Somewhere past the third glass

Bad day. The kind that starts wrong and curdles by noon, and by dusk the only honest counsel left in the house is a bottle of scotch with a third of its soul already gone. I was down in the amber end of it, contemplating opening another and the general rot of the species, when the wire coughed up the news out of Texas and I damn near put the glass through the window.

They did it. They actually went and did it. At the stroke of some pen-pusher’s midnight on the last Friday in July, the Lone Star State reached out and turned a shelf of tested, labelled, perfectly legal little gummies into hard contraband, felony grade, prison grade, filed in the same drawer they keep the needle drugs in. One minute to Friday a grown man could hold the thing in his palm like a cough sweet. One minute past, same man, same palm, same sweet, and he is staring down a state jail felony, a hundred and eighty days to two years in a Texas cell and a fine with four fat zeroes on it. Nothing changed but the number on the wall clock. No new poison came into the world. A hand swept across a dial and a whole class of citizen woke up criminal in their own beds.

And how does a supposedly free people arrive at a place like that? The usual way, drunk on its own fear. The witch-doctors of the health department got cut loose in some courtroom back in May, when the high bench knocked out the injunction that had kept these things on the shelves for five honest years. The moment the leash slipped they went scrabbling back into a drawer of 2021 definitions like a hangman blowing the dust off a rope he’d been told to burn, and they dredged up the old spell, delta-8, delta-10, THCP, and wrote every one of them back into Schedule I alongside the hard stuff. Then the Austin police announced, with what I can only picture as a small municipal shiver of joy (imagine the revenue!), that carrying the stuff is now a felony. The hemp men are already in court howling about interstate commerce. The raw flower is snarled in some side-fight about how you even weigh a molecule. It is a shambles. It is a law that needs a flow chart, a lawyer and a stiff drink to read, and it was cooked up by people who have never in their soft lives been frightened of anything but their spouse’s scowl.

The tell is that they kept the good stuff

Here is the joke with the razor folded inside it, and it is a filthy one. They banned delta-8, the mild and giggling cousin, the training-wheels high, and they left the real animal standing in the room. Hemp delta-9, the actual freight, the genuine head-change, stays legal as a church picnic so long as it slouches in under some federal decimal. The seltzer that unstrings your knees at a braai: fine, sir, enjoy! The gummy tuned to ride the very same line: fine. But the vape with delta-8 on the label, tested, batch-numbered, sold under a bright light by a shop with a camera and a licence and a paper trail a mile long, that one will earn you a sentence and a cell.

Chew on that logic until it cuts your gums, because there is none in it. If the terror is getting high, delta-9 gets you high. If the terror is the children, a gummy is a gummy is a gummy from here to the Rio Grande. What they actually outlawed was a word and a molecule they had decided, on some reptile principle, to be afraid of, while the stronger drug with the fatter lobby strolled out the front door tipping its hat (hint … it’s not booze). That is not public health. That is a scarecrow in a lab coat, and it frightens no one but the fools who stuffed it.

Prohibition never killed a thirst in its life

Now the big one, the rotten pulsing heart of the whole business, and the lesson every drug warrior since the first sour Baptist poured the first barrel of good whiskey into the gutter has refused, point blank, to learn. You cannot ban a want. You can ban a shop. You can ban a shelf, a label, a licence, a poor bastard behind a till. You cannot ban the thirst. It does not die when you outlaw it. It just gets up, dusts itself off, and goes looking for a darker door.

Yesterday the Texan who wanted his gummy walked into a lit room and bought a tested thing with the milligrams stamped honest on the tin. Tonight he wants the identical gummy, the room is dark, the counter is gone, so he does what the thirsty have done since the Garden: he finds a guy. And the guy’s product has no batch, no lab sheet, no camera, no receipt and no earthly clue what is swimming around inside it, because the whole boring apparatus that kept the stuff clean and dull and safe was just dragged out back and shot. The state did not kill the drug. It killed the paperwork. It took a market standing in broad daylight being tested by grown adults and it booted the thing into the alley with the rats, and then, so help me, in six months it will call a press conference and clutch its crystals and pearls about how the street version came back dirty and strong and cut with something that dissolves a kidney. You did that. You, fucker with the pen. You took away the receipt and you called it saving the young. Lying bastards!

That is the whole obscene conjuring trick, and it plays every single time: a government, in the holy name of safety, reaches out and makes the thing more dangerous than prohibition ever managed on its own bloody-minded steam. Not by accident. By choosing the raid over the rulebook, the cell over the label, the flow chart over the lab test. Regulation is the dull, unglamorous, life-saving chore of test it and label it and cap the dose and card the buyer and stand a licensed human with something to lose behind the counter. Prohibition is the sexy, stupid, blood-on-the-tarmac business of banning it and acting amazed. Texas rolled up to that crossroads with the whole map in its lap and floored the car into the ditch, whooping the whole way down. And the black market cheered them on.

Meanwhile, over here, sober up

Now set the glass down, because here is where the cold water hits, and it is not a Texas story at all. It is a mirror, and we are the ones in it. South Africa is standing at the identical fork this very night with its own pen shaking over the page, drafting its grams and its plant counts and its penalties, trying to work out how to walk a cannabis market into the daylight without falling on its own face. And Texas just showed us, live, in colour, with the volume cranked, precisely what the wrong turn costs. Criminalise the tested, licensed, labelled version, and the want does not shift an inch, it only turns meaner and blinder and quits answering the door to anyone in a uniform. Turn a shopkeeper into a felon and a lab sheet into a punchline, and then stand in the smoking wreck calling it protection.

Do not. For the sake of every honest grower and every careful chemist and every poor devil who wants nothing but a clean gummy and a quiet night, do not walk it. If a thing frightens you, haul it into the light and test it and keep your eye on it. Do not ban the one version anybody was watching and gift the rest to the dark. Prohibition is not the opposite of danger. Most nights it is the drunk old father of it.

We do not sell you a gram of anything, us. We are a directory, a noticeboard, a fistful of signposts for the high country, and nothing more. But I can still read a map by lamplight with a bottle in me, and the Lone Star State just set one alight and held it up for the whole watching world. Regulate the thing. Test the thing. Quit manufacturing felons out of your own paying customers and then sobbing about the dark you built with your own two hands. Free the weed. Let farmers farm. They do no harm.

The bottle is dead now, and so is my patience, and the pair of them went out together the way they always seem to.

Selah. Make it before they take it.