News
Toronto band Fucked Up have shared the title track from their forthcoming album 'Another Day', out August 9th on the band’s own imprint Fucked Up Records. The video for "Another Day" gives a brief look at the history of human cannabis use and calls for an end to drug prohibition.
Fucked Up frontman Damian Abraham explains: “Evolving side by side for millennia, there is no other plant on earth that we have had a deeper and more fraught relationship with. It has provided us food, clothing, fuel, sails, rope, paper, building material, recreational entertainment and a medicine to treat countless ailments.
My relationship with cannabis began by turning to it as a medicine. While I had briefly experimented with smoking it in my early teen years, it wasn’t until the side effects from anti-anxiety medication became too much that I considered cannabis anything other than some hippie bullshit. It would wind complete changing my life and opened eyes to my ignorance.
I began trying to learn as much as a could about the plant and the good it can offer. This video is the product of that journey. But behind all the potential good cannabis has to offer is a fraught and tragic history. One of the chief crops of colonialism, its labor intensive production being a large driver behind the enslaved African peoples and later Indian people in indentured servitude to the Americas. Later consumption of it would be used to justify the racist vilification and ultimately criminalization of whole populations of people.
The last few decades have seen immense changes begin to take place. Years of activism would bring about “medical marijuana” programs. Medical cannabis would act as a thin end of the wedge for recreational legalization efforts. The new legal markets, in turn, have brought a wave of corporatization. While the lyrics of the song continue the story that started in “Lords of Kensington”, they’re also meant to be a metaphor for what’s happened to cannabis post legalization in Canada. A regulatory framework, with eyes on profits over justice and righting past wrongs, saw an industry handed over to prohibitionists and the people that enforced it over the victims of it. This song is about the death of that faze of cannabis and a hope for whatever rising in its place being better.
The first joint of legalization is smoked when all cannabis prisoners are free.
RIP to Tracy, Horatio and all the activists and pioneers that aren’t here to see that day.
End all drug prohibition!
Research assistance by Matt Riot. Thank you to Colin and Jonah for making the vision real.”
