…”Long-term users of marijuana gradually become worse at learning and remembering things, a new study suggests.”

Insert your own joke here.

“Marijuana is now Washington state’s No. 8 leading agricultural product. In other news, Cheetos and Ho-Hos remain the state’s leading imports.”

Actually, no. Frito-Lay has a plant just off the Columbia in Vancouver USA, and Hostess is still ensconced in Seattle on Dexter (or “Dextrose”) Avenue.

…in the state officially go smokeless.

Some bar owners have predicted a fiscal disaster, as smoking customers would find fewer reasons to linger in their favorite watering holes.

Alcohol service is one of Seattle’s biggest employers and most prominent industries. It’s an industry that’s continued to thrive while the rest of the regional economy’s sputtered and faltered.

One reason it’s continued to thrive has been its steady, piecemeal deregulation. A few oldtimers remember when hard liquor by the drink (a.k.a. cocktails) could only be served in Washington state at private clubs, such as the Elks. Later, from the 1950s on, the strong stuff could only be served in full-service restaurants. These restaurants had to offer full meals, devote more seating area to dining than to drinking, and earn a certain percentage of their revenues from food as opposed to liquor. In these places, as well as in beer-and-wine-only taverns, the taps officially shut down at 1 a.m. Monday through Friday, and at midnight on Saturday. Sundays were dry all day.

Even the number of drinking places in a neighborhood was restricted, by regulations designed to limit “destination” nightlife areas. The idea was to limit drunk driving by making people drink closer to their homes, but it never really worked in that regard; particularly in the suburbs, where everybody drove anyway.

Over the years, the Washington State Liquor Control Board relaxed these restrictions a little at a time. Perhaps the two most important steps came in the mid-1990s.

The neighborhood bar limits were eased, leading to robust nightlife zones in Pike-Pine, Belltown, South Lake Union, and most recently in Fremont.

Cocktail lounges still had to offer something vaguely resembling food, but no longer had to be adjuncts to restaurants–the “bar menu” could be as simple as microwaved frozen entrees. This move, which coincided with the outbreak of the “cocktail nation” fad, gave previously beer-and-wine-only outlets access to higher profit-margin items, making the whole business less of a gamble.

But while public drinking became more convenient, public smoking was the new target of restriction. With the passage of a state initiative last month, Washington’s now got the nation’s toughest anti-smoking laws.

As a result, a local hospitality industry that had seen nothing but growth for a decade now sees a threat to its livelihood.

Cigar bars, and that new downtown fad of hookah bars, will have to sue the state in court to continue existing.

Bars will no longer get big promotional incentives and advertising support from tobacco companies. (Bars will still be allowed to sell smokes for off-premises consumption.)

And fewer regular customers, some bar owners predict, will show up. When they do show up, they’ll linger for shorter amounts of time, hence buying fewer drinks, because their nicotine urges will force them outside.

I have my doubts about the latter concern. There are more and more nonsmokers out there these days, though you wouldn’t know it if you hung out at some bars. I know several people who no longer go to bars or nightclubs, even when their favorite musical act’s playing, out of an aversion to second-hand smoke. The absence of such smoke from drinking establishments can increase, not deacrease, their potential customer base.

IN OTHER BOOZE NOOZE, Seattle City Councilmember Tom Rasmussen has introduced a bill that would offficially designate all of central Seattle, including Capitol Hill, as an “alcohol impact area.”

The anti-smoking law impacts on-premises drinking spots; Rasmussen’s bill would impact retail stores. These businesses would no longer be allowed to sell fortified wines or malt liquors. They couldn’t sell single cans or bottles of beer or single-serving bottles of wine. They couldn’t sell any alcohol prior to 9 a.m. daily (up from the current 6 a.m.).

Such restrictions have already been “voluntarily” imposed on retailers in the Central Area and Pioneer Square; but that’s just sent these products’ customers elsewhere. Now Rasmussen wants to impose it upon a wide swath of the city.

This bill is unabashedly class-biased. It would make it harder for poor people to get cheap booze. It wouldn’t help poor alcoholics get treatment. It wouldn’t stop people with money from making drunken fools of themselves in public. It would only affect the surface image of Seattle as a “clean city” inhabited only by “nice people.”

