Blowing Smoke

Toker Volunteers Unwelcome?

 



Yesterday Kai Price made me aware of this complaint filed with the Monson Police over the way a volunteer, helping with recovery from the deadly tornado that roared through our Valley earlier this month, was treated by local police officers:

On Jun 10, 2011, at 4:24 PM, "subversive01057" wrote:

I do not want to discourage anyone from helping with the tornado volunteer cleanup effort. The town has been devastated, and we can still use all the help we can get. And overall the police have done a tremendous job. However I wanted to report that I am about to file a compliant with my town of Monson, MA, as follows:

Sometime around 10pm on the evening of Tuesday, June 7th, Will of Amesbury, MA, was outside the Unitarian Universalist Parish of Monson, which had been affected by the tornado, dropping off some extra slate tile donated from elsewhere, with the fore-knowledge of UUPM minister.

Will had heard about the tornado in the news, saw the devastation on TV, and being a tradesman/electrician, he thought he could help and he packed up and moved to the Monson campground and worked as a registered volunteer around town for a week, including at the UUPM, where he made a real difference. At the time, three of his chainsaws had been well used by the First Church of Monson and were in the process of being repaired by him.

Given the rubble outside the church, the time of day and the looting that has occurred in town, this constituted suspicious behavior, and Will was stopped by the Monson Police Department, questioned, and his vehicle was searched. In my mind, this was all very reasonable (with the exception that Will's glove compartment may have been damaged during the frenzy of the search). The Monson PD does an excellent job of helping residents feel safe and secure in their homes and businesses.

Will explained his presence, presented the Rev. Jackson on his cell phone to the officer involved to corroborate his presence, and as no evidence of looting was found, Will was not arrested.

In the search of Will's vehicle, the officer found a small amount of marijuana. It seems that as a result, Will was ordered to leave the town limits of Monson immediately under police escort and threatened that should he ever return he would be subject to immediate arrest. When he explained that he was staying at the Monson campground and that the medication he was under made it seriously unsafe for him to drive, he was told that he would not be allowed to stay there and must leave Monson immediately.

The Monson PD should be very well aware that following overwhelming voter approval that in Massachusetts, simple possession of an ounce or less of marijuana is a civil infraction punishable only by a maximum $100 fine and forfeiture of the marijuana. The penalty for possession of marijuana does NOT include being run out of town. Will has had a challenging life and was deeply emotionally hurt by being (unofficially?!) trespassed from the Town of Monson and denied the opportunity to help further, especially after he had just donated a week of volunteer labor and had done nothing that would warrant this banishment.

The Monson PD has responded incredibly well to a challenge that few police could have ever imagined that they would be called upon to face. The widespread tragedy of this tornado, combined with the heat and the long hours, make the generally magnificent response of the Monson PD in the past week all the more heroic.

However sometimes mistakes are made--I've certainly made mistakes in my life, and I'm sure that nearly everyone else has too at some time or another. The way Will was treated is deeply appalling to me as a Monson resident and home-owner (and please note that I am not nor I have ever been a member of the UUPM), and I would like to think that it was just a misunderstanding. Surely this was not the instance of prejudice that it appears to be. And when mature adults make mistakes, what they are called upon to do is man-up (or woman-up), admit to the mistake, apologize for the mistake, and reasonably try to rectify the situation.

Today Kai Price released the following update:

Lesson learned: file the written complaint.

A half hour after I dropped off the form the police sergeant stopped by and explained that it was all a big misunderstanding, Will was not trespassed at all and is welcome to come back to volunteer without fear of police harassment, and the problem was that his associate/passenger did not have ID, gave sketchy answers to questioning, and they were both in an area where looting had been reported and it was late at night.

You may now return to your regular programming.

Despite the way Kai Price bends over backwards to praise the police, is this really a happy ending? Unanswered questions remain. Would the police have backed off if no complaint was filed? When they realized that there had been, in their words, "a big misunderstanding" why didn't they contact the person involved on their own and apologize instead of waiting for a formal complaint to be filed? Does the glove compartment damaged in the search need to be repaired, and if so, who will pay for it? The police justify what they did by claiming to have been searching for looters, but was everyone stopped in that search given a police escort out of town?

This incident is hardly the most earth shattering local controversy, but it does clearly illustrate the tendency that law enforcement still has to overreact in instances where marijuana is involved, despite the fact that the drug has been nearly legalized. To prevent further such overreactions in the future, the best and most effective way would be legalize marijuana entirely.

