Closed Mounds

Somebody decided what you were allowed to know.

For a hundred years, a class of people has been making decisions on the common citizen's behalf. About cannabis. About the earthworks under his feet. About the cigarettes the Army handed his father in 1944. About the science the tobacco industry buried in 1953. The common citizen was not in the room. The common citizen is rarely in the room.

Closed Mounds: A Philosophy of Who Decides is John Douglas's witness account from inside that arrangement - a sixty-eight-year-old Ohio veteran, patent holder, bass player, and former community college music teacher who has carried the plant for fifty years, is setting it down now on his own terms, and refuses to pretend the arrangement was an accident.

The book takes the framework an economist named Bruce Yandle published in 1983 - Bootleggers and Baptists, the unlikely alliance between moral advocates and economic profiteers that builds durable bad policy - and pairs it for the first time in print with anthropologist Joseph Tainter's account of why complex societies collapse when the cost of complexity exceeds what it returns to the people paying for it.

Inside:

• Why the Drug War started in Geneva in 1925, not Washington in 1970, and why a 1961 UN treaty is still the ceiling under every American conversation about cannabis


• What John Ehrlichman confessed about Nixon's policy in 1994 - and why the confession did not stop the machinery


• How the licensed dispensary is the privatization of prohibition, not the end of it


• What Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue tells us about the reader who has consumed for fifty years and is ready to set it down - and has nowhere to go


• Why Ohio in 2023-2025 is the American Rwanda, and why local healing is the only kind that works

The book is for the common citizen the curator class has been deciding things on behalf of - the veterans, the factory workers, the teachers, the traditional growers, the dealers who want out, the virgin minds who were taught that abstinence was virtue and were never given the evidence to evaluate the policy that taught it to them.

The mound is open in the record. The class of people who have been deciding what the rest of us are allowed to know has had a long run. The run is ending - not because the class is losing its grip, but because the contradictions inside the mounds they built are starting to cost more than the mounds return.

Pull up a chair. The documentary is still running. There are rooms in the mounds I want to show you.