Smoking the Government Weed

Nuanced musings on the legalization of cannabis

In America the pendulum never really swings, the coin just flips. You can have father/daughter purity balls or you can have nine-year-old drag queens pole dancing for tips. You can have have Biblical womanhood or you can have sugar babies. What you absolutley cannot have is a national conversation about sexual discernment and the pitfalls of both sexual repression and hypersexuality.

Yes, it’s Pride month and topless fetishists are twerking on the White House lawn, but this column is not about sex. I want to talk about a different topic lacking all nuance in our culture.

I want to talk about marijuana.

Not that long ago, smoking pot made you a literal outlaw. You had to put in some effort to be a pot smoker. You needed to know someone who knew someome to get access to weed. You had to ask around. You built relationships and proved yourself trustworthy. You risked going to jail. Lots of people did go to jail.

I discovered weed in my junior year of high school, and I took a liking to the stuff. This was during the Reagan years and pot smokers held the same social status as draft dodgers, dirty hippies, “urban” communities, and biker gangs. I had a handful of pot-smoking friends, but honestly we spent more of our time looking for pot than smoking pot. Within the confines of our small conservative town, demand for marijuana far outstripped supply. We rationed our weed.

When I headed to college in 1988, I left one small town for another. As a high achieving pot-smoking kid with anarchist tendencies, I specifically chose a school with no drug or alcohol policy and no core curriculum that was known as a haven for free thinkers. The school administration proudly asserted “the college is neither a police nor parental authority.” If we broke the law, that was between us and the law. I loved it there.

(Of course all of this has changed and my alma mater has joined most other colleges in policing and helicopter-parenting students.)

I fell in with the other weed lovers at college. While marijuana was easier to come by than it had been in my home town, we did not enjoy constant access to weed. Had I gone to school in Northern California or a big city, I might have availed myself of a steady stream of high quality buds. But in Grinnell, Iowa we were usually smoking Mexican brick weed, and sometimes we couldn’t find that. There was also the phenomenon of ditch weed, low-potency marijuana scavenged from farm fields where it was growing, quite literally, like a weed. (I wouldn’t recommend it.)

Bear with me as I slip into a requiem for that Generation X young adult sweet spot. Raised on Free to Be You and Me. Post sexual revolution but pre intenet porn. Riot Girls and grunge (my favorite fashion trend of all time). Kurt Cobain wearing skirts to make the point that men could wear skirts and still be men. No electronic surveillance (unless you count your paranoid friends who insisted that any phone discussion of marijuana tripped some omniscient government wire-tapping system). We enjoyed freedom few other generations can imagine.

Yes, yes. I know that my perspective on those times is certainly skewed. I was a white class jumper, raised poor then attending an elite liberal arts college where I was surrounded by the children of the bourgeoisie and the rich. We did know people who had gotten in trouble with the law for marijuana related crimes, but for the most part we didn’t live in fear of this. The situation was very different for people who were poorer, darker skinned, or living in heavily policed areas.

Like most potheads of the time, I was a huge advocate for the legalization of weed. Back then, arguing that marijuana had any medical or societal benefits made you a heretic as well as a suspected criminal. But argue I did, and not just because I’m an argumentative person who also smoked weed. I listened to the Hemp for Victory activists and the cancer patients and the social justice advocates and I truly believed the government was suppressing an important medicine and oppressing people of color by criminalizing marijuana.

I still believe that cannabis is an important medicinal herb. I also believe the government oppresses people of color through the drug laws. But I’m not certain that the legalization of marijuana has been a net good for society. I often think we’ve traded one set of problems for another.

If you reside in one of the 23 states that have legalized marijuana, I’m sure you’ve noticed a shift. Marijuana has gone from difficult to access to difficult to avoid. I’ve started entertaining myself by counting weed shops on my way to and from different places in town. There are nine weed shops along the five mile route from my house to my gym. More impressively, seven weed shops line the one mile stretch from my office to my bank.

We’ve gone from ditchweed to dabs. At the risk of sounding like an old grandma, I’m going to go ahead and say it: People are using too much weed.

When New Mexico legalized medical cannabis in 2007, I had mixed feelings. I did believe that cannabis had medicinal qualities and I was 100% in favor of letting people use marijuana without fear of legal consequences. But something about medicalizing the use of cannabis didn’t sit well with me. Integrating cannabis into the American phenomenon of the medicalization of all of human life didn’t seem wise. It struck me as potentially dangerous. Would pot smokers take on illness identities to access legal weed? Wouldn’t it be confusing to argue for legal recreational use of a state-sanctioned medicine? But I went along with the medical cannabis program. It seemed like progress and I was a progressive back then.

I knew (and had spouted) all of the old platitudes about why we should legalize weed. You know how they go: cannabis is safer than alcohol; no one has ever died of a cannabis overdose; Big Pharma opposes cannabis because cannabis can be used in the place of drugs for many conditions; cannabis is not addictive. That last one sometimes got stuck in my throat as I remembered a few years in college when I had a really hard time shaking my daily marijuana habit. I knew more than a few people who absolutely did seem to be addicted to cannabis.

