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It’s the third full week of April, that time of year when websites put together colorful slideshows of stoner-themed gear and downloads of Pineapple Express spike. 4/20—believed to be a reference to the time of day when a group of California students would get high together in the ’70s, now shorthand for all things pot related—has become a sort of Hallmark holiday for the digital age, a merch-heavy marker of cannabis culture’s continued creep toward the mainstream.
Yet for all its movement toward normalization, cannabis is also a potent symbol of what’s wrong with our politics. For while it may be more socially acceptable than ever—and news of its broad array of health benefits for everything from depression to skin conditions continues to spread—it remains a federal crime to possess, grow, or distribute it, and it is classified alongside heroin as a Schedule I substance (“no currently accepted medical use”), severely limiting opportunities for medical research. The election of President Trump means that all of this is unlikely to change anytime soon.
Cannabis is now medically or recreationally permitted, or on the path to becoming so, in 29 states, including, as of yesterday, deep-red West Virginia. (In Canada, Justin Trudeau introduced a bill to Parliament last week that could pave the way for national legalization.) Yet despite the fact that 60 percent of Americans believe it should be made legal, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has doubled down on his long-standing opposition to the substance, declaring it “only slightly less dangerous” than heroin just earlier this month. Whether his Justice Department will crack down on players in the estimated $6.7 billion-and-growing legal cannabis economy remains to be seen, but this is, after all, the man who famously said last year that “good people don’t smoke marijuana.”
Of course, roughly 7 percent of the American population 12 or older does smoke marijuana in any given month; that’s around 20 million people. Though as some of them will tell you, it’s not good stoner etiquette to use the word marijuana at all. The term wasn’t commonly used in the U.S. before World War I or so, when cannabis extracts could be found over the counter at any pharmacy and hashish was a glamorous niche item. During the Great Depression, the first drug czar, Harry J. Anslinger, arrived and went looking for a new target post-Prohibition, and the ethnic-sounding epithet became a tool to stoke racial fears. Anslinger’s hysterics included calling cannabis an agent for “deeds of maniacal insanity” and issuing racist propaganda with phrasing like “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men. . . . the primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races.”
It’s an association that’s been baked into the culture, so to speak. Today, black adults are four times more likely to face arrest for cannabis possession than their white counterparts. A charge for something as small as a joint can incur crippling court fees and make it difficult to be hired for a job. Those caught growing or selling the plant (even small amounts of it) on the underground market are often incarcerated—a pattern the Trump administration may have an interest in maintaining, considering its financial links to the private prison industry. (One Republican goal the laws certainly aren’t helping with is saving money: According to the ACLU, states spend more than $3 billion annually enforcing marijuana laws.)
All of which is one reason why it’s in the public interest for cannabis—medical or otherwise—to become a legal drug, regulated, taxed, and dispensed in measured doses for responsible use. Another is the opioid epidemic, which kills some 50,000 Americans per year and is now the target of a Trump-sponsored task force. Cannabis is a promising part of a potential solution: It’s both an effective pain reliever and an aid to ease withdrawal symptoms from painkiller addiction. States where medical marijuana is legal have seen a 25 percent reduction in overdoses. Yet the man placed in charge of solving the crisis, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, has called cannabis “poison” and potential tax revenue from legal cannabis “blood money.”
Christie’s concern has to do with the notion of pot as an addictive substance—though rates of dependence are significantly lower than those of most other drugs, including alcohol and tobacco—or a “gateway drug,” which, really, any drug could be. But his reasoning overlooks compelling research around, for starters, the cannabis-derived compound cannabidiol, or CBD, an anti-inflammatory that’s not even psychoactive—and by itself shows promise as a treatment for anxiety, Crohn’s disease, multiple sclerosis, seizures, and even cancer. (CBD is sold in edible goods and skin-care products nationwide, though the DEA reiterated last December that it’s federally illegal.)
Why, then, do so many lawmakers (and so many of the rest of us) still see the plant as a threat? The Seth Rogen–in-pajama-pants caricature persists, as does a well-funded pharmaceutical lobby, but part of it no doubt has to do with pot’s mind-opening quality. Cannabis can ignite the intellect, engender empathy, and inspire an attention to and reverence for the natural world—which could very well be why those who benefit most from existing petrocapitalist power structures are so terrified by it. Paul Bowles wrote that cannabis is “always described in alcoholic countries as a ‘social menace’ . . . the user of cannabis is all too likely to see the truth where it exists, and to fail to see it where it does not. Obviously few things are potentially more dangerous to those interested in prolonging the status quo of organized society.”
Of course, challenging the status quo is itself an American tradition. After all, not only was Steve Jobs the son of a Syrian immigrant, he was also a pothead in his youth, as was Maya Angelou (to name one of many literary legends who lit up). Astronomer Carl Sagan’s longtime habit is a rebuke to the notion that weed is the enemy of motivation. Martha Stewart famously knows how to roll a joint. And no less a patriot than George Washington grew hemp (a useful industrial variant of the crop which is also illegal) himself.
In other words, cannabis isn’t just the next frontier in wellness and an economic bright spot; it’s a conduit for the kind of creative insight that leads to progress. Stoners or not, people interested in any of these things would be wise to vote accordingly.