by John Wilcock

“Today, as soon as they’re introduced into the army, soldiers are placed in aggressive and stressful conditions. Their egos are broken down and rebuilt within the context of group unity and loyalty. The verbal abuse of the drill instructor, the firing drills, the hand-to-hand combat are all intended to get them accustomed to violence. The shift in training has vastly improved the willingness of US soldiers to fire their weapons in battle…”
— from Fighting the PTSD Syndrome in Popular Science

THE WAR AGAINST MARIJUANA is now over. Will somebody please tell the government? More than 50% of those polled think it should be legalized; 18 states have endorsed its medical value; two other states agree it’s okay to smoke for pleasure. And now here’s a Fortune cover story: MARIJUANA INC. inviting readers to “Meet the Entrepreneurs and Investors Firing Up a New Industry.” Whenever business steps in, you know it’s the beginning of the end. But now, think for a moment of the billions of dollars wasted, the hundreds of thousands in jail, the years of stubborn insistence about a weed that for centuries grandma has grown in her garden (and smoked), classified as a dangerous drug. Speaking from personal experience, I first wrote about the blessed herb in my column in the late 1950s, since which time I have written 37 books, 1,200 columns, and produced at least a thousand cable TV shows. Goddess knows what I might have accomplished if I’d never smoked.

In the Sixties when my lawyer told me that down at court everybody toked — lawyers, judges, cops — underground papers around the world all sought two things: the end of the Vietnam War and the legalization of marijuana. In the next few months, my lengthy tome The Weed That Changed the World (co-edited with Bob Perlongo) will be launched as an eBook. Work on it began 12 years ago yet somehow it never found a publisher.

It’s a comprehensive volume, profusely illustrated, that deals with many aspects of the blessed herb including medical, psychological, sociological, historical, religious, growing, cooking, eating, smuggling, and toking around the world. Sign up below to receive advance information about the book release.

“A geyser is going to go off,” says Troy Dayton, 35, co-founder of ArcView Angel Network which plans to bring would-be entrepreneurs and financiers together. ‘The question is,” he says, “which companies are going to be sitting on top of it when it does?”

Lawful cannabis sales in the U.S. may top $1.5bn according to Medical Marijuana Business Daily’s Factbook, and this figure could double when Colorado and Washington open retail stores. “This is dramatically different from anything we’ve seen before,” says ArcView’s co-founder Steve DeAngelo. “The reality on the ground now is you’re seeing the birth of a whole new industry.” DeAngelo, 54, with his familiar dreadlocks and black fedora, is a genuine hero of the marijuana movement, having founded Oakland’s famous Harborside Health Center — described as the world’s largest pot shop — in 2006 and boldly defied federal harassment ever since.

“The irritating burdens of the modern state may mean that legalization — with its attendant regulations, taxes, and federal oversight — may do more to discourage marihuana smoking that scattershot law enforcement does now.”
— Joshua Gelernter in the weekly Standard

DINOSAUR BONES are getting to be a favorite with collectors around the world and countries where they are most found such as China, Mongolia, Morocco and Brazil have prohibited their export. Celebrity collectors such as Nicolas Cage and Leonard DiCaprio may have been in the mind of the former FBI’s John Miller when he told The Week that many private buyers are simply “wealthy people who want something really interesting (to spotlight) in their basement for their 70 dinner guests.” A few months ago, Homeland Security arrested a self-described “commercial paleontologist” for providing a Tarbosaurus to a New York auction after it had been smuggled out of Mongolia and across the Atlantic labeled “pile of reptile bones worth $15,000.” (It sold for $1.1million). A cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex, the beast is said to have had “20 extremely large razor-like teeth.”

SMELLS LIKE PIZZA says the magazine Stores about that new perfume Eau de Pizza Hut which the company brought in from Canada only as a Valentine Day promotion but now may have to expand to satisfy demand. “The cologne has a slightly sweet base scent of freshly rising dough,” the magazine explains poetically, “but finishes decidedly savory with hints of Italian spices like oregano, vine-ripened tomato sauce, and the crispness of fresh-sliced vegetables — all wrapped by wafts of cheesy goodness.”

PRISONERS WHO SIT AROUND watching television, perhaps weightlifting or socializing with fellow-convicts aren’t doing anybody any favors, including themselves says Stephanos Bibos. “They bear no practical responsibility for the victims they have harmed or the families have left behind. Instead we force them to remain inert.” Her point is not to require work as punishment but to prepare the prisoners for the outside world. “Apart from economic and educational value, such work would inculcate discipline, collaboration, obedience, and a willingness to delay gratification,” she writes in the National Review, “virtues that many inmates lack, and whose absence tends to encourage crime.” About 12% of inmates work for prison industries or on prison farms but these aren’t jobs that offer much training for jobs in the real world, she says, while suggesting that the military should change its ban and open up its ranks to suitable convicts, as once a long tradition.

