And so ends my photographic journey through California. Hope you enjoyed. I was initially trepidatious about going to America on this trip as it was going to be the first time I had visited since Trump came to power and I expected it to be visibly different but it wasn’t. There was no way of knowing. You forget when you watch the news that it isn’t real life. It has nothing to do with the everyday and it does not relate to the folk you meet.
I actually found that everyone seemed even friendlier and more chilled since I was last in California and that possibly had something to do with it now being Legal Weed World ‘n’ all (see wednesday’s post). I actually think it just highlighted the disparity between the perceived notion of a country and its people as fed to you by the media and what it actually is. Not to say that the Trump isn’t totally fucking horrendous on so many levels, he is, but he is not necessarily a reflection of what it is to live and be in America.
Just like Brexit and the shit show that is our Government is not a reflection of a giant chunk of us here in the U.K. Although, you would also presume so if you were watching it on the News from abroad. Not saying it isn’t having an effect, it is, but your day-to-day is the same…you get up, you work, you eat, you hang out with people, what actually makes up our life is not affected at all. I would also, go as far to say that the things that really depress me in the news do not impact me at all and yet it is still difficult to ignore. The disparity between what we see is happening in the world and what we actually experience makes for quite a paradoxical existence.
One of the reasons I am doing this series now is that I just can’t bear to be here at the moment, even mentally. Nothing good is going to come from me losing my shit watching people, who we entrusted to govern, scrabble around to save themselves, with not a single thought for the impact it is having on us or the country. And there is cock all point discussing it because no-one is listening. And so I choose to spend this time ‘being elsewhere’, anywhere but here…
…so next week, Stockholm! A place that actually gives a shit about its residents and their wellbeing…now isn’t that something?
This is a swarm of drones flying over Palm Springs. It was pretty freaky to see them hovering above us en masse, destination unknown. What was even more freaky was the eery buzzing sound they created as it really just sounds like one thing: the end of the human race. And when I looked at this photo, what was even freakier still is the light trail (from the long exposure) made them all look like a battalion of ‘ds’ flying overhead. Were they in fact spelling both themselves and our demise? Have they already achieved consciousness? Is it already over for us? Am I looking into this way too much? Probably, definitely and highly likely to all of the above.
They say that as soon as we hit the ‘point of singularity’ when machines achieve genuine artificial intelligence it will instantly be too late (see Terminator films for ref) and we will all be doomed so it might be worth paying attention to any little stepping stones that get us nearer to that moment…just saying.
On the off chance that machines do take over I would just like to say I have always been a big fan, love your work and I hope I can be of assistance in the future…
Marijuana is now legal in California, as it is in another handful of states dotted around America. The whole of Canada too. The (other) Green revolution is well underway and looks like it will spread across the whole continent and eventually the Globe. As I walked into my first ever legal weed store in Los Angeles, it was, I have to admit, a pretty surreal experience.
The first shop I went in was called Medmen (great name btw) and it was decked out to look and operate just like an apple store. You were greeted by staff in matching coloured polo shirts with headsets, smiling at you as you walked in. As per their mac counterparts, they were very attentive and helpful and showed you round the myriad of product choices on offer, all displayed in clean glass cabinets and they even had iPads to demonstrate. The only major difference between this shop and the apple store is that the workers on duty all appeared to be fairly stoned. I couldn’t tell if this was company policy or just personal choice fuelled by accessibility. Did it affect their ability to deal with the customers? Not really, although they did get a little distracted at times.
The other thing I noticed is that when you looked around the shop (which was packed) was that the customers were from every walk of life, every age group, every ethnicity. They were not identifiable as any one demographic but what they did have in common was that they no longer needed to go and see a dealer to get high. They could do it by walking in off the high street and buying any number of THC (the active compound in marijuana) based products which were not only labelled with the exact dosage so you knew exactly what you were taking but were also essentially healthy products, certainly in the case of the edibles. You could now get as wasted as you like and it would not be harmful to you. And you now also didn’t have to break the law and risk arrest and possible incarceration to achieve this altered state. And everyone there seemed to be pretty fucking happy about it too.
Mints
The legal weed revolution has created an endless supply of new & non-toxic ways to get high so that you no longer have to inhale damaging smoke into your lungs. Compared to these new and ingenious ways to ingest THC, setting fire to some weed wrapped in paper seems like old tech. The variety and ingenuity of what they have created is truly astounding. They have drinks, mints, cookies dough, chocolate bars…they even have a mouth spray. Two squirts and you are well on your way.
You can obviously still buy actual weed if you want and the choice is truly staggering. And they all have superb names like Wedding Cake, Trainwreck, Purple Crack, Han Solo Burger, James Franco etc etc. There are also a whole new breed of cool branded pre-rolled joints such as Higgs and Pure Beauty as well as the endless array of vapes on offer.
