Month: June 2009

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My First Citizen’s Arrest

Well, today was one of those days where you think everything will go down pretty easy. Think again. I’m on the N Judah heading toward Caltrain and at the Ballpark these girls who were together in a group got on and one other girl also go on. The lone girl pulled out her iPod that one of the three other girls immediately snatched. The lone girl in her 20’s was pleading for them to give it back. Now here’s the odd part. The three girls who took the iPod were no more than 15 and maybe combined they all weighed what I do. So I stand up and walk up behind the lone girl and ask her, “Are these girls bothering you?”.

The response from the three girls was “Shut up motherf*cker or I’m going to mace you” and she pull out a can of “something”. I begin thinking of the line, “So are you feeling lucky punk?”. The lone girl says to me, “no it was my fault, don’t worry about it.” Her fault? she’s pulls out and iPod and it gets taken from her that doesn’t sound like it’s here fault.

So now my next response from the three girls is, “What are you gonna do now?”

My response? “I’m going to come over there and beat the three of you down if I have to unless you return her iPod.”

OK, what am I thinking here? That could be mace, it could be pepper spray, hell it could have just been WD-40 for all I knew, but even that would sting if it go shot in your eyes. So I’m standing there thinking what the hell am I going to do and the two of the three girls give back the iPod and headphones with a, “We was just playing with you.” I sit down and unfortunately the girl with the “Mace” walks up to me making me stand up and shoves the can up to my face with the line, “I should just mace you motherf*cker!” She puts the can down quickly and I can’t tell what the hell I’m dealing with until she starts to bring her hand up again. At that point I grabbed and twisted her wrist so that if she sprayed whatever this was she’d get it not me and kicked her leg out from under her grab the can with my free hand.

I took a step back and noticed that the streetcar driver had stopped the train at Caltrain and wanted to know what was going on. At this point the girl gets up and runs at me to attack me. I don’t want to punch a girl that might only be 15 so what did I do? Yep, I maced her. Then her two friends  freak out and come at me after watching their friend get maced and what happens? I maced them as well.

So now we have three girls writhing around in pain on the ground while the train operator comes over to give me a hand. I called 911 and told them we had an attempted robbery by three girls with a can of mace and that we’ll need you and paramedics immediately because they got maced. The two others who were on the train and saw the whole thing said they were glad I did it, but what if I had gotten maced. We all waited for the police and paramedics to come. It turns out it really was mace and not pepper spray and the police took the can and depositions from everyone there. The train operator said he had noticed something was going on, but wasn’t sure what even before I got involved and was starting to call it in when it all went down and the best part was, this all happened within two city blocks.

Was this a smart thing for me to do? Probably not. I mean if I had gotten maced my eyes are bad enough already and add to that the fact that I would have been beaten down by three 15 [maybe] year olds. I guess I’m just a good guy at heart, but don’t expect me to be going out and buying a Batman outfit anytime in the near future. I’ve done my good deed for the day and I’m done.

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Marijuana as a commodity

big_bud_marijuana
Marijuana, the crop of the new millenium

I’ve been seeing a lot lately about California making marijuana legal and taxing it in the same sort of way it works in Amsterdam.

Personally, I think this is a good idea. Everyone knows that California is the biggest pot growing place in the US if not the world and cash it’s bringing in is in the billions of dollars. Yes, it is a drug, but so is alcohol and vicodin and valium and all the other prescription medicines out there that. Yet if your company drug tests, none of these will keep you from getting a job, marijuana on the other hand, will.

Historically from what I could find there has never been anyone who has died of an overdose of marijuana [leaving out the possibility of them being stoned and crashing their car]. Alcoholism has killed thousands of people an when you mix in the people who mix alcohol with prescription drugs the numbers jump up even more.

We have medical marijuana clinics now and that makes it easy for people to get a card and get marijuana for it’s medicinal value. These are more of a minor blip in the marijuana cash crop business. Now think about this. If it becomes legal and taxed large companies would jump in and set up farms that would end up producing more marijuana as less cost which would overall end up dropping the price to offset the taxes placed on it. This could overall make it cheaper to purchase than it would to try and grow it similar to common vegetables like lettuce.

California needs cash badly and when you have a billion dollar industry that if legalized and taxed could turn into a trillion dollar industry I firmly believe that California would get a good boost to it’s economy. Not just from sales, but think of all the people who would come as tourists just because they could purchase marijuana legally. This would obviously boost border towns that usually need some help, but it would also boost the economies of metropolitan areas. Which would also help increase the hotel and restaurant business as well. All this would help to bring back the economy in California which while being the 8th largest economy in the world, has some of the worst marks in our school systems.