get to shoot guns um if that's your thing i'm also a strip of massage parlors strip

bars duty-free stores tourist restaurants malls and uh the biggest kmart or maybe the only kmart

i don't know i don't know that i don't know these things um so it's a it's a weird dichotomy you got

you got all this military nest but you also have a proud local heritage and culture now

guam was first impacted by the quote-unquote western world when the spanish magellan came there

and right off the hop there was an adversarial relationship between the

spaniards and the local chamorro people there was the usual colonial things that happened which

uh it's heartbreaking so i'm not going to get into too much but the whole well you know what happened

to indigenous populations and it's really well it's up there's no other way to put it

fast forward a couple hundred years the u.s acquired guam along with the philippines and

puerto rico as a concession in the settlement of the spanish-american war and the chamorro people

and people of guam were then put under the auspices of the u.s and then during japan's

expansionist imperialist period in between

the great war and world war ii guam was occupied by the japanese and then

quote-unquote liberated or reoccupied whichever point of view whatever terminology

you want to use by the americans

so it's conundrums it's worth noting too that throughout micronesia

islands were also occupied by the germans the dutch were more in melanesia

so the military bases present an interesting conundrum because it brings all kinds of u.s money

and investment into guam but also brings all the problems that that brings like

i'll put them in the bucket of the lack of self-determination the dependence on the u.s

for economic survival and also you get a bunch of sailors coming in there and partying and yucking

it up and so you kind of get that decadence and hedonism that comes with that i won't

make too much of a statement on on that

foreign

You're home for the defense show.

20 minutes after 9 o'clock on your Friday nights.

It's me, Kelly, in here with you.

And we've got a special guest in the house tonight.

Uncle Reed is with us.

People call me special.

I'm starting to feel kind of weird.

Well, you are special, Dave.

And you're leaving Ireland.

I am.

Dave the stick guy.

You might know Dave as Dave the stick guy, right?

Yeah.

Everybody knows he has to do with the stick.

Every time I've ever talked about you, they went, oh, the stick guy?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because you make the colors totally stick.

Yeah, I do those on fire now.

And you didn't notice I had big patches of arm hair.

That's because of that.

Really?

Yeah.

Well, you seem to have made it through OK, which is nice.

When I was there from 94 to 96, I worked a few different jobs.

First of all, I was a tour guide on a sort of half submarine tour boat

that would go out into Apra Harbor, which was surrounded by big Navy.

I would, in Japanese, entertain and amuse and educate the guests.

Also in Korean, it's worth noting.

About the various shipwrecks, about the Navy base over there.

That ship was owned by John Wayne.

And right underneath us, there's two ships, one sunk in World War I,

one sunk in World War II that coincidentally landed sunk on top of each other.

So Guam has all kinds of dive sites.

This is where I learned to scuba dive.

On the submarine tour, we would come up on the reef, anchor onto a buoy

because you don't want to anchor right under the reef.

Although people knew.

People also fish with dynamite and bleach.

There were all kinds of other destructive activities.

So I did that job for a while, but after telling the same joke

seven, six, seven times a day for several months,

I couldn't stand my own humor anymore.

And the guys I worked with, well, it was kind of a bunch of knuckleheads.

So I went to get it.

I went and had to change jobs and became a teacher of Japanese language

at a local high school, JFK High School, John F. Kennedy High School.

But I quickly, and I taught this kind of colloquial business Japanese, meaning that

for young people growing up on Guam, at the time, and maybe it's still the case,

there was a big problem with ice, shabu-shabu, speed, methamphetamine.

And a lot of people were tempted into that way of life, of using or dealing or whatever.

Or else you get a job with the military, some military or government-related thing.

The Guam military is, the Guam government, rather, is rather bloated by any estimation.

And a lot of people do that because, well, it's a good livelihood.

Or else the third was tourism.

And so I really taught a style of Japanese that would help these young people,

this was my objective anyway, to get jobs in tourism.

So rather than teaching formal grammar, I was teaching more conversational

and functional Japanese, as it were.

However, I became a budget cut, and I ended up working for three months for free.

My job was eliminated.

I didn't get paid.

I went through a whole conundrum with ombudsman and sitting in at the superintendent's office.

I kind of got fired.

I kind of got fucked.

But the worst part was leaving my students because I really developed a bond with these kids.

I have some snapshots and some storage locker of these kids.

And I really had a wonderful experience teaching them, although it ended in heartbreak.

So then I got a job as a club host at a private beach club.