So with this drug now legally available has their world gone to pot? (sorry, couldn’t resist) Has the streets of California descended into anarchy? Have kids become ‘hooked’ on other drugs as a result? No, no and no. All it has done is stopped regular people, who wish to alter their mind state to relax and enjoy themselves, from having to commit a crime to do so.
Drug use is not a criminal issue. It is a public health issue. The criminality of drugs does not stop people from doing it. All it does is send money and power into the wrong hands. It also ensnares young vulnerable kids into a criminal existence and incarcerates users, subjecting them to even further criminality, who should never have gone into the prison system in the first place. The war on drugs does nothing more than destroy lives and has been proven to be an utter waste of time and resources. So why continue with a policy that doesn’t work? For every drug haul they make, or cartel head arrested and imprisoned, they are simply replaced and the whole thing starts over.
And in the meantime, the states that have declared weed legal, have recuperated millions of dollars in tax which can now be put to good use. There are no apparent downsides to this and the sooner we get on board the better. We are cash strapped in this country and we have an ever increasing crime problem, which is entirely linked to the illegal drug trade. Remove that aspect and the whole thing falls apart. Without this income the criminal world would have nothing and be unable to detrimentally affect people’s lives to anywhere near the extent they currently are.
The question that will undoubtedly arise if legality ever gets considered over here is whether we should be encouraging drug use but truth is we already have legal drugs such as alcohol, caffeine, tobacco, prescribed pills, some of which are significantly more harmful than marijuana and are already legal so it would be nothing new at all. Alcohol, for example, is a much more socially destructive drug than weed could ever be so there is no logic to the substances that are banned compared to the ones that aren’t.
There is a greater more fundamental question of why do we feel we need/want to consume substances that alter our consciousness? If you look at all the consumed products, legal or otherwise that affect our mood and mind set and the percentage of the population who do at least one of them, it is pretty friggin high (no pun intended). So if it’s that prevalent surely this cannot be a legal issue. Are we all criminals?
I am currently reading the book ‘The Inner Level’ by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett and they show how drug consumption is significantly higher in societies with greater inequality. It would appear everyone is ‘medicating’ to make themselves feel better about their (lack of) social status. They state that ‘addiction is as much as a social as an individual problem’ and quote Damian Thompson’s book ‘The Fix’ which states that ‘You don’t have to be ill to give in, just human’. So it’s possible that the world has just got so fucked up that intoxication has become an essential requirement to coping with it. If society is the problem then surely we need to look at fixing that rather than judge or punish people who are choosing whatever ‘fix’ to help counter-act the negative effects their surrounding world is having on them.
In all honesty, I don’t think that its coming here anytime soon. Back in the day when the twat of all twats Cameron was in power, he set up a committee full of experts to look at the drug problem and they went off and researched it extensively and they came back and their recommendation was to legalise drugs as the only viable solution. His response? He fired the committee.
The homeless situation I saw in both Los Angeles and San Francisco was pretty dire. In L.A entire blocks located downtown have become tent towns, home to those who don’t have one. Its a grim sight to see, and the scale of the problem is quite staggering. It looks like something out of a dystopian sci-fi like “Escape from New York”. What is even more painful is that apparently Californians voted to add a small per cent of their tax dollar specifically to raise money to combat the ever-increasing homelessness but it is very evident that money has yet to be allocated as nothing has improved.
In San Francisco, it is equally as bad. Like in L.A they have all been moved to one area (the Tenderloin in their case) so they can be kept out of sight to the majority of residents. In London, we have a possibly an equally bad problem but it is maybe not as noticeable as they are scattered everywhere rather than in just one district. The other difference is, in London, you do see a lot of compassion and sympathy towards the homeless. Over there, from what I saw of the people who passed them, they not only ignored them but they also seem afraid of them. This is not to say the Californians don’t care for them, they do, as cleary shown in their decision to vote for greater funding to tackle the problem, but the treatment of them on the street is different to here.
One night we were in San Francisco, having a smoke outside our hotel which was right on the edge of a block chock full of homeless and a guy came up to us and asked for some money and we gave him a few dollars and he was so touched he walked off and then came back to express his gratitude, not just because we have given him something but because we had treated him like a human being. He told us he had come to San Fran to get work, ran out of money and him and his family, who were also living with him on the street in a tent had got stuck there and were now trapped. He was the sweetest guy and it broke our hearts to speak to him. What we must endeavour to do is remind these people, who have fallen on hard times, that it is not their failure, it is society’s. It is us who have failed them, not the other way round.
A short while after this, another woman came up to us (pictured below) and she sung us an incredible rendition of a soul track and she poured all her emotion into it and it was truly beautiful. And then my friend Phil, hugged her like she was family and that was also truly beautiful.
We must never forget that no-0ne is born homeless. Every person you see on the street could be any of us who have just had a really really shit run of luck.
