Unlike Bill, I did inhale, and, without elaborating, I was very much a child of the sixties — but times do change.   While I agree with the conservatives, to a certain point, on their stance for a Drug Free America, I think the Right is far too liberal in their Drug-Free-America position.  Why stop at a small slice of the pie?   We need to be even more stalwart in this war on drugs.  First, let us examine the definition of “drug.” What is a drug?   Simply, a drug is a chemical or substance that alters the body.

            We need to insist on a firm interdiction of marijuana, psychedelics, cocaine, and all those widely used and abused drugs, but that is not enough.  After all, any self-respecting, card-carrying member of the GOP would rightly support that position.  I offer this challenge to all those wannabe conservatives:  I will support their watered-down and liberal idea of a Drug Free America if they will accept mine.

            We need to ban all drugs across the board.  The animals and fish need to be drug-free; take them off the antibiotics, the growth hormones, and the steroids; stop spraying vegetables with chemicals and insecticides.  Get the children off Ritalin and Prozac. For every kid that is a little lively and boisterous, must the answer always be Ritalin or Dexedrine?  No, if they have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), give them something worthwhile to focus their attention on.  Ban the coffee, tea and sodas laced with enough caffeine to cause tachycardia from a single sip (sounds like cocaine to me.)  Then let’s move on to the really hard drugs: Close down the gin mills!  How many deaths and car accidents annually are related to alcohol consumption?  According to one statistic, the answer is more than 50,000.  If smoking is the single major reason for lung cancer, oral cancer, emphysema, and all manner of respiratory illnesses, isn’t the obvious answer to make tobacco use illegal?  

Smoking and alcohol use cause at least half the illness in this country and account for the largest expenditure of health dollars.   Let’ss ban the chemical additives, as well.  But that is only the beginning!  Let’s get children off processed foods and diets of candy and sugars.  I can see the wave of the future– Signs around schoolyards boldly declaring, “It is a Federal Crime to sell or solicit processed and chemically adulterated foods within 100 yards of this school.”  

Stop the indiscriminate use of pharmaceuticals — the psychotropics, mood enhancers,, sedatives, antibiotics, and so forth.  It is astonishing how many people I run into who tell me that they told their health care provider they were feeling “A little blue” and, before they could utter a sigh, they were given a prescription for Prozac.  I would probably add television as the most insidious of mind-altering phenomena, as well.  A lifetime of staring into the tube five hours a day is like smoking a hashish water-pipe and sucking on the pleasant fumes until all the stress and worries dissipate. 

            Friends, it is only a start, but if the conservatives will support my proposal for a Drug Free America, and maybe the tobacco farmers of  North Carolina (well, not the farmers, but at least their kids) will breathe a lot easier.   Once the Right and I agree on a Drug Free America, there is no telling what progress we can make.  I think we need a real war on drugs in America and my modest proposal could be a good start.         

I’m on the sunny side of fifty

I’m on the sunny of Loving

Baby, don’t ya know it – the best years ahead.

Yeah, hey, the best years ahead.

Yes, the jazz poet namaya at 56 and feeling the best years are ahead. Though it is late at night, and I am reluctant to publish any thing at this hour, a few words to let people know that 56 feels like the new 40. I am in better shape and creatively I am in a sublime creative space. In my new song that I am still ironing the kinks out of it, but I am more impassioned about peace and social justice issues, I am discovering brand dimensions of my creative world with the project ECOCIDE, the trillion dollar penis, and the PENTAGON MAN – the ravenous monster with the ICBM penis.  The Crucifixtion of Desire is in the process of creation – a six foot tall barbed wire figure with a 2 foot black penis and a pink condom, on the back is the personal ads… am i too focused on the penis thing? New dimensions to creativity. More to come.

Thank you Tony Hayward