Now, this beach club was quite an anomaly because, you know, the vans would pick up the guests

at various hotels on the hotel strip I mentioned, and then they would go

through Anderson Airport.

There's a special permit to bring these guests through Anderson Air Force Base and then take them

down to this beach.

And then because the private beach club itself was landlocked, it would load them

up onto a six-wheel amphibious vehicle, a British military vehicle left over from World War II,

and take them along the headlands and the beach and the rocks to this private beach club,

which they would be welcomed at by some drummers playing log drums, a staff of oddballs and misfits,

including me and a couple others.

And then, you know, I started to work with other people who did the job of bilingual club host.

To say bilingual is almost an anomaly because it was all in Japanese.

And so I'd welcome them, tell them the bathroom's over there, there's horse riding,

there's four wheelers, lunch is at 12, it's like a barbecue buffet.

And then from there, I started to add some other tours because, you know, I'm that guy

who has a little bit of initiative about stuff, to do a snorkeling tour because I would see folks going

in trying to snorkel.

And they'd go in against the current, wouldn't know how to put their mask and snorkel on properly.

They would be slipping and falling on the slippery rocks.

I did all kinds of first aid, including a few that are, well, another story for another time.

But there was some ugly accidents that happened.

So I put together a snorkeling tour so I could show people how to do this and go swim

and look at the fish and shit.

And then I also put together a jungle hiking tour, which is really neat because with some

of the local staff there.

We put together a traditional Chamorro hut out there.

There was also latte stones, which are these stone pillars.

They have nothing to do with coffee.

They're these stone pillars that houses were once built on top of to,

so they wouldn't get flooded out.

And we built this traditional hut out there, which also became my smoking lounge.

And to think now that daily I took, I brought weed through the U.S. military installation,

seems a little ridiculous.

But, you know, a guy's got to do what he's doing.

He's got to do to keep his mind right for working.

So I take these tourists in the afternoon and show them the hut,

show them some caves where after World War II, and some of these stories are quite well-known,

where Japanese soldiers wouldn't believe the surrender announcement and stayed living

and hiding in caves throughout the Pacific, including Guam,

for years, sometimes decades afterwards.

So I pointed out some of those caves.

There was an unexploded grenade in the crook of a tree

that the tree had kind of grown around.

And then there's also all kinds of wild animals.

There's wild boar.

You know, the Spanish, when they came, had brought all sorts of non-indigenous animals,

including these big docile sort of oxen called carabao, and wild pigs.

And they were fucking wild, man.

These things were gnarly.

Yeah, they're birds and animals and stuff like that.

And I'd take them on this little thing and do the little spiel and try to bring some art and history

and culture to the mix.

Rather than just playing on the beach and drinking beer,

and not that there's anything wrong with those activities.

But, you know, art and culture is kind of my thing, man, and history and all that.

Sometimes at this job, they would, there would be groups that would come and camp overnight,

like either like a school group or, I remember, a beach soccer tournament.

Or sometimes it would be Japanese TV shows that would come and film.

And so I got to meet some famous Japanese actresses.

Oh, my gosh, lovely ladies.

And I was just swooned.

And my job was to help and ensure all the Japanese folks, the tourists, were having a good time.

Now, now I think of this, well, you know, back then I thought I could feel my brain atrophying every day a little bit.

I was getting stupider and dumber by the day, it felt like.

You know, you're just out in the sun, wearing nothing but board shorts.

Well, the other fellows I worked with always called them Nampa boys.

They were always...

Flirting with the ladies and setting up dates for the evening.

But, you know, my situation was a little different at the time.

And sometimes we'd do these overnight camps and I would get to sleep in a hammock or in a tent on the beach.

And I was getting paid hourly for this.

They would bring a whole tuna up and sashimi up the whole tuna.

And I would have a plate, like a heaping volcano-sized plate of sashimi, squirt a whole tube of wasabi on it.

Quite wonderful.

Except I felt my brain atrophying and I felt like, oh, my gosh, I'm going to turn into a Jimmy Buffet song if I'm not careful.

Also, the family that owned this beach resort, they also had the exclusive tobacco and liquor distributorship for these outer islands.

And, you know, bringing alcohol into indigenous populations who aren't accustomed to it genetically, I felt kind of gross and complicit with being part of that.

But that's a whole other story.

And I'm not one for jobs lasting more than 18 months.

So, anyway, so eventually I bailed on this job.

So, anyway.

There with me.

I know it's a little bit weird.

But it's a pleasant flashback for me listening to all this despite all the crackle and noise.

And, by the way, that music was from a guy I worked with on the submarine boat tour who drove the boats.

