Wed, 15 Dec 2004 Boston Herald (MA)
Howie Carr, Herald Columnist
IN AT LEAST ONE WAY, ZOOMASS ISN’T GOING TO POT
What a bummer, man. The feds say that the University of Massachusetts can’t, like, grow weed.
That is so totally wrong, dude.
The decision from the Drug Enforcement Administration was faxed to ZooMass Friday, according to the Marijuana Policy Project, which The New York Times described as “an independent group that favors legalization of marijuana, particularly for medical uses.”
Medical use – yeah, that’s the ticket. Like, weed is an herb, man. George Washington was totally into hemp. What do you think it means when they said “pursuit of happiness?” It’s right there, man, in that thing Nicolas Cage stole in “National Treasure.”
How can you pursue happiness when your stash is running low, man? Talk about cruel and unusual punishment. How can you get a good riot going on the Southwest Quad when you’re down to sticks and stems? By the way, who knew you had to have a license to have pot at ZooMass? This is all Bush’s fault, dude. If only he’d lost to that, uh, what was that other guy’s name man, the one with the $8,000 bike and the snowboard? You know, the one that was in Vietnam. Dude like that had to be totally pro-weed, right? You ever seen “Apocalypse Now?”
It’s a shame ZooMass won’t get to grow its own marijuana. It would have given new meaning to the term absent-minded professor. Cheech & Chong could have endowed a chair for the study of . . . whatever, man. ZooMass began its zany quest for a marijuana farm three years ago, when the president of the stoner school was William M. Bulger, whose brother Whitey, in addition to being a serial killer, was also at one point perhaps the largest illicit drug dealer in New England.
Actually, if it was UMass-South Boston instead of UMass-Amherst, in the day the professor would have been well advised to get permission, not from the DEA, but from Whitey.
The brilliant scholar behind the failed crackpot scheme is Dr. Lyle E. Craker, professor of plant biology. He says the government’s pot is “weak” – a chronic complaint in the UMass dorms about even private-sector ganja. “We wanted,” Craker told the Times, “to have a source independent from the government.”
Paging Whitey Bulger. He and a guy named Joe Murray used to have a pot warehouse on D Street in Southie. The cops grabbed 15 tons there one day in 1983. They intercepted a Whitey ship, the Ramsland – 36 tons. Hello, Dr. Craker! Why didn’t you just pick up the phone and call Billy Bulger and see if he could have gotten you Whitey’s phone number. I mean, Billy’s admitted talking to him since he went on the lam.
It’s been a tough fall at ZooMass. Some people got, like, busted for throwing bleep at the campus cops. Then Bush beat what’s-his-name. Then Dirtbag – er, Dimebag, did the dirt nap.
Think of the spin-offs this could have meant for the school. New degrees – master of marijuana, bachelor of boo. You could establish a School of Culinary Arts, with a major in munchies. Forget polymers – let’s show the Pacific Rim who’s doing state-of-the-art bong technology. They’ll never get the Final Four, but maybe ZooMass could have snagged the NCAA joint-rolling championship. And how about a new genetic variation of pot – seedless weed. How many times have you, like, bought a new sweatshirt, and then, when you fired up a bone, a seed explodes and burns a little hole on the shirt and Mom is so totally torked when you go home for the weekend.
It’s all, like, Bush’s fault. Totally.
Howie Carr of the Boston Herald writes IN AT LEAST ONE WAY, ZOOMASS ISN’T GOING TO POT.
