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III.
On Friday, the administration just happened to release the transcript of the interviews of convicted sex trafficker and Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. By a remarkable coincidence, this release occurred the same day that the Justice Department, under subpoena, turned over to the House Oversight Committee a first trove of documents from its investigation of Epstein, potentially far more damning to Trump.
In her interviews, Maxwell describes Trump as saintly when it comes to women. “The president was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects,” Maxwell said during two days of interviews in Tallahassee, where she was serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking. Her trial included detailed accounts of sexual exploitation of girls as young as 14 told by four women who described being abused as teens in Epstein’s homes.
She added, “President Trump was always very cordial and very kind to me … I admire his extraordinary achievement in becoming the president now. And I like him, and I’ve always liked him.”
As anyone with an ounce of worldly sophistication must appreciate, Maxwell, who was recently moved to a lower-security prison, is repaying Trump for the favor and angling for a pardon. But this would be very tricky for Trump, since the MAGA base is obsessed with the Epstein case, and obsessed with politicians who are involved with, or soft on, sex trafficking of minors.
Was anybody fooled by the clumsy diversion of the release of the Maxwell transcript? Well, Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post described the two releases as “unrelated.”
IV.
One day, in the late 1960s, my then-girlfriend was walking up Sixth Avenue in Manhattan carrying a shopping bag with half a kilo of weed. She had scored it from a dealer as a favor to several friends and was en route to make deliveries. She was young and innocent-looking. A kid who couldn’t have been more than 14 tried to take it from her. She handed him a five-dollar bill and told him to get lost. If the cops had happened to get involved, she risked a long prison term.
In that era, we were mainly protesting segregation, the war in Vietnam, widespread poverty, and sex discrimination, to name four. Still, there were hundreds of thousands of people behind bars for simple possession of marijuana, and with Nixon’s war on drugs the incarcerations only got worse. A young crusader named Keith Stroup, with a $5,000 grant from the Playboy Foundation, organized NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.
I was ambivalent. Prison sentences for pot were appalling and worth resisting, but I was focused on more consequential issues. I wasn’t wild about the stoner culture either. Weed might help some creative people become more creative. But in my circle, the people who spent half of their time high tended to get way too far into their own heads, and were mainly boring. Oh wow.
This was the era when the Yippies, who were into revolution by giggles, mocked the earnest radicals of SDS.
Fast-forward five decades. We have lost most of the other struggles. Racism is fashionable again. The gap between wealth and poverty has never been wider. The Vietnam War ended, but worse wars persist. But good old Keith Stroup basically won.
Marijuana has been decriminalized in 31 states, though it is still technically illegal under federal law. In most of libertarian America, red as well as blue, nobody gets busted for smoking a joint, or even for dealing small quantities.
However, the result is not quite what my crowd imagined. Rather than small producers growing and selling pot, the stuff has been commercialized. And it’s commercialized but unregulated by the FDA, typically a lot stronger than when I was young, and of varying strengths; so you have no idea what you are getting.
The five largest companies selling weed each bring in over a billion dollars a year and are vertically integrated, beginning with Curaleaf, Trulieve Cannabis, and Green Thumb Industries. Your storefront pot shop with the cute name that drives up rents and crowds out the local bakery is likely to be owned by one of these conglomerates.
In short, the stuff that epitomized the counterculture is now one more big business. A pot reformer circa 1970, who just wanted a few tokes in peace, might say, with T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, that is not what I meant at all.
And because of the legal ambiguity, weed growers and wholesalers are sitting ducks for selective prosecution. And—wouldn’t you know it—Donald Trump to the rescue. He is in negotiations with the commercial marijuana lobby over how large a payoff it will take for him to press for full federal legalization. Groovy, dude.
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