His name was Chris Jacobson.

And he had a little four-track analog recorder.

And every year he would make a cassette tape, which he would mail out to his family and friends as a festive gift.

I've tried to track this guy down and have been unable to do it over this intervening decade.

So, Chris Jacobson, he's from Rhode Island.

Spilt Milk Records was his erstwhile label.

If you're listening or if you know him, please tell him hello.

We'll be right back.

It's Sunday.

It's all day long.

I want to talk to you a little bit about marijuana throughout the world because you're a world traveler.

I am.

And I'm curious about the legalization factors in the rest of the world.

I mean, is marijuana looked upon with such a stigma in other countries as it is in the United States and Guam?

Well, every country is different.

A lot of places are not such a big deal.

I think you've got some extremes like Holland where it's very open.

But it's so open that it kind of gets a little bit ridiculous.

We've got American frat boys.

They're high-fiving.

But then in some countries like in Southeast Asia where it's, I mean, really open use.

And, I mean, just the local people.

It's just from in British Columbia.

I got some information about this here.

I'm from in British Columbia.

It's something like, I mean, 20% of the people there use it on a fairly regular basis.

There's another statistic I have here.

Oxford and Cambridge, these big highbrow universities in England, like something like 60% of the students are regular users.

These are the future world leaders and all this kind of stuff.

I mean.

In most places, it's just, there's nowhere, there's very few places where it's legal and there's no law against it.

But a lot of places it's tolerated.

In Palau, it's just very open and very tolerant.

It's just no big deal.

I think a lot of places just society kind of keeps it in check if you're being a moron.

I mean, obviously your uncle tells you, hey, you know, relax.

But I think in Guam and other places that are part of the United States, there's this whole police state.

There's this whole trip that are dictating the way you've got to live.

And I think the U.S. and I in this territory, there's some real stressed out places concerning marijuana that I've ever seen for sure.

In Japan, there's harsh laws against it in Japan.

But living up in the mountains in Japan, there was plenty.

If you live in the cities in Japan, there's, I mean, it's a real sketched out deal.

But living up in the mountains in Japan, it's very open and it's no big deal.

But what I found is almost any country in the cities is kind of a big deal.

But not in the country, countryside.

Every place, every country I've ever been, I've seen it growing.

Just wild.

People growing in their backyard, people growing in their greenhouse, people.

I mean, that's such a big deal.

Present day Uncle Weed, again, to say that, keep in mind, this was 1995, 1996,

where regular folks were just getting access to the Internet.

There was a scant amount of information about this kind of stuff on the Internet.

And this is me qualifying my sometimes ludicrous comments.

However, at this point in my life, I'd already traveled to many countries

and had enjoyed cannabis in every single one of them.

Maybe.

There's a little bit of hyperbole in my descriptions.

Or in some other cases, there's tremendous understatement.

Who's to judge?

Carry on.

So anyway, during all this time, I was doing my cannabis activist activities

and entrepreneurial endeavors.

In that, I was making hemp bags and clothes that were handmade for the most part,

as well as chapbooks of poetry printed on tree-free hemp paper.

Weren't big sellers, I'm going to be honest with you.

And participating in all kinds of activist activities.

I had all kinds of little brochures and pamphlets and educational sheets I'd made

in English and Japanese.

And me and the mysterious Japanese surfer girl would set up booths

at Jeff's Pirate Cove in Talafofo, kind of in the south of the island.

It's great old, well, speaking of Jimmy Buffett songs,

this place is right out of a Jimmy Buffett song.

And he would host, Jeff would host craft fairs.

And whatnot.

And there'd be bands and we'd set up a little booth and sell either handmade

or stuff from a company called Hempies or a company called Hempstead

that were making Japanese, sorry, pardon me for a minute.

We're making hemp board shorts and surfboard bags and wallets, other things of that nature.

And so those items sold quite well.

And also at Chamorro Village, which if anyone is listening from Guam,

was brand new at the time.

Again, this is the mid-90s.

And this was kind of a little shopping area built specifically

to support local made products of which I was locally making things.

However, I'm obviously not indigenous Chamorro.

So it was kind of strange bedfellows.

But it was a fun place to hang out because it was cool little architecture

and there was a great thing.

There was a great seafood restaurant there and also a jerk chicken

Jamaican restaurant there as well.

Ah, fond memories.

Tell us a little bit about this Sunday.

You're going to be there from what time to what time?

We'll be there all day.

I think it starts getting underway about 9.

It probably goes down until the drag gets out of there kicking and screaming.