Meanwhile, fascinating videos from the June 2nd tornado continue to surface. Here's an amazing one showing the dangerous scene as severe winds strike a downtown Springfield parking lot. Notice how a car moves just in time to escape deadly debris that soon strikes that spot.

 

There was some dark clouds and thunder and lightning this past week, but thankfully nothing like the violent storms of the week before. Here's some of the electrical show the other day over Holyoke as captured by Greg Saulmon. 

Mary Serreze caught these dark clouds hovering over Northampton City Hall.

My neighbor assembled these stones on his front steps in accordance with a feng shui pattern of good fortune.

Happy UMass summer school students. 

Kurtis and Rob are traveling in style to the Amherst Survival Center.

 



The following feelgood video was filmed entirely in Amherst. 

Extravaganja 2011

 

They were promoting it all week in the UMass Campus Center.

Friday afternoon when I passed by the Commons they were setting up the stage.

Here's what it looked like when the crowd showed up on Saturday, as captured by Larry Kelley.

 



The occasion was the annual Extravaganja Marijuana Legalization rally, which this year was expanded into a two-day affair. Here's a picture of local legalization activist Terry Franklin (center) with two of the student organizers of the event.

The event attracts a lot of vendors, such as this mobile Jamaican restaurant.

The Extravaganja always brings out the seldom seen freaks from the hilltowns, who leave their woodland hideaways to come into town for a day of revelry and then return to the forest to resume their mushroom meditations.

 

A flower power bumpersticker in a Northampton parking lot.

 



A Tea Party bumpersticker at a Northampton convenience store. 

An unanswerable question on an Amherst College A.C. unit. 

Never Forget

This weekend I went to the 25th anniversary memorial service for the slain Springfield police officers Michael Schiavina and Alain Beauregard.

 



As described in The Springfield Republican:

Beauregard, 29, and Schiavina, 28, were shot Nov. 12, 1985, during a traffic stop on Stebbins Street, off State Street in the city’s Old Hill neighborhood. Schiavina died that night, and Beauregard died three days later.

The shooter, Eduardo Ortiz, killed himself 17 hours after the shooting in a Plainfield Street hide-out as police moved in.

Frankly, I have never heard any insider tell me that they believed that Ortiz (known as "Crazy Eddie" on the street) committed suicide with his own gun. Instead, it is always suggested that the police made an executive decision to spare the taxpayers a lengthy and expensive trial, especially since they felt that justice could never be served in a state such as Massachusetts, which does not have the death penalty.

But people tell me the damnedest things, so who knows? Anyway it was a nice ceremony, featuring sirens going off all over the city at the exact moment when 25 years earlier the shots rang out. I was surprised not to see more Springfield politicians in attendance. Congressman Richard Neal, who was Mayor at the time of the tragedy, was conspicuous in his absence. Oh that's right, I forgot, the campaign is over. I personally spotted only four elected officials in attendance: Mayor Dominic Sarno, new D.A. to-be Mark Mastroianni, City Councilor James Ferrara and School Committee member Chris Collins.

At the end, some very nice keepsake brochures were passed out to the crowd:

Inside were reproductions of the badges of the fallen:

 

Speaking of memorials, at UMass on Veteran's Day this honor guard stood at attention outside Memorial Hall.

Elsewhere on campus there was this wall to memorialize the fall of the Berlin Wall 21 years ago.

 



Students were invited to take hammers and help tear down the hated symbol of Leftist oppression.

Plastered all over campus the same day were these posters calling for a big pro-marijuana rally.

Of course I had to check it out. When I arrived a group of protesters had already formed.

These guys were literally trying to drum up a crowd. At its peak there were about 75 people present at the rally.

 



The usual suspects were on hand, such as pot politician Dan Melick (far left) and libertarian leader Terry Franklin (far right) shown here conversing with a student marijuana activist.

The signs people made were both clever and funny.

Others were a little more extreme.

At one point an authoritative looking person in a suit and tie came out and complained about the obscenities on some of the signs, but did not try to confiscate them. Indeed, his displeasure only made people with "fuck" signs wave them more enthusiastically.

At least there was nothing as tasteless as this dumpster outside a UMass frathouse.

 



Let me leave you with this chalk portrait of the Sun I came upon on the woodland way into downtown Northampton.

 

Jill Stein at UMass 2010

Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein brought her longshot campaign for Massachusetts Governor to the University of Massachusetts this afternoon. There was a decent turnout.

