In the latest evidence of the moral bankruptcy of my community, a standing-room only crowd turned out to pressure the Redway Community Services District into permitting a new brew pub to suck water from Redway’s already overtaxed water system. If there’s anything this community needs less than another industrial scale water waster, it’s more beer, and encouragement to drink it.

We have a huge problem with alcohol abuse here in Southern Humboldt, and you don’t need statistics to see it. It hits you in the face everywhere you go. Homeless alcoholics litter our streets from one end of town to the other, but the people with homes drink even more. Just attend one of the many nonprofit fundraisers, and watch how fast people suck down those $6 beers. Try showing up, sober, at around 10:30 p.m. See if you can find one person who’s not too drunk to talk to. Most community events around here feel like a college frat party, except that half of the drunks are old enough to have kids in college, or grandkids.

Read the papers. Without DUIs, alcohol-related traffic fatalities, disorderly conduct arrests and editorial complaints about public drunkenness, our local papers would have to investigate our corrupt county government just to fill the pages. Can you imagine that? Linda Stansberry reports, in her recent story in the NCJ, that people die of drug and alcohol related causes here in Humboldt County at THREE TIMES the state average. We’re so drunk here in Humboldt that even our statistics are staggering.

Do we care? Fuck no! I guess we like it when our neighbors and our kids die, or when our kids run people over and leave them to bleed to death on the street. That’s just part of growing up, right? Funerals give us another excuse to get sauced, and there’s too damn many of us around here anyway. Let’s build a new brew pub so our kids can get drunk and run people over a little closer to home.

Here in SoHum, all we care about is getting drunk and making money. That’s why we think the marijuana industry should look like the wine industry. So when the Redway Community Services District raised concerns about how this proposed new brew pub might negatively affect the small town’s water supply, greedy drunks came out in force to express their outrage, in an all-out effort to ram the project through.

No one expressed concern about how this new brew pub, proposed for the Meadows Business Park, might lead to more traffic fatalities, especially since the proposed location lies halfway between SoHums two most densely populated residential areas, but not within easy walking distance of either. The out-of-the-way location, in an industrial park, will not attract tourists, or promote shopping in downtown Garberville. Instead, the proposed new brew pub would cater to locals who like to drink and drive, and it would encourage us all to drink and drive more. How is this good for us as a community?

Thankfully, the Redway Community Services District stood up to the pressure, and the brewmongers went home angry. We may be famous for our cannabis, but the cannabis industry supports a destructive alcoholic lifestyle. Cannabis has the capacity to alter consciousness, but in SoHum’s dope yuppies, greed and the thirst for alcohol clouds their thinking so completely that even the best cannabis doesn’t reach them. They grow weed, but they think like alcoholics.

No, weed is not wine. Weed is nothing like wine, but SoHum’s dope yuppies think like alcoholics everywhere. Alcoholism is the disease that spawned our unsustainable culture of violence and environmental destruction to begin with, and alcoholism shapes our culture to this day. That’s why we inhabit such a cruel, heartless society and face a looming environmental crisis. Alcoholism destroys lives. It destroys families. It destroys communities, including ours, and it is destroying the world.

Cannabis is the solution, but SoHum’s alcoholic dope yuppies are just part of the problem.

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John Hardin writes at Like You’ve Got Something Better to Do.