But this will be the third or fourth time we've done it and it's kind of cool

to be on an island just for it.

It's a real nice job.

We're setting it up.

We've got the fish kelogewin, the fiesta food.

There's all kinds of neat stuff being sold on there.

They're doing stuff with wood and I mean, every kind of movie,

arts and crafts you can think of.

They've got the recorder, some like recorder consort group,

a bunch of people playing recorders.

Wow.

And they've got the Pogo Bay Reefers, I think they're called.

They're something reefers, which I mean, that's the important thing.

There's a little band there going on at 1 o'clock.

I think it's a buck or two to get in.

Yeah.

They've got a sarong fashion show and they've got all kinds of neat stuff.

It's always a nice day to spend down at the beach and especially if you live up on the

north end of the island.

We used to live right down there by Jess and she really enjoyed it.

She found life pretty kind down there.

Indeed, indeed it is.

I love it down south there.

Tell us, okay, you're going to be there off Sunday and real quick we'll plug your wares.

You sell hemp products.

A lot of people on the ground still don't really know about hemp.

A lot of people in the world don't and that's kind of what we're trying to do, teach people

about it.

It's not really, you can see the stuff, you can kick it around, you can feel it, you can

see how it feels.

I'll show you my old Grimsey hemp stuff and you can see how well it holds up and you can

pick it up.

We're going to have some backpacks and hats and stuff like that we've got down there.

But it's a nice day to spend down at the beach.

We'll have our sticks down there.

We'll try to put my sticks in.

If you stay down there, if it starts getting dark and I light them on fire, you can watch

me burn my house.

Yeah, and that'll be fun.

All right, well, I hope you enjoyed it.

Thank you.

Also, I want to say real quickly here that if you can't make it in on Sunday, or if you're

just interested and you'd like to get a hold of the catalog, you can look it up on the

website.

You can call us here at 637-6100 and we can put you directly on Dave's mailing list from

here so that you can get booklets once the catalogs are ready to go.

We can have them in the mail for you.

And you can check them out yourself.

All you've got to do is call us and tell us.

637-6100.

Anyway, along the way, working at the job on the submarine, I had to be a registered

certified crew member on these things because, you know, there's safety considerations.

As part of my spiel, I did the safety briefing, the life jacket, and all that shit for the

tourists.

But, of course, after I'd done my piss test, I was ready to smoke some herb.

So, one of my coworkers there, who I will not mention by name because he is the scion

of a rather well-known political family and now he serves himself in the U.S. military,

quickly became my cannabis...

Cannabis compatriot, compadre, as it were.

And so, when it came time to be like, so, hey, can you score me a bag?

He's like, oh, yeah, I'll get you a dollar bag.

And I'm like, wow, a bag of weed is a dollar here?

This is the best.

I'm never leaving.

It turns out a dollar bag was about two grams of highly compressed, mediocre weed and cost

$100.

That was not near as exciting.

But you do what you gotta do, right?

You know, I've paid more.

I've paid less.

I've paid better.

I've had worse.

You know?

One thing I've learned about traipsing all over the world is you take what you can get

sometimes, you know?

He became my compatriot and I made friends with some Samoans.

You know, it was weird.

I'd go down to the beach bars, right?

And the local Chamorro dudes and the military dudes have a tense relationship.

And this has gone on for a couple of generations because the Navy guys come in and puff out

their chest and scamming on the local girls.

And the Chamorro guys get aggressive about that.

Anyway, neither here nor there.

But because I was this skinny, tan guy with a beard, people, like, didn't quite know where

to place me.

Well, he's not military.

What the fuck is he?

You know?

And I always kept an emergency joint behind my ear when people would get a little aggressive

and up in my face and be like, no, no, this diffuses the situation and smoke some herb.

Herb's good like that, right?

And then I made friends with the Samoan dudes and the Samoan guys were King Tana.

Tana, he was the heir to some royal title in Samoa and worked there as a fire juggler

and later taught me his skills and we performed together with me rather unsuccessfully.

It turns out no one wants to see a skinny, howly guy juggling fire when there's a ripped

Samoan guy.

Much more looks the part.

Ah.

Anyway.

Made friends with these guys, another reggae band, and developed a little community of

other like-minded herbalists.

And together we would spend splendid times drinking beach drinks and smoking joints.

Then I met some other cats, some other off-Islanders, howlies, working sort of in a similar situation

as me, working in scuba diving with Japanese tourists.

And some of these guys were weed growers.

And one guy in particular, I went into his house.

Started by the two biggest fucking dogs I've ever seen and went up to the fifth floor of

his concrete bunker-like house and saw massive plants hanging from the shower, drying out.