THE ANNUAL BENT SPOON award by Australian Skeptics has gone to a homeopath who denigrates all vaccines and suggests that whooping cough victims seek out a homeopath for a cure. The Bent Spoon Award for “the perpetrator of he most preposterous piece of paranormal or pseudo-scientific piffle” was first won in 1982 by psychic Tom Wards “who made many predictions of world events that were remarkable for their inaccuracy.”

“Of the 50 largest individual gifts to public charities last year, 34 went to educational institutions….(nine more) to medical facilities and fashionable charities…Not a single one of them went to a social service organization or to a charity that principally serves the poor and the dispossessed.”
— Why the Rich Don’t Give by Ken Stern in the Atlantic

WHY WASTE GOOD VIDEOTAPE? is what Rony Meisler, a Brazilian fashion designer, asked himself when his shop got robbed and he contemplated the pictures from his security camera. So he overlaid the tape with the caption It’s not necessary to break the window. Just come in. Inventory clearance: 40% off and then added a guitar and drums soundtrack. Voila! A commercial he could run on the local TV station.

THE WILCOCK WEB: Those despicable pols who voted against stricter gun laws could have voted the decent way, lost their jobs, and quadrupled their salaries by becoming lobbyists like all the others do….The Pentagon predicts that allowing women to serve in the front lines would reduce rape by removing the disparity between the sexes…. Those millions handed to Afghan farmers not to grow opium might better be spent buying the crop and burning it…. Upstate New York’s Lake Placid Lodge where guests have to hand over their gadgets at the front desk and take part in cooking classes, snowshoeing expeditions, yoga, “and other tech-free pursuits” is listed by Inc. as one of a new class of company retreats which encourage employees to take a “digital detox.” Similar retreats: San Francisco’s Digital Detox and Mendocino’s Shambhala Ranch…..North Korea is manufacturing drugs “so renowned for their purity they are in high demand across the globe,” says the Daily Telegraph. Vast quantities are shipped to its foreign embassies for sale to boost the country’s export income…..Weirdo Dennis Rodman says he can’t wait until he gets back to North Korea this summer. “I’m staying in the palace”…..“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important,” wrote T.S. Eliot ….Words that soak into our ears,” says The Ol Farmer, “are whispered, not yelled”…When the Mississippi floods couldn’t they store some of the water seeing as the region is parched the rest of the time?…….How did General Electric get away with earning $5.2bn in the US in 2010 and yet owing no taxes?…..The Swiss, of all people, have introduced a bill that will allow shareholders to limit the obscene amounts that directors of their companies have been getting away with…“What do (bankers) do to deserve such wealth?” asks a Guardian reader. “They don’t look after our children, our sick ,or our aged. They don’t do anything tangible. They simply look after other people’s money, generally badly and sometimes criminally”….Surely Google’s glasses are the silliest invention of the new century?….Mad Men’s Jon Hamm has been asked to don underwear when filming because his tight-fitting pants over-emphasize his crotch…. ….MURPHY’S INLAWS by Phil Procter: “Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak. A fine is a tax for doing wrong and tax is a fine for doing well. He who laughs last, thinks slowest. A day without sunshine is like, well, night.” ….Paying George W. Bush’s expenses (security, pension, office, postage, travel etc.) costs the government $1.3m a year. But he’s raised $500m for the monument to himself, the library at Southern Methodist University….For the first time, reports The Week, the French are now spending more in fast food chains than in regular restaurants…Dredging enough sand to create four square miles of land will make Rotterdam’s port the biggest in the world, able to cope with enough cargo containers each moth to circle half the earth….The Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Mass., which installed a printing press that can produce within minutes a copy of hundreds of titles, has hired bicycle messengers who can deliver books faster than Amazon can ship them….Under its disability laws, Brazil is installing double-size seats to accommodate fatties at next year’s World Cup….Beer concentrate has been dreamed up by Pat Tatera of Backcountry Beverages. All it needs is the addition of ten measures of soda water….We’ll soon be hearing from all the sleaze balls who’ll be lawyers competing to represent a terrorist….“The comfort of the rich depends on an abundant supply of the poor.” – Voltaire (1694-1778)