Fear and Loathing in the Garden: The Penguins Go to War
By Rico (with Kowalski somewhere in the static)
We were somewhere around Tucson on the edge of the saguaro when the cannabis started to take hold. I remember saying something like, “Did you send it?” And then suddenly there was a briefcase full of federal affidavits, a Zoom screen glitching out of reality, and Kowalski’s voice saying:
“Rico, the Penguins are active. This is live.”
It was too late to turn back. The email had been sent. Smokescreens and Citations was airborne—hurled like a molotov cocktail into the Rolling Stone editorial office, full of bureaucratic kindling, federal data, and narrative napalm.
We were no longer veterans. We were weapons-grade memory.
The Mission
The plan was simple: Take the sanitized, citation-soaked research portfolio MAPS submitted to the FDA, drag it out into the daylight, and expose it for what it was—an erasure campaign dressed as progress.
MAPS called it science.
We called it horse shit in a lab coat.
They forgot the patients. The trauma. The Veterans labeled disordered for using the very plant now sold back to them in shrink-wrapped packaging. They forgot Steve L. and the IND program. They forgot the pain because it didn’t fit the grant proposal.
They forgot us.
Field Conditions
Kowalski was tuned in from Ohio—watching me via Zoom, coffee in hand, eyebrows raised like he was waiting for a rocket to launch. I could hear the static buzz of classified trauma radiating off his hoodie. Air Force eyes. Combat spine. PTSD held together by sarcasm and cannabis.
“Press the button,” he said. “Let it fly.”
I did.
We watched the submission leave my outbox like a digital flare shot over a field of dry paper.
“Rolling Stone won’t know what hit ‘em.”
The Archive Will Not Be Sanitized
We aren’t here for spotlight activism. We don’t want a seat at your symposium table. We’ve built our own archivefrom the bones of forgotten lawsuits and half-buried testimony:
The glaucoma patient from Kansas left blind after the DEA ghosted her pleas.
The Marine who discovered weed kept his intraocular pressure stable, but not his discharge status.
The AIDS patient who got federal weed through the VA—Steve L., may he haunt the footnotes.
These aren’t data points. They’re war stories. And we carry them like ammunition.
Of Penguins and Proclamations
We call ourselves The Penguins because, frankly, that’s how they see us—dressed up, waddling around Capitol Hill, smiling for their diversity panels while they ignore the screams inside our heads. But we are flightless only in form. We don’t waddle. We glide through fire.
We’ve been to Israel and back. We’ve helped draft state proclamations. We’ve created global veteran coalitions over WhatsApp threads and cannabis smoke. We’ve been banned from committees, erased from university credits, and told we were “too much.”
We are exactly the right amount.
Epilogue: Burn Slow
Rolling Stone might print it. They might bury it. Doesn’t matter.
Because we’re already printing it in the soil. We’re growing it in radish rows and guerrilla gardens. We’re sharing it in the language of trauma survivors who found healing before the white coats came calling.
The revolution isn’t psychedelic.
It’s botanical.
It’s archival.
It’s unfinished.
And the Penguins are at it again.