I remember purchasing a cola that was the size of my forearm from him for that same

hundred dollars.

So let's just say things progressed in my weed purchasing ability in Guam.

I have a photo of this bud somewhere so, you know, I'll share that with you if you're curious.

Ah.

So whenever I would get great crippling weed, and so dude's weed was really nice, and it's

that nice outdoor sativa, sun-grown that I'm very much in favor of and very fond of.

It doesn't have to be crippling.

It has to be, I like it to be light and bright and get you creative and get you ready for

a hike rather than sitting on a couch.

But sometimes I would get weed that was just crippling, whoa, lay it, like I gotta call

in work.

I'm not coming in today.

I'm going to go lounge on the beach and try to drag myself over into the ocean.

And this weed, as it turns out, would come from the island of Palau.

And later on, I went to the islands of Palau, but I'm going to save this story for another

time or else this is going to drag on forever.

But I think, right now, I mean, the price of cannabis is pretty ridiculous in America,

especially here in Guam.

I was totally shocked when I first came on island.

But I think, right now, I mean, the price of cannabis is pretty ridiculous in America,

especially here in Guam.

And later on, I mean, the price of cannabis is pretty ridiculous in America, especially

here in Guam.

But I think, right now, I mean, the price of cannabis is pretty ridiculous in America,

especially here in Guam.

And later on, I mean, the price of cannabis is pretty ridiculous in America, especially

here in Guam.

I mean, if they start growing that and they legalize it and the government taxes it-

I mean, as big of a federal deficit we have, it would just disappear.

I mean, I'd do my part.

What exactly do you think is stopping the legal process from recovering itself?

The government having to found a way to make money off of it.

And the breweries and the tobacco companies and the politicians all, as soon as they can

figure out a way, I mean, all these big corporate giants-

You don't think they could put a tax on it?

corporate you don't think they could put a tax on it well i think they could put a tax on do you

ever think that marijuana and just in your opinion do you ever think that you'll see the legalization

of marijuana in your lifetime oh absolutely um i think the u.s is going to keep dragging its feet

about it and i think the rest of the world is gonna is gonna go ahead and kind of legalize

a good example of this is this european community a couple years ago a lot of the european countries

probably went ahead and they made this european community negotiations for that all of you know

germany and england they're telling um holland oh you got to tighten up your drug life you got

to tighten this up and uh and holland said well okay we'll tell you this if you can find one

reason um why we should do it i mean is our crime rate higher than yours is our you know we have a

lot of unhealthy people our productivity lower there's absolutely no reason why it should be

illegal if you can come up with a reason we'll we'll make it you know we'll crack down of course

no one can come up with a reason it's still very open in holland and just because now there's no

borders between the european countries it's it's pretty open all around europe

now

and uh and i think that will other countries will kind of follow that lead but i think the

u.s is going to keep dragging its heels and keep throwing people into jail and and uh for me i just

don't really have much interest in living in the states unless they can kind of relax a little bit

about it but uh i mean we do what we got to do you know i i i honestly and and i probably shouldn't

air my views because no one really cares but uh in my opinion i i would rather see see marijuana

legalized and regulated instead of uh and

have the the police worrying about more important things oh absolutely um uh obviously you you can't

put it in 7-eleven next to the bubble yum but you know it it should be sold i don't know maybe

maybe in a drug store maybe um maybe a pharmacist maybe you could buy it over a counter and you had

to be 18 and show show i think in a lot of places um like where i'm from in canada they have like

the provincial liquor store and there's just you know you can only buy beer beer and liquor in

this place i mean it could be a similar thing like that in amsterdam it's uh it's in the

coffee shops and you can't have alcohol and cannabis in the same place really you're going

to the coffee shop and they have tea coffee and cannabis you go to the bars and they have beer

and i mean it's all separate that's another way of doing it

so anywho my time in guam started coming to an end the day jerry garcia of the grateful dead died

that was august 1995 and the news came and hit me like a ton of bricks i'm a huge dead

and i've been on tour and i thought about leaving guam to go on that summer tour in 95 but i said

i'll go next year i'll keep here i got a job i'm making some money and it was the first time in a

long time i'd made any kind of decent money right of course jerry dies i'm crushed i quit my job at

the submarine that day and went to a candlelight vigil in a park and i had a little bit of herb and

roll up a pinner and we're passing it around a little circle as it happens

two other howley guys show up and by that point i'd been around a while so i was like uh i was you

know fucking howley like i was like i was in with the the club but these guys were like dorky off