Stein gave an informative, if somewhat wonkish speech, but it is her lack of political polish that is part of her appeal. She accused her opponents of being sell-outs to special interests, but was harshest towards incumbent Deval Patrick, whom she accused of "corporate misdeeds" when he worked in the private sector. The truth is Stein really is a breath of intellectual fresh air in an otherwise dull field. The shame is that on most issues she is virtually a socialist. However, she is very libertarian on the legalization of marijuana, and it was her lines in support of legal weed that drew the loudest applause from the mostly student audience.

Among those in attendance was Amherst/Granby State Rep. candidate Dan Melick (left). He has caused a stir in his campaign by calling for the legalization of all drugs. 

Not surprisingly the pro-pot angle brought out longtime legalization advocate Terry Franklin.

Following the speech counter-culture comedian Norman Bie did his latest incarnation of his longstanding routine "Deviations From the Norm."

Meanwhile in Tom Wesley's race to replace Richie Neal in Congress he received a major boost this week from an appearance in Palmer with his former GOP primary rival Dr. Jay Fleitman. Now the Republicans are formally united coming into the home stretch.

Meanwhile this highly unflattering video of Congressman Neal has been making the rounds. 

 

A McCarthy for Senate sign in front of Gateway Hardware in the Pine Point section of Springfield.

That's no surprise, since Gateway is owned by the candidate himself Tom McCarthy, shown here hard at work in his store the other day. 

A political tempest arose this week in Springfield over the illegal placing of a Democrat Party campaign sign on the pillars of City Hall. 

Although the sign was quickly taken down after complaints came pouring in, it was never determined who exactly had delivered the banner to City Hall or ordered it put up. Although some argued that the controversy helped to publicize the event, others suggested that the Democrats had damaged their cause by appearing arrogant, as if City Hall was the personal property of the Democrat Party. Others expressed anger that city workers were being used to promote Democrat Party events. This partisan favoritism reminded me of a similar controversy that occurred years ago.

In Springfield during the Albano era, the candidates who were loyal to the city's corrupt Democrat Party political machine were allowed to use the inside of City Hall to hold campaign announcements and press conferences. Obviously this gave the machine-backed candidates an advantage in how they appeared on TV and in photographs, as they were able to impress voters by making it appear as if they were already operating out of City Hall. However, when critics of the local machine tried to use the same City Hall settings for their campaign affairs, they were told it was not allowed!

Enter into the picture Brenda Branchini (above) a local hairdresser who decided in 1997 to run for City Council and wanted to use City Hall for her formal campaign announcement. Branchini was a colorful character, whose now defunct Court Square hair shop was notorious for offering, for an extra fee, the option of having your hair cut by females in very skimpy lingerie. Sadly, that sexy side of her business overshadowed the other more relevant aspects of her candidacy, in which she had numerous commonsense libertarian views. In many ways she ran exactly the kind of issues based campaign one always hoped to see in Springfield during those days of political stagnation and corruption but seldom did.

As a public figure Brenda Branchini came across as bold, sassy, unbossed and unbought. In protest of her exclusion from City Hall she led a motley parade down Main Street that included homeless people, dogs and cats, sex workers and radicals of all stripes who went dancing along with flutes, whistles and horns while waving signs demanding to be allowed to hold a rally inside City Hall just like those candidates blessed by the political establishment. Branchini and her supporters were turned away by City Hall security, but the protest parade managed to attract media attention. Once it became public that City Hall was being used to stage campaign rallies for privileged insiders that were forbidden to other candidates, the policy was finally changed to close City Hall to all partisan political activity.

Or so it seemed until this week. Hey Brenda, maybe it's time to come out of political retirement and lead another parade!

 

2010 Cannabis Candidates

Dr. Jill Stein, Green Party candidate for Governor 

You don't have to be a stoner to recognize the destructive effects that the criminalization of marijuana has had on our culture and civil liberties. Fortunately, full legalization of the mild intoxicant is within reach this year as California votes on an initiative entitled Proposition 19 that will make it as legal to buy pot as it is to buy beer.

Meanwhile, longtime Valley cannabis activist Terry Franklin (below) has compiled a list of pro-legalization candidates in Massachusetts: 

California, with its Proposition 19, is the place to vote this year; but for us voters in the Northeast, I've put together this list of candidates in our own area who support marijuana legalization.

Not everyone is a single issue voter, but please keep this issue in mind when making your decision. Most of these people are "3rd party" candidates -- Libertarians have been on board for decades -- and it's heartening to see a number of Greens joining them this year. Even without winning, minor party candidates can have an effect: One or both of the major parties see themselves losing voters, and will try to shift their platform in an effort to get them back in the next election.