The topic of cannabis overdose used to be a humorous subject. It was definitely possible to smoke too much weed. “One toke over the line” was a terrible but temporary state of being. Remember that hysterical video of the cop who stole weed from the evidence room, made pot brownies with his wife, got way too high and couldn’t figure out if he was alive or dead? Funny stuff, but not really. Anxiety is a beast. Cannabis-induced panic and anxiety happen more frequently with today’s supercharged weed and this is causing strain on our already taxed emergency rooms.

We all knew you could overdose, but the understanding was that you could not die from ingesting too much marijuana. It was impossible to lethally overdose on the weed we were smoking in the 1990s, but these days the concept of smoking weed seems almost quaint. People are consuming enormous amounts of THC in the form of gummy bears, soda, and high potency formulations like “moon rocks. Evidence is mounting that children can die from cannabis overdoses, a situation that becomes more likely as cannabis increasingly comes in the form of candy.

When medical cannabis was legalized we were told by legalization advocates it would help conditions ranging from PTSD to chronic pain, with the implication that cannabis would eliminate the need for pharmaceutical treatment for these conditions. Legalized cannabis was going to get people off psych meds and help solve the opiate crisis. Sixteen years later, it’s pretty clear that things did not go according to this plan. Despite easily available medical and now recreational cannabis, New Mexico continues to have one of the highest rates of opiate addiction in the country. And more people than ever are taking daily psychiatric medications for the treatment of PTSD related depression and anxiety. It’s also becoming quite clear that early marijuana use increases the risk of psychosis, particularly in young men.

Many believed that cannabis was going to help solve the environmental crisis. Hemp would sequester carbon, replace cotton, and power our biodiesel vehicles. Instead, massive cannabis grow operations in the West are stealing water from watersheds and from farmers who are growing food. The cannabis water wars don’t exemplify the hippie values of peace, love, and understanding, let alone environmental stewardship. Commercial cannabis cultivation uses a vast amount of energy. A 2021 study conducted by Colorado State University declared the cannabis industry “insatiable” and called the carbon footprint of industrial cannabis “enormous.”

Cannabis is dioecious, meaning that like human beings it is sexually dimorphic. Female plants are distinct from male plants and it is the flowers of the female plants that are harvested for medicinal and recreational use. Cannabis is Big Yin, female medicine. The plant is estrogenic, meaning it binds to estrogen receptors in the body which can lead to problems with the endocrine system. It doesn’t take a research scientist to know that marijuana is, as my acupuncturist friend says, “yinning our guys out.” Cannabis can cause demotivation syndrome, or what we used to call being a burn out. Regular cannabis use in men decreases sperm counts. In women it can also disrupt the endocrine system and negatively impact fertility.

Cannabis was going to open all of our minds and make us mellow and kind to each other. This hasn’t panned out either. I’m not naive enough to believe civil unrest has never been higher in the US, but social tensions have definitely not decreased since everyone started using way more weed.

Well at least no one is still being prosecuted for growing and selling marijuana, right? Unfortunately, wrong. The government and Big Weed do not take kindly to outsiders stepping on their lucrative turf. In states that have legalized weed, a portion of the tax revenue collected from the cannabis industry goes to law enforcement to crack down on rogue weed sellers (you know, the ones who aren’t getting licenses and paying taxes). The cops continue to arrest those who aren’t selling goverment sanctioned weed.

Do I want to return to the old days when pot smoking was a criminal activity? No. When I think about myself as a 16 year old girl driving with my friend to a biker compound where the guys had guns and vicious dogs and we had to take a few hits with them before leaving to prove we weren’t narcs …. no. I don’t want to go back.

I just wish it had happened a different way.

If I had been in charge of ending the criminalization of weed, here’s how it would have gone. Cannabis would be fully decriminalized. It would be legal to grow it, to use it, to have it in your house, to give it away. It would be illegal to sell it.

But where’s the money in that, eh?

I believe cannabis is a sacred medicine with many wonderful uses. What is happening to the cannabis plant mirrors what is happening to the sacred all over the world. When I see the big cannabis grow operations I think of brothels and surrogacy farms. The most female of all medicinal plants is being exploited to squeeze out the highest levels of recreational and reproductive capacity. People still pretend that using weed makes you a tuned-in member of the counter-culture, and the people selling weed continue to promote this image. In reality cannabis is just boring and mainstream now.

Iggy Pop once said, “We don’t get high any more, we just think stoned thoughts.” As I drive around town counting weed shop after weed shop, my mind goes to uncomfortable places. Why does the government want us consuming so much marijuana? Are there forces invested in encouraging demotivational syndrome and lowered fertility? Does the government want us to be more susceptible to hypnosis/propaganda?

Or is it just old-fashioned capitalist greed?