islanders i'm just gonna say it and they started asking questions and and everyone's like what the

fuck's with the questions man they're like oh we work for the newspaper and i started asking

questions about what happened to jerry when's the memorial concert what you know because you know

this was 1995 it's hard to get information on that and they're like oh jerry died and i'm like

and i'm like wow how do you know because they knew all the answers and i'm like how do you know

all this stuff and they're like we work for the newspaper we have the internet and i'm like the

internet and they say yeah it's like uh you know words and pictures and comes through phone lines

onto your computer i'm like computers wow you can do that and i'm a guy who's always made fanzines

and newsletters and poetry chat books and i send out tons of letters and all that so i was very

so the next day i signed up for a class and went uh how to use the internet at the local internet

service provider with 9600 baud modems and windows 3.1 and i didn't know shit about any of this i

just like i want to see the part with the words and pictures i don't care about the trumpet windsock

and the tcp ip and the beep beep beep and the pop and they have anyways so i get to the part of the

class where we can go look at a web page so i type in dead.net and it starts downloading you

know you sit there you start loading a web page and you go out and get a cup of coffee or a beer

or whatever have a smoke and come back and the page is still loading page is halfway loaded and

then bonk brown tree snake bites into a power line and shuts down power for two days i had seen the

future and it took me several days to see that future again getting a computer hooked up at home

and getting a buddy over an old sea captain who had some interest in the internet and came over

and took hours of trying to get this thing running and i was like oh my god i'm gonna get this thing

this computer configurated to get to the internet but i saw it and i was like my future lays within

this internet it was soon thereafter i made my first website which was all about the history of

hemp in japan and i started this project while in guam later it was published in cannabis culture

journal of international hemp association books including hemp horizons hemp for victory

and all sorts of and also versions

of it in heads magazine anyway that all started in guam so there's just that's the background now

along all of this i would sometimes make radio appearances as is my you know part of my thing

that i do i show up i tell stories places and there's this radio station became friendly with

they were like the classic rock station remember this was the mid-90s it was like

a lot of like cheesy dance music and you know pop pablum and all this but there was

a classic rock station that started up on an am station and i would pop in there sometimes and do

a little spiel make a little funny and do all that kind of thing and one night i went to appear on

this show called deep cuts hosted by a lady called kelly crane who's one of those classic rock and

roll djs she had a little bit of the gravelly voice and she's all cool i had frosted tips in

her hair it was all like feathered up like it was 1985 and we sat together where i told stories

and shared edutainment as it were about hemp cannabis and all its different forms so i'm

very pleased to take this artifact that again has been hibernating in a storage locker in a shoebox

in the aim of personal archaeology i've dug this out to share with you noting again that the audio

quality is well very substandard but you know like here you are you're in a like a tropical island

everyone wants to go to a tropical island the thing about tropical island is people don't talk

about you know uh telecommunications and communications infrastructure sometimes

is kind of suffering there's your disclaimer

but yeah i mean just have a like hit a cool or a new park you know something that you know

yeah it's just um it's just it's like the coconut tree you know like uh you you pick a coconut you

can eat the meat you can eat the meat you can eat the meat you can eat the meat you can eat the meat

you can eat the juice and it's uh it tastes like a coconut you take a piece of the coconut tree bark

or it's coconut tree um it's not gonna i mean you cannot eat that obviously right same kind of thing

with the hemp plant you taste the flowers off it which is like the coconut and that's what people

are using for smoking your stock you know it's just like the coconut tree you're using that to

make a house so you're using the leaves to make you know a hat or making your house it's the same

thing with the hemp plant where you're using the stock to weave the cloth and make the fiber but

also things like from the seed people are compressing the seeds and taking the oil out of

that to make um everything from like massage oil to like cooking oil to like cooking oil to like

cooking oil um to uh like oils to like making paints and varnishes to making things like uh

ethanol which we used to run cars on i mean it's it's well a few years ago i first started

finding out about hemp i thought well yeah it sounds cool but i didn't really know about it

but now the stuff i've been bringing in and the stuff i've been making myself and traveling around

the world learning about him and uh and it's just remarkable all this stuff that's fascinating

we're gonna touch on a bunch more of these subjects and if you got any questions you

can call us and uh we'll try to answer them for you six three seven sixty one hundred other

numbers here doing this one for you too this is the dave matthews band the new one this is my

brother dave very cool too much two guys named dave y'all knew it for 61. that is too much

hustle 61 this is your home for the cut show it's about to

uh 20 minutes in front of nine o'clock on kelly crane your gracious hostess and the deep cut show