• Smoking in bars and restaurants officially ends on Dec. 8. There should be some kind of ceremony. Perhaps a ritual lowering of the giant Camel billboards inside the Showbox, or a ceremonial giveaway of the last Lucky Strike bar ashtrays.
• The gas-tax repeal is apparently going down. In double-negative terms, that means the higher gas tax is still on. The viaduct replacement project is still on, as are assorted commuter highway projects. The Republican-leaning rural voters of Eastern Washington, who imagine themselves to be self-reliant but traditionally get more out of gas-tax funds than they pay in, voted for the repeal (i.e., against the tax).
• The city and county political establishments, with little organized opposition, easily remained intact, with incumbents winning the races for mayor, county exec, and city council.
• And, oh yeah, the monorail finally lost on the fifth vote. This means the four previous votes, and the millions already spent on engineering, design, and real estate, may be for naught. It’s a “victory” of sorts for the municipal establishment, which never liked this populist interloper messing up its carefully planned system of projects. All along, the monorail threatened to takeup taxing and bonding capacity the politicians would rather put to use on their own pet projects.What I’d like to see now: The city should sell or donate the monorail project’s assembled real estate and R&D documents to either King County or Sound Transit, with the proviso that they be used to build a public transit system on the two legs of the monorail route (Ballard to downtown, downtown to West Seattle). This re-christened system need not use monorail technology or elevated tracks. It could involve retro trolleys, modern streetcars, light rail, or even buses on bus-only street lanes. Just as long as it’s something other than expecting everyone to own a private car.
• Back East, meanwhile, Democrats won big in Virginia and New Jersey. But in NYC, that supposed liberal hotbed to top all liberal hotbeds, the Republican mayor won an easy re-election with hardly a peep of opposition.

…the authorities apparently believe they’re helping the kids by teaching ’em how to make their own meth.

…there are many parts of hemp I don’t understand.

One of them is Hempfest, a giant two-day advertisement for a product that’s not legally available.

Musicians (such as the Kottonmouth Kings, above), orators, performance artists, and T-shirts lauded the praises of this supposed miracle industrial-agricultural product to an audience that seemed not to care one whit about industrial agriculture, but who seemed quite interested in chemical hedonism.

As we should’ve learned in the ’60s, hedonism makes a great pretext for a socio-political movement, but a lousy basis for actually running one. It’s hard to get things done that need to be done if you’re relying on people who’ve joined in to have leisurely fun.

Just because I think the stuff shouldn’t be illegal, it doesn’t necessarily mean I like it. (I think traditional haggis, made from organ meats, should become legal in the U.S., but I might never care to eat one.)

And besides, I loathe the smell of patchouli and think “jam bands” can create some of the dullest music on the globe.

One thing I do approve of heartily: Dumping the current political regime, and for many reasons beyond its prosecution of the “drug war.”

I might not go to Hempfest again. But I’d love to go to a Shempfest!

…utter coolosity factor: The huge, graphic cigarette warning notices.

…there was another cross-studio team-up of animated favorites, the justly forgotten anti-drug screed Cartoon All-Stars To The Rescue.

The tobacco companies are trying to shut up their most effective critic– the “Truth” ad campaign, which just so happens to be funded by the tomacco companies.

HERE ARE the two most important parts of the big football telecast:

• Janet Jackson’s attempt to prove, once and for all, she and Michael are different people.
• The anti-tobacco ad that wasn’t by a tobacco company, TheTruth.com’s “Shards O’ Glass.”

The game itself was a surprisingly tight, action-packed affair, ending with a last-second field goal. And it was won by the northern team (the New England Patriots), barely beating the southern team (the Carolina Panthers). Perhaps it’s an omen that someone from, say, Vermont or Massachusetts might whoop a certain adopted Texan later this year.

…but here high atop MISC World HQ we’re sitting high-N-dry, watching the rain and flooding footage on cable, avoiding anything to do with the World Series, and pondering what kind of age we live in that finds both Rush Limbaugh and Courtney Love popping the same drugs.

…about a third of the way down this linked page, that Bill Gates’s highly publicized anti-AIDS crusade’s really a prop-up for the big drug companies, and for the intellectual-property regulations that protect their monopoly (and his):

“Gates knows darn well that ‘intellectual property rights’ laws… are under attack by Nelson Mandela and front-line doctors trying to get cut-rate drugs to the 23 million Africans sick with the AIDS virus…. He’s spending an itsy-bitsy part of his monopoly profits (the $6 billion spent by Gates’s foundation is less than 2% of his net worth) to buy some drugs for a fraction of the dying. The bully billionaire’s ‘philanthropic’ organization is working paw-in-claw with the big pharmaceutical companies in support of the blockade on cheap drug shipments…”Gates says his plan is to reach one million people with medicine by the end of the decade.  Another way to read it: He’s locking in a trade system that will effectively block the delivery of medicine to over 20 million.”

NEAL POLLACK sez it’s way past time Americans started fighting for their right to party:

“These are tense times. People want to loosen the steam valve a little bit. They want to participate in culture outside of the jurisdiction of federal ‘morality’ educators. We don’t want the government telling us how to spend our free time, sussing out and prosecuting casual drug users and harassing nightclub owners. And for heaven’s sake, give the kids some condoms.

