Burned

Burning Man this year received its usual wide attention.

The East Bay Times debunked five alleged Burning Man myths.

Salon reported that a “staggeringly high suicide rate among Burning Man’s seasonal workers is just one symptom of a toxic work environment.”

The London Daily Mail reported that the “Me Too movement has also called the appropriateness of the signature ‘Orgy Dome’ into question.”

The New Zealand Herald ran a “survival guide” for Burning Man attendees.

The New York Post reported on “How the one percent do Burning Man,” an evergreen story that can be done every year.

The Rib Cook-Off is a week away, but downtown Sparks is closed for two weeks for the one-week festival. Venders say they need that much time for set-up.

PYMNTS, a trade journal for the “payments industry,” had a piece on the economics of Burning Man.

CityLab reported on Burning Man’s administrative structure, concluding, “If you love bureaucracy, Black Rock City is the alternative desert utopia for you.”

The size of the town on the playa fluctuated. The San Francisco Chronicle said 60,000, most reports said 70,000, and the Reno Gazette Journal upped the ante to 80,000.

But this year is likely to be remembered as the year of the highway crackdown.

The Pyramid Lake Tribe, whose reservation festival attendees cross to reach Black Rock City, entered an agreement with law enforcement agencies for rigorous highway stops in advance of the start of the festival. The action was not announced in advance. However, if anyone was busted on the way to the festival, they had been warned in another way. Three days before the BM start, the Gazette Journal reported, “The Nevada and California highway patrols are joining to crack down on distracted and reckless driving on I-80 from San Francisco to Wendover, according to an announcement from NHP. … There will be extra troopers on duty from Aug. 27 to Sept. 3, according to the NHP.”

Although the report, which was online several days before it hit print, referenced only Interstate 80 and not Nevada Highway 447, it did advise, “The effort is designed to coincide with Burning Man and the Nugget Best in the West Rib Cook-Off.”

The police—there were conflicting reports on how many agencies participated, but Bureau of Indian Affairs officers were the most visible—used minor traffic violations such as obscured license plates, burned-out lights or drifting too close to the center line to halt vehicles and sometimes to search them.

A U.S. Interior Department spokesperson said the stops had “nothing to do with Burning Man,” a claim that was not taken seriously. “Are they saying these stops would be being made if everyone was on their way to a Ducks Unlimited gathering, or a state wildlife department thing?” asked one critic. “This has everything to do with Burning Man.”

With only one Burning Man under their belts before this, marijuana shops have concluded that BM is to dispensaries what April 15 is to accountants. One shop’s billboard inside the California border in Verdi virtually invited BM participants to take the risk of carrying pot to Burning Man by stopping at the dispensary “before & after the burn.”

Drug money

It was all a forceful reminder of how thin the new veneer of voter and political tolerance of drugs is, and how easily a return to punitive enforcement of prohibition can happen in a system where law enforcement opposes the evolving public policy and has a financial incentive to do so.

As a candidate, Donald Trump said in Sparks on Oct. 29, 2015, “The marijuana thing is such a big thing. I think medical should happen—right? Don’t we agree? I think so. And then I really believe we should leave it up to the states. It should be a state situation. … But I believe that the legalization of marijuana, other than for medical, because I think medical, you know, I know people that are very, very sick, and for whatever reason the marijuana really helps them … But in terms of marijuana and legalization, I think that should be a state issue, state-by-state.”

As president, Trump has done nothing to enforce that view on his appointees. He has said or written things as president about not interfering with marijuana use, but it has been followed by action. In reality, his appointees have become more punitive. A month after he was sworn in, his press secretary said, “I do believe that you’ll see greater enforcement of it [marijuana].”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions revoked the Obama policy that left states alone if they made marijuana legal or available for medical use. New federal rules were adopted making Small Business Administration loans more difficult to obtain for firms that do business with the marijuana industry.

Indeed, the administration has been so harsh on marijuana that Congress started processing legislation, taking enforcement from the federal level and moving it to the states, with Republicans leading the way. Sessions’ punitive approach has been given credit for fueling that effort.

Trump, meanwhile, has received praise from prohibitionist organizations like Smart Approaches to Marijuana.

Over the years, some administrations have taken less punitive approaches to drugs only to have subsequent administrations stir up hysterias that resulted in renewed harsh enforcement.

The administrations of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter reduced punitive policies in favor of treatment only to be followed by the administrations of Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush, both of whom staged national furors over drugs, with the result that states backed off on their own more flexible stances. Nevada, which enacted medical use in 1979, repealed it in 1987.

Some marijuana supporters believe that with states like Washington, Colorado, Nevada and California now becoming dependent on marijuana taxes, there is no way the newly evolved tolerance can be rolled back.

But law enforcement also relies on money taken in drug bust forfeitures. The federal Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 allows law enforcement agencies to keep drug forfeiture funds it generates with busts, a conflict of interest that has led to abuses, but police agencies do not want to lose those funds and would join any new effort to bring back punitive marijuana enforcement.

In fiscal year 2016, the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office received $114,058 in drug forfeiture funds.Ω