has brought you by to find people down there at primo sir shop if you got the guts baby they have

got the gear now we're going to check in with the phone lines here we've got uh we've got someone on

the phone lines that would like to speak to you dave dave is down here from uncle weed temporary

and we've got laura lee on the on the line she'd like to like to speak to dave laura

oh excuse me wait a minute one button are you there i'm there i'm there

the thing that i wanted to know about hemp is i understand that it's kind of this rough scratchy

stuff is is it in other weights too um you see all kinds of different stuff right now there's

two countries that are doing hemp for export um there's china and hungary the stuff that's coming

from hungary is a little bit uh coarser and heavy duty and it looks coarse but it's soft you can

even just from your backpack you can kind of feel how that feel there kelly yeah mine is real soft

but then the stuff that comes in from china it's coming in all kinds of weights everything from a

hemp silk blend which is really uh i mean it's really light and soft to people even making

lingerie out of it all the way to like heavy duty um i mean big beefy burly stuff that people are

making shoes out of um shoes and hiking see i thought when you were talking about shorts

surf shorts and stuff i thought they'd be all scratchy no no they're nice and soft i thought

they'd be all scratchy well we thank you very much for your color good show you have a nice evening

so now let us discuss guam in current days as i mentioned guam is a u.s territory there's

a congress person the congress person doesn't get to vote in congress

so in some ways it's like puerto rico or even washington dc

the reason i bring up washington dc is washington dc also

voted by a referendum to legalize medical cannabis and then recreational cannabis however

the district of colombia is while they have their own mayor and so on they're under the auspices the

u.s federal government as such unlike washington oregon nevada colorado other places they haven't

really been able to effectuate the will of the voters and the will of the people to have proper

cannabis storefronts

and reliable access to medical cannabis and very importantly the legal protection that you can

use cannabis for medical or recreational purposes although some people would say it's all medical

so like washington dc uh guam legalized medical cannabis by citizen referendum in the last

couple years however the law is still sort of in limbo because there's this pressure from the fed

and the lack of initiative by the local government to stick their neck out and say this is the will

of the voters we're going to enact this as such there's kind of this vicious cycle of it going

back to committee going back to new study politicians protecting themselves as is their

want to do for the next election cycle by couching it and pushing it back and then the naysayers come

and say this is bad for communities this destroys communities this is going to increase the drug

problem because there's a problem as i mentioned about some other much more dangerous drugs and

then people come on say this is going to help with opiate and speed crisis oh and it goes around and

around but in my digging this stuff out i've come across a wonderful organization called grassroots

guam who are not just active but very vocally active in their support of cannabis for

recreational and medical purposes in guam and as one of their initiatives

uh

andrea who's the executive director i think i should have i should have made a note right

instead of making sure i had a smoke and a beverage and goats i should have maybe made a

note i have one somewhere uh appears regularly on a radio show called let's be blunt cute name

it might even be in the same radio station offices as studio as my clip was originally

recorded in anyway uh regularly she discusses with the host all about these different conundrums

about permitting oh well now there's it has to be 51 locally owned no it doesn't yes it does oh no now there's another gubernatorial election i love that word gubernatorial election coming up and they've brought all the candidates to task to ask them specifically what their intention is about enforcing the will of the voter and bringing medical and recreational cannabis into the mainstream on this island as it is guam is a small island and while people are growing outdoors

and likely indoors although electricity is tremendously expensive and unreliable so it's not really a good

place to do that but you know it happens um i grew a couple plants indoors in a bathtub

not fantastically successful i might add uh but in order to effectuate and put these things in

place to have legal dispensaries it's really hard to launch that up in guam so you know your

neighbors know what you're doing and building an indoor growing facility in a concrete bunk

or you're having to use a ton of electricity to run lights isn't and air conditioning certainly

isn't sustainable or environmentally wise there but growing outdoors involves all kinds

of other so-called security risks so these folks from grassroots from are trying to stick

handle the public and the politicians through these conundrums so the people of guam can

have their their scant right to self-determination effectuated in the form of having safe and

legal cannabis so i salute you people at grassroots guam

um i enjoy listening to let's be blunt they do it like a video cast of their radio show one of those

kind of things you know sports radio does this where they just put a fly on the wall camera in

the radio studio and it's quite enjoyable it brings back a lot of memories about being in guam

you know guam it was a kind of a weird place to live i have fond memories of another off-islander

who worked on the submarine tour who uh had a little rowboat and we would go up the talafofo

river and up into the jungle and that's where people are also going to be able to go to the

ごみを探すためにかなり危険な事態であったりすることがありたい

so actually you have to be a little careful going up there because people think you're

coming out scout out their plots of grass especially when you're an obvious off islander

all that in mind i encourage you to learn about the island of guam and the people thereof

the geopolitical conundrum in which they are involved and the hard work of grassroots guam

to normalize cannabis on this island if you have any other questions or comments please

feel free to ask me on facebook or facebook.com and i'll see you at my next talk front if you

questions about Guam. I'm happy to riff on this with you. You know, since I've left Guam,

most of the people that I meet that have some familiarity with Guam are U.S. military personnel.

