High Times

About 10,000 mostly white students gathered for a massive pot smoking session at the University of Colorado on Sunday as part of the annual "4/20" celebration at the college. The event, also featured concerts and no arrests or citations by police.

In the news business we call that a "straight lede." The five W's get answered in two sentences or less, and readers can decide immediately whether the story is newsworthy enough for them to continue. In fact, because of it's simple brillance, nobody who read that lede should be surprised by my next statement:

Are you fucking kidding me?

I know I complain a lot, and if you read this blog regularly it might seem like I go out of my way to find things to be outraged about. But, I really don't. Actually, I try very, very hard to avoid outrage because I don't need that kind of strain on my already overburdened heart.

Yet, some things just defy logic. More than 10,000 people showed up on a public campus and started getting high and nobody got arrested or cited? In America? Seriously, everybody who thinks this type of display would have been tolerated at Howard University, Morehouse College or Tuskegee University please raise your hands at your desk right now. PUT YOUR HAND DOWN BEFORE I SLAP YOU FOOL!

What was it Tupac said again?

It's war on the streets and the war in the Middle East/
Instead of war on poverty/ they got a war on drugs
so the police can bother me

If anybody ever needed proof that this nation's drug laws are enforced differently based on the color of the criminal's skin they need look no further than this story. Sure, the article says that in the past the police harassed revelers and gave them citations and whatnot, but apparently things have changed.

The local police chief now believes it's a waste of his manpower to ticket and arrest weedheads. Not only is he willing to let the young kids get blasted at school, but he's also turning a blind eye to the old fogeys getting lit in other parts of the city.

Is this Bizarro World?

I'm really struggling to get my bearings because even a cynical, race card-playing bastard like myself didn't think this type of arrogance was possible. This is like white folks giving everybody else a massive middle finger, while bending over and mooning us all. This is such a blatant double-standard I almost expect the folks from Candid Camera to jump out from behind the walls of my cubicle, right now.

.....Hello, are y'all there?........I'm waiting.........

Damn, it's real.

This is incredibly disheartening. I know some people might see this as a really random issue to latch on to, but it's actually not. The way this event was handled by the media and the police gets to the very heart of the inequality and injustice that infuse every aspect of life in this country.

How can we brashly condemn other countries for failing to provide their citizens with equal treatment under the law, when we have failed in that respect ourselves. Narcotics arrests are the driving force behind the prison population explosion in this country, and stories like this only prove that many of those arrests are based on a choice by law enforcement officials to focus their energies on certain communities.

Some police officers would probably claim that they spend so much time in black neighborhoods becase residents want them there, and because that's where most narcotics violence is focused. Some of y'all might even be nodding along at that logic.

However, one of the most commons comments by the police after a drug-related homicide is that they can't prevent someone who wants to commit a murder from committing one. That directly contradicts the reasoning that the unfair focus on black communities when it comes to arrests for narcotics possession and distribution is designed to keep violent crime down.

Police can't have it both ways. A democratic society cannot have different sets of rules for different people. If all men are created equal, then some men cannot be more equal than others.

What are they smoking?