Courtney’s Opinion: I’m naturally high, but that’s me. You do you, wild child.
In the spirit of being an informed writer, I googled “other names for marijuana” today. The results made me giggle. Coincidence? I think not. This was my favorite finding: “Marijuana, dope, pot, grass, weed, head, mary jane, doobie, bud, ganja, hashish, hash, bhang. People affected by cannabis are ‘high,’ ‘stoned,’ ‘out of it,’ ‘whacked,’ ‘off their face.’”
My giggles come naturally, as do my munchies, so I’ve never felt the pull of the pot or the need to be off my face.
Also weed-free, my husband loves to strike up conversations with strangers. A few years ago, we were on a ski lift in Colorado. The trip to the top of the mountain is 12 minutes, so while I reveled in the snow and silence, my husband was inclined to strike up a conversation on our vertical trek. He asked our lift-mates what they did for a living. Pretty standard small talk. The stranger started explaining the indoor hydroponic marijuana farm he had started.
When the stranger asked my husband what he did for a living, hubby dead-panned, “DEA agent.” Needless to say, the rest of ride was awkwardly silent. When we got off the lift, we laughed and laughed. Giggling as if, well, as if we were high. It still makes us laugh today. But we don’t judge. Get whacked if you must.
In addition, I was terrified to disappoint my parents, and breaking the law would have been tantamount to life in parental prison. So, I must admit I have never inhaled. True story. I tried once (post high school), but my lungs don’t seem to work that way, so it was over before it even started.
Barry’s recent dip into the marijuana gummy game, and the “wild ride” that subsequently transpired, inspired this month’s column. And I struggled to come up with a solid position on the matter. I have to be honest, marijuana and its legalization – or not – is not on my top five list of things that I need fixing, so I am boringly indifferent.
Personally, and for some reasons that I am sure a therapist would be happy to deconstruct, I have a fear of becoming addicted to anything, so I steer quite clear of items in the drug category. To this day, when I have surgery and the doctor prescribes a pain medicine, I switch to Advil as quickly as I can. I have a full bottle of prescription sleeping pills, because I would rather lie awake and solve the world’s problems and be exhausted come morning than become reliant on a sleep aid. Of course, the irony is I am so tightly wound that a little marijuana would probably do me some good. But then I would worry about the brain cells I am losing and be wide awake anyway.
Sorry Barry, my fiber gummies (this is 50) are about as crazy as I get these days. But I am enjoying picturing a 17-year-old Barry lurking in a dark parking lot in Ohio, sweating profusely and waiting for his first weed hookup. In contrast, I am also imagining present-day Barry skipping through the Mall of America and experiencing Wink World and the Museum of Illusions without a care in the world.
You do you, my friend.
Barry’s Opinion:Get on the legal train, South Carolina. This isn’t the War on Drugs anymore!
I was 17 years old the first time I purchased marijuana.
As my sole connection to obtaining The Devil’s Lettuce was an upperclassman who had some kind of shadowy hookup, I met my erstwhile dealer in the parking lot behind the United Dairy Farmers, nervously keeping one eye on every rooftop for police lookouts just waiting to send in the SWAT team.
Sure, I was paranoid. I’d grown up with the many War on Drugs PSAs playing in the background, after all. Every one of my cartoon heroes had told me that drugs would ruin my life, or even kill me dead. And yet, with all that accumulated guilt, with the voice of Super Mario ringing in my head telling me, “If you do drugs, you go to hell before you die,”* I laid down $20 for an eighth of an ounce of the skankiest ditch weed that Shawnee Hills, Ohio, had to offer.
Thankfully, Ohio’s many narcotics control officers must have had something better to do that day, because I walked away with contraband in hand and a clear criminal record.
I bring it up only because it’s a stark contrast to the last time I bought marijuana, which was this past summer.
This time, however, there was no shady back alley. There was no threat of incarceration. Just a well-lit storefront in the Mall of America, the world’s greatest monument to our national pastime of consumerism. Just steps away from the Nickelodeon amusement park – featuring some of the same characters who used to warn me about this sort of thing – I bought a packet of THC-laced gummies from a smart-looking young man in a place that looked like an Apple store for Jazz Cabbage.
What a world, I thought, as I stuffed my illicit souvenir at the bottom of my shopping bag lest the kids find out. In my home state of South Carolina, what I had just done could land me in jail for a month. Here in Minnesota – a place whose chronically chill population always seems like they sparked a J on the car ride over, whether they did or not – it was perfectly legal.
Why? If this stuff is supposedly so dangerous, why is it dangerous only in South Carolina? Partially because every time someone in power puts forth a commonsense proposal for something as uncontroversial as medical marijuana, dark money PACs shower us with hyperbolic mailers about how they’re going to turn South Carolina into “one big pot party.”
(Shoutout to Tom Davis for having to deal with this crap just because he has the gall to want to help cancer patients.)
And we all know it’s ridiculous. We all know that legalizing marijuana has not led to chaos in the streets in the 24 states where it has been made legal recreationally. And the only thing it’s led to, in the 38 states where it’s legal medically, is doctors who have more options for treating their patients.
So why do we have such a stick up our collective derriere when it comes to legalizing Giggle Grass? The more conspiratorially minded among us might point out that South Carolina is fertile ground for illegal marijuana farms that would have their bottom line knocked out by legalization. And thanks to our political system, they are free to spend that money sending out mailers that keep us in fear.
I don’t know if I buy into that, but it’s intriguing. For my money, I think the reason why we as South Carolinians won’t even allow the oncology wing to have a good time is because we still think we’re fighting the War on Drugs.
Folks, we won the War on Drugs. And it wasn’t won by the dealers, or the distributors, or even the government. It was won on the strength of good old American commerce. We won it as soon as we took the profits from Satan’s Spinach out of the hands of criminals and put them into the hands of small businesses.
That $20 I paid for that scrubby bag of shake all those years ago probably wound its way into the hands of some bad people. The money that I paid this past summer supported the American Dream, keeping a mall storefront open and employees in a job. That money helped build someone a life.
That’s a victory lap that I and the people of Minnesota can be proud of. It’s time for South Carolina to get on the winning team.
*This is 100% a real PSA. Look it up on YouTube.