So you'll often see, if you live near a U.S. military base, Chamorro stickers, this word

Chamorro, or the words Hafa Dei, H-A-F-A space A-D-A-I, which is like their standard greeting,

in Aloha, as it were, Hafa Dei. So there you go. That's Guam. Tocan people of Guam.

I will see you again one of these years.

Now it's the time that I tell you very briefly that, since I recorded this bit from Japan,

not the part that was recorded in Guam, they did have that other gubernatorial

election and some changes in Congress. And this has, again, come to the forefront

of the political conversation. And what I mean by that is there's now a Senate bill

to bring recreational cannabis to a legal framework, and it's getting tremendous support.

Fantastic. There's some young, new politicians leading the way on this, and there was a change

in the governor's office. So it's getting a lot of support, except for from the Guam Vitors Bureau.

Now, tourism being a big deal, although it's been in decline the last bunch of years. So they go,

oh my God, we need to build up tourism again. What do we do? Some people are saying that, well,

we should use cannabis as a way to increase tourism. And other people are going, oh my God,

it's going to ruin the family-friendly reputation that Guam has. I don't know who in Guam

Visitors Bureau thinks that Guam has a family-friendly reputation. It's the discount

Hawaii, as it were. And I mentioned earlier about massage parlors and strip bars and gun shooting

ranges.

Now, that said, I haven't been to Guam since 1996, so it could be entirely different.

So I'm mostly, well, I'm completely speculating. Hey, this ain't journalism. So dig, that's going

on like in real time right now in February 2019. And it'll probably be completely outdated by next

month. And the other thing that's happened is Saipan, which is part of the Commonwealth of

Northern...

Mariana's Islands, which includes Tinian and Rota. Tinian is famous because that's where

Enola Gay took off from. Saipan, so they also have a relationship with the U.S., but a different

relationship where they're not a territory, they're a commonwealth. So Saipan has a tourism

industry, but they also have a big garment manufacturing industry. Some people might say

sweatshop. In Saipan, they can manufacture clothing and put on the Made in the U.S.A.

label, but without adhering to U.S. labor laws. Dirty secret. So there's many laborers,

especially from the Philippines, they're working in substandard conditions,

making your clothes. Anyway, the point is about Saipan is...

I really should have done some research. But again, I find myself on a tiny island with no

internet. And I don't want to wait another 20 years to release this. They have legalized

recreational cannabis.

Use.

Use. Because it's difficult to grow in these tropical environments in a controlled atmosphere,

it means they have to import. Canada now is... Well, anyone who's paying attention to this

knows there's all these conglomerates ramping up in the U.S. and Canada and Israel for export.

And so they have a small legislature in Saipan, I think eight members have passed unanimously to

do this. It was a 30-day rulemaking period, not the one-year stalling tactic that some states have

used.

So it should be effectuated by now. A quality documentarian would have done this research. I

have not. But this makes it fun, right? Make your own adventure. Saipan, Guam, what's the status

today?

Shamba Ranks, the reggae singer, was just busted in Jamaica with like a quarter ounce and a roadblock.

And they fined him $2.

Oh, my goodness.

Fine. It came across on the newswire, which I thought was kind of funny. He had to pay $2.50

fine and $23.50 in court costs.

Oh, my goodness.

It cost him $26. And I'm sure he's feeling terrible about it now.

Well, we better just pass the hat around and see what we can do to help Shamba Ranks out.

Everybody out there, I need you to donate.

And we're going to do a TV infomercial with Sally Struthers.

Please, can't you just spare for the price of a cup of coffee?

Yeah, this is Black Rush from Westmoreland, you know? Challing along the hills, you know?

With Uncle Weed, you know? Yeah, man. Good friend of mine, you know? Yeah, man.

Last traveler, come share your wisdom. I'll share the hour. I want you. Share love and laughter.

Oh, this is...

Maybe we'll make things a little bit better, if not perfect.

Maybe we'll make things a little bit better.