I tried to make the list as comprehensive as possible. However, there is no doubt I have missed someone -- especially in the more local races. Carefully evaluate the positions of all the candidates on your ballot before going to the polls on Election Day. Even if someone has not come out for legalization, they may have a position on a lesser issue such as medical, decrim, or hemp which is better than their opponent.

MASSACHUSETTS

Governor........(G) Jill Stein
Congress........(I) Mike Engel........1st C.D.
Congress........(D) Barney Frank......4th C.D.
Congress........(R) Sean Bielat.......also in the 4th
State Sen.......(D) Cythia Creem......Newton area
State Sen.......(R) Craig Spadafora...Melrose area
State Rep.......(I) Daniel Melick.....Amherst & Granby
State Rep.......(I) Jonathan Loya.....Hopkinton area
State Rep.......(I) Ron Madnick.......Worcester area
State Rep.......(G) Scott Laugenaur...Pittsfield area
State Rep.......(I) Jim Pillsbury.....Framingham area
State Rep.......(I) Bob Underwood.....Springfield area

In addition, 73 towns in MA have non-binding, but important, advisory questions, "PPQs," on the ballot, concerning either legalization or medical marijuana. 

In other political news, the Richard Neal re-election congressional race against Tom Wesley (above left with Holyoke's Chief Scott) is quickly evolving into the premiere political battle of the southern Valley. Take a look at Wesley's latest and most devastating political ad yet:

 

In another important development in that race, Wesley has announced the co-chairs of the Valley section of his campaign with the surprise appointment of former Springfield City Councilor Barbara Garde (below right).



From a Wesley campaign press release:

Former Springfield city councilor Barbara Garde and Virginia Neill, a widely respected small business owner and community leader, will serve as co-chairs of the campaign. Both leaders will focus much of their efforts towards supporting the Wesley organization’s rapid growth in the western portion of the 2nd District.

“As our national and local economy continues to struggle, it’s incumbent upon us all to re-think and challenge the status quo, operate-as-usual, mindset. I believe strongly that Tom Wesley provides a clear and very reasonable alternative to Congressman Neal’s 22 year record. It’s why I have not only endorsed Tom’s candidacy, but have committed myself to see to it that I do everything possible to see him elected this November,” Barbara Garde, a former Democrat, said.

Garde once served as a co-chair for Domenic Sarno’s mayoral campaign in Springfield and was positioned to serve in the same position for Richard Neal’s congressional bid in 1988. Since Neal faced no challenge that year, the co-chair position was not necessary. She currently serves as the Vice President of Marketing for Springfield-based AmBCare Ambulance Service.

I last saw Garde in person back in June of 2007. I took her photo, which didn't come out too good, and filed this report:

Tuesday I was in Springfield all day, starting in the morning with the Springfield Control Board meeting at City Hall and at night at the official kickoff rally for the Karen Powell for City Council campaign. In between I sort of schlepped around my old stomping grounds of ol' Pine Point, going to lunch at Tony's Pizza on Boston Road. There I ran into former City Councilor Barbara Garde. She told me that she's been drinking heavily since she left office.

Just kidding. Actually she said she's enjoying life after politics very much.

Is it any wonder why local politicians dislike me so much? Yet way back in 1993 I wrote these words of praise about Garde in a "report card" I made up for The Baystate Objectivist, complete with nicknames, of the Springfield City Council, or "clowncil" as we called it in those days.

Guardian Garde - With only one year on the Council behind her, it isn't clear exactly where on the political spectrum to place Barbara Garde. Yet if there is one characteristic passing consistently through the ideological mish-mash it is Garde's fierce independence. A potential swing vote on many issues, Garde is courted by all political factions with equal fervor. But it's probably a waste of time trying to call this Councilor's tune. When it comes to matters of principle, this lady don't dance.

And she still doesn't, with Garde once again showing great courage in urging other disillusioned Democrats to join her in backing Tom Wesley.

This week at UMass a table was set up in the Campus Center to support Charlie Baker for Governor.

 



In Northampton this morning supporters of incumbent Deval Patrick were campaigning.

In what appears to be shaping up as a strong Republican year, not all Democrats are proudly running on the party label. However Amherst's State Rep. Ellen Story is an exception.

 



A cynical bumpersticker on a car parked on an Amherst street. 

Portrait of a hipster at the Mystery Train in Amherst by Alice Ware. 

Here's a Jeff Ziff video from the recent Skid Row concert in downtown Springfield. 

Soaked Springfield by A. Mateus