“Sex and drugs and live music make life great. These are the kinds of things that were outlawed in Taliban-run Afghanistan. If they can’t be legal and easy in America, then I don’t want to live here anymore. I want to live in a place where drugs and sex are tolerated, where the government provides a sane level of social services, where religion isn’t always threatening to take over the state.”

I heartily concur.

Down with the Republican sex police AND the Democrat music censors!

Proponents of pot legalization should give up their pious guises, admit they’re really out to legalize recreational toking, and take pride in that.

We should allow and even endorse such wholesome frolics as the Fremont Parade nudists. Even set aside a clothing-optional public beach or two.

The Seattle City Council shouldn’t just approve bigger parking lots for strip clubs, it should dump its decade-long moratorium against licensing any new strip clubs.

Let’s fess up and admit our teens (and adults) are gonna be gettin’ it on w/one another, and prepare ’em for the potential physical (and psychological) consequences.

And consentin’ adults of whatever gender oughta be able to get it on w/other consentin’ adults of whatever gender, even for material gifts, as long as they don’t keep the neighbors awake at night.

Hedonistically-related activities that do impunge on the well-being of others, such as stinky meth labs that could explode and take out the whole block any day now, could still be prosecuted under those reasons.

Heck, I’d even lower the drinking age a year or two, under certain circumstances and with certain driving-related caveats.

There. Now I’ve gone and ruined any chance of ever getting elected to the U.S. Senate.

Unless a bunch of us go out and do what Pollack asks–form a “Party Party” built around the right to live our own lives our own way.

As I’ve written in the past, Seattle’s civic history has always involved the dichotomy between sober civic-building and boistrous partying-for-fun-and-profit. (Frenchie theorist Jean Baudrillard would call it “production” vs. “seduction.”) The past decade of the hi-tech boom saw great public and private investment in the “production” half of the equation, but all that remains standing from much of that are monuments to the bureaucrat-acceptable parts of the “seduction” industries–sports and recreation sites, big comfy homes, museums, and performing-arts palaces. The newest of these, McCaw Hall (the revamped Opera House), has its open house this Sunday. (Yes, it’s a theater named for a family whose fortune was made in that bane of theater operators everywhere, cell phones.)

Las Vegas is realizing the economic value of fun. It’s time our regional (and national) leaders did likewise, or got replaced with other leaders who do.

(PS: I know the cyber-Libertarians would insist to me that they fully support the right to party. Alas, some of these dudes also support the right to pollute, the right to discriminate, the right to pay shit wages, and the right to bust unions.)

(PPS: Ex-Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg discusses some of this in his new book, Dispatches from the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit. Goldberg makes the supposedly provocative, but actually common-sensical, point that the Demos can’t successfully court what used to be known as “the youth vote” if they’re sucking up to censors and wallowing in baby-boomer bias.)

FIRST, A HEARTY THANX AND A HAT TIP to those who attended and/or participated in our nice midsummer soiree last Friday. We’ll have to do it even bigger and better soon.

SECOND, MANY ACKNOWLEDGMENTS for all who’ve offered ideas re: our plans to redesign and revamp the print MISC. We should have something to announce by the end of this month.

A NEWSPAPER BOX DOWNTOWN was adorned with a less-than-totally-adoring statement from one “STRWBRY GIRL.”

A BELLTOWN CONVENIENCE STORE bears a poster hawking a Korean budget-price cigarette with the slogans “Placing into the Escrow Fund” and “Try Our Full Line of Flavors and Watch Your Income Grow.” What’s more likely to actually grow if you smoke ’em, of course, is a malignant tumor.

…has come and gone. There seemed to be something missing from it this time, something uncommercial and unrehearsed. (Aside from the street beggars, such as this one dutifully preparing a sign reading “Smiles Are Free, Heroin Isn’t.”)

Most of the action took place behind the plastic-wrapped chain-link fence separating the $10 admission stage and beer garden from the much smaller free performance stage and the handful of “political” booths (most of which were exclusively devoted, in this age of corporate corruption and government power-grabbing, to the notion that all it takes to be “political” in a morally-superior way is to eat the right foods.)

A P-I freelance writer loved the (quite rockin’) set by the Gossip (above), and particularly noted the singer’s willingness to show off part of her bod. The writer was much less approving of Helle’s Belles guitarist Adrian Connor showing off part of her bod. Yo, Chris Nelson: Equality works both ways. A svelte straight woman has just as much right to take public pride in her midriff as a voluptuous lesbian does.

Meanwhile, other acts just rocked on, oblivious to the made-up controversy, such as local skeptical-pop stalwarts Peter Parker.

In another part of town over the weekend, the indie role-playing-game store in the U District that took the place in neighborhood gamers’ hearts from the short-lived Wizards of the Coast palace held its own “coming out” party of sorts, setting up some tables on the sidewalk so as to give some hardcore gamer dudez a dose of what’s stereotypically thought of as a rare and not-always-craved commodity among gamer dudez, sunlight.