like MerryJane. As Forbes reported in 2018, Washington state alone boasts “1,083 cannabis brands producing 45,000 unique products.” No longer defined by aging hippies reliving their favorite Grateful Dead concert or reggae festival, weed is now legal in a growing number of states like Colorado, where “ganjapreneurs” have opened sleek dispensaries staffed by tattooed hipsters who legally sell a range of oils, edibles, and carefully curated kinds of cannabis. And then there are the celebrities, whose presence usually signals that a counterculture has been officially coopted. Goop founder and actress Gwyneth Paltrow recently teamed up with Med Men, a “premium” marijuana dispensary, to sell marijuana products. Whoopi Goldberg has her own line of cannabis products under the brand name Whoopi & Maya Synergy. Mike Tyson owns a large pot farm in the Mojave Desert, and Law & Order creator Dick Wolf is an investor in a marijuana lab. But no one embodies the transformation of pop culture’s relationship to pot more than Miley Cyrus. Once an adorable tween singer and star of the Disney Channel show Hannah Montana, Cyrus has grown into an adult celebrity unafraid to twerk or toke. After publicly renouncing her heavy pot use a few years ago because she wanted to be “super clear and sharp,” Cyrus recently told USA Today that she’s getting high again. Why? “My mom got me back on it.” The Cyrus matriarch, who is also Miley’s manager, “smokes a lot of weed,” according to her daughter. And so, again, does Miley. A recent Instagram
post featured a picture of Cyrus smoking a joint with the caption, “Weed makes you happy.” Who could ask for a better brand ambassador? Not that long ago, publicly proclaiming your love affair with cannabis would have been a career-ender for a beloved Disney child star. Today, it’s a savvy professional move, one that Nancy “Just Say No” Reagan and the anti-drug crusaders of old would have found unthinkable.
These days, getting high is about as transgressive as popping a multivitamin.
Although pro-pot activists have fought drug laws for decades, it was the 2005 Showtime television show Weeds that signaled a major shift in pop culture’s depiction of pot users and dealers. The sympathetic main character, a widowed mother played brilliantly by Mary-Louise Parker, managed to tell an old-fashioned story of Horatio Alger-like grit while peddling pot in 21st-century suburban America. By the end of the show, her narrative arc matched society’s changing norms. She was no longer a shady drug dealer, but a legalized pot tycoon. Weeds opened the door for many other shows (like Broad City and High Maintenance ) that featured pot not as a countercultural outlier but as a part of everyday life for regular people. That ho-hum attitude now extends even to not-so-regular people: professional politicians. In the 1990s, presidential candidate Bill Clinton engaged in a feat of verbal gymnastics trying to explain his youthful marijuana use (he claimed to have tried it but not to have
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