citizens in pot-legal states have not yet appeared on our screens, but if you smoke enough weed, it is widely known you will begin to think you see them. I live in Vermont, where laws governing marijuana have lagged behind other states. It’s hard to understand why a true-blue state like ours would not have been out in front of this issue. My personal opinion is that marijuana legalization provoked a kind of political paralyses in a state that has never met a tax it couldn’t support or a business that it could. Legal weed means, on the one hand, a taxable popular commodity that will generate millions of dollars to support progressive causes in the state. On the other hand, it will create a new and lucrative industry that will be filling empty storefronts, cultivating now- barren fields and greenhouses, and making money for a lot of enterprising entrepreneurs. The Vermont Agency for the Preservation of Empty Storefronts and Barren Fields (not its real name) is not entirely comfortable with the idea of people making money willy-nilly, no matter how much it could tax them. And everyday Vermonters are divided on the issue. Many fear the message it might send to young people, and the lack of a testing criterion for impairment while driving. The rest have been finding sitters and driving across the line to Massachusetts to buy highly taxed, killer, legal weed that is making people rich less than 20 miles from where I sit. That said, in 2018, Governor Phil Scott did sign into law a bill that substantially decriminalized recreational marijuana use. Medical marijuana use has been legal in
Even when I was what was politely called “experimenting” with drugs, I didn’t like weed. My carefully transcribed lab notes of those experiments indicate “Cannabis sativa when repeatedly inhaled tends to aggravate feelings of hunger, promote cognitive difficulties, and produce an overall soporific effect.” At least that’s what I would have written were any of us writing anything other than derivative poetry inspired by Jim Morrison. Pot, in other words, made me stupid, tired, and hungry. Since those traits perfectly describe my natural resting state, marijuana never produced in me a high so much as a feeling of way too much me . I preferred the substances that inspired me to believe there could never be enough of me... That the room wanted to hear more, girls wanted to see more, and other men could not handle more. That substance was alcohol, of course, which is at the center of more shame, regret, illness, decadence, death, and suffering in the world than black market plutonium. And it is legal for adults to buy in vast quantities in all 50 states and most of the world beyond. It is not, however, legal to buy and sell marijuana anywhere in the United States, though 11 states now say it is, and another 24 allow it for medical purposes and have decriminalized recreational use. The fact that these state laws and existing federal law disagree is at the heart of a deep, national debate no one seems to be having. Images of jack-booted DEA agents repelling from black helicopters to bust unsuspecting
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March 2019
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