Everyone in the smart set is talking about Eric Schlosser’s new book, which argues that 10% of the US economy is “underground,” beholden to pot, porn, and prostitution. I would say that number is a conservative estimate. Out in Eastern Washington and northern Idaho, for example, it's easier to find a cheap prostitute than good barbecue. The same could be said for the local herb.
The kids say it’s “dank,” and Diet Pepsi commercials have taught us never to argue with those more toned and less encumbered by history than we are. So enamored with their homegrown marijuana are certain of these locals that they participate in something called a “barter fair” periodically.
Barter fairs are the Inland Pacific Northwest’s cousins to flea markets and swap meets, where country people get together and sell or trade various items to those who want them. Untrammelled capitalism, in its purest form, liberated from even a need for currency; typical of vendors’ booths are cardboard signs saying “will accept trade” or “no reasonable offer refused.”
There are significant differences between barter fairs and similar public marketplaces. Unlike the contemporary flea market, which often is a clearinghouse for shoddy, mass-produced goods imported from Asia, the barter fair has little in the way of mass-produced, new merchandise. These folks are businesspeople almost incidentally, with subsistence their only goal. No effort is made to sell items with which the seller has no personal connection.
So if someone is buying some old hippie’s cassette tapes at a dollar apiece, the tapes are likely something the seller decided he simply couldn’t use anymore. As for hemp pastries and glass pipes sold at a barter fair, these were likely made by the seller. Again, evidence of unfettered capitalism unimaginable from a legal American business. Grow it, make it, sell it – an economic logic that defies NAFTA, the WTO, and doughty drug warriors like William Bennett and Barry McCaffrey. Consumption and production as acts of insurrection.
But even if all that’s true, does it really matter? The price of participating in this economic market, for many, seems to be effective alienation from the larger culture. Not buying a pipe from a vendor one particular week? The vendor will be at another barter fair next week, somewhere in Idaho.
These fairs are invariably on the outskirts of nowhere, with the directions to them vague. Outside of Northport. 61 miles from Metaline Falls. Toward the Canadian border, but not that far up. In these obscure locations, law enforcement is stretched so thin that even emergency response takes close to 90 minutes routinely. There simply aren’t resources to enforce what ultimately are meaningless laws against possession of organic drugs, and so the law enforcement efforts sensibly concentrate on large-scale traffickers.
It is possible to escape the War on Drugs in America, for the most part, if one is willing to make certain sacrifices. Like living thirty miles from a stoplight, or congregating with people on the weekend who lack pride to such a degree that they let their filthy toddlers wallow in mud, just before they grab a basket full of medicinal brownies to hawk, two for five dollars.
Is marijuana incompatible with American civilization? Yes, it is, but not for the reasons pushed by the National Drug Intelligence Center, reduced to tepidly maintaining that "marijuana is a leading drug threat to the country. It is the most readily available and widely used illicit drug in the United States, and its prevalence has contributed to both an acceptance of marijuana use among some adults and adolescents and a perception that the drug is not harmful."
Focus on the word "harmful" for a moment. If marijuana were legal, it would harm all sorts of interests. Pharmaceutical companies would have less opportunity to turn profits from ineffective, addictive medicines, competing as they would with something anyone with a green thumb can grow. Indeed, with something that can grow on its own in the wild.
The people at the barter fair are not the kind of people one would hope their daughter would marry. They're not especially clean, especially if they've been camping on the grounds the entire weekend. They effectively have been driven from American civilization because they recognized that this government would rather lock them up than let them be. The unvoiceable realization that Washington sees them as chattel amounts, in their eyes, to a breach of the social contract. And so they drop out, lost to the system.
God help them if they're found.
May 7, 2003
