Willie Nelson Marijuana Bust News
Willie Nelson Doesn't Apologize for Loving Weed 
If you’ve been in the marijuana world long enough, especially as a marijuana journalist or photographer, you eventually have a Willie Nelson encounter that leaves you smiling.
Mine happened a few years ago when Willie was on tour. I went to work out at a local resort that also has a fitness club, and saw two massive tour buses in the parking lot.
Didn’t make the connection between those buses and the fact that Willie Nelson and his band were slated to perform concerts at a venue only a couple of miles away. But I did smell the sweet odor of cannabis drifting over from the tour buses, and I wondered who was in them.
This was in a drug war state where you can go to jail for a gram of weed, so it seemed like a damned courageous (or foolish) thing to be sending billows of dank smoke out into the parking lot of a major resort in a backwards redneck county known for drug warrior police and prosecutors.
When I checked in a the fitness center front desk, I asked the fitness center girl about who was in those tour buses. “We get fired if we tell, sir,” was her timid reply. And I got the same unhelpful response from all the other resort staff I asked.
However when I was done with my workout and went back to the dressing room for a shower and sauna, I noticed an entourage of people, some with guitars, and a longhaired guy who looked like…Willie Nelson.
Willie was in the center of the group and they were heading towards the sauna. Two burly guys were on the group’s perimeter. I was giddy with joy and walked over to the burly guys, figuring they were Willie’s security guards.
When I told them that I worked in the marijuana industry and wanted to share some medicine with Willie, they scowled at me and said they didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. Later on I realized how stupid I was to have said that to them. They probably thought I was a cop.
Willie’s people pretty much took up the entire dressing room and sauna, so I just showered and left. I made a detour to the tour buses, where a couple of other burly guys stood drinking whisky out of a bottle. I told them I had a gift for Willie, and handed them a fat, sticky AK47 bud.
Unlike the other security guards, they didn’t flinch. However I doubt seriously that that bud ever made it to Willie. The guards’ smiles were just too big for me to think that they’d pass up a chance to hit the AK47 all by themselves! A hell of a lot better than whisky, that's for sure.
But let's try to remember just how many times has Willie Nelson been busted for marijuana. It’s hard to keep up, because Willie never stops smoking and carrying his marijuana medicine, no matter how many times the 5-0 comes on him.
His latest trouble came in November last year when he was popped with six ounces of marijuana in Texas, which is a vicious drug war state.
Most of us would do hard time, perhaps even life in prison, for possessing six ounces of cannabis in Texas, but the prosecutor told the presiding judge that as long as Willie showed up in court and sang a couple of songs, the charges would be dropped.
When that didn’t fly, the prosecutor offered to drop the felony charge to a misdemeanor, and make Willie Nelson pay a few hundred dollars in fines and costs.
Again, I am glad for Willie Nelson that the prosecutor is a big fan of his, but it’s a fact that you or I would have done prison time for six ounces in Texas, no doubt. Even if we could sing You Were Always on My Mind almost as well as Willie.
The presiding judge isn’t as big a fan of Willie Nelson as the prosecutor is, so she has overruled the misdemeanor plea deal and who knows if Willie might have to go to trial, or even go to jail.
One thing’s for sure though- Willie Nelson isn’t sitting around weeping about the drug war. He founded the Teapot Party and made the following statement about his goal of legalizing marijuana:
"Tax it, regulate it and legalize it! Stop the border wars over drugs. Why should the drug lords make all the money? Thousands of lives will be saved. The purpose of the Teapot Party is to vote in people who believe the way we do, and vote out the ones who don't."
Willie’s Teapot Party website is cool, fun and good-looking, and he’s getting huge numbers of fans on his Facebook page too. There are few celebrities, singers, and movie stars as courageous and unapologetic about loving marijuana as Willie Nelson is. And if some mean ol' Texas judge tries to put him in jail for cannabis, it would likely ruin the judge’s karma for eternity!
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Wednesday, 06 July 2011
