A warrant is a piece of paper that says the state has decided you are a problem. Not that you are dangerous. Not that you have hurt somebody. That you are a problem. The distinction matters. A dangerous person is someone who does harm. A problem is someone who does not cooperate. The warrant does not care which one you are. The warrant cares that a judge signed it.

They came to my house in Detroit in nineteen sixty-seven for two joints. Two marijuana cigarettes. They sent armed men. They sent the state of Michigan through my front door with guns drawn for two joints that weighed less than a cigarette lighter. The warrant said I was in possession of a controlled substance. The controlled substance was a plant that grows in the ground. The state decided that this plant was more dangerous than the men with the guns. That is what a warrant does. It rearranges the danger. It makes the plant the threat and the guns the solution.

Fred Hampton got a warrant too. Chicago, nineteen sixty-nine. The FBI had a warrant. The Chicago police had a warrant. They came at four in the morning while he was asleep. They fired ninety shots. Fred was twenty-one years old. He ran a free breakfast program for children. The warrant said he was a threat to national security. A man feeding children breakfast. A threat to national security. That is what a warrant looks like when the state has decided who the problem is before the paper is signed.

Eugene Debs got a warrant in nineteen eighteen for giving a speech. He told people that the war was wrong and the draft was wrong and working people were being sent to die for rich people's profits. The warrant said sedition. The speech said truth. Debs ran for president from a prison cell in Atlanta and got a million votes. A million Americans looked at the man the warrant put in a cage and said that is my president. The warrant did not stop the idea. The warrant made the idea louder.

They are still writing warrants for plants. In twenty-six states right now a person can walk into a dispensary and buy marijuana with a credit card. In the state next door a person can go to prison for the same plant. The state line is an imaginary line. The plant is the same plant. The person is the same person. But the warrant only works on one side of the line. That is not law. That is geography pretending to be morality.

I did two and a half years in Jackson State Prison for two joints. While I was inside, the warden smoked cigarettes that killed more people in one year than marijuana has killed in all of recorded history. The cigarettes were legal. The plant was not. The warden had a pension. I had a warrant. Nobody has ever explained to me why one plant gets a tax stamp and another plant gets a SWAT team. Nobody can explain it because there is no explanation. There is only the warrant. And the warrant does not explain. The warrant commands.