Cannabis

Tuesday

Rupert Stone

Marijuana legalization has been a disaster

On the day the Marihuana Regulation & Taxation Act (MRTA) was signed into law in 2021, the man who was to become mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, made the following statement: “I’m proud to be here today to debate the adult use of marijuana – also known as loud, Sour D, herb, Mary Jane, kush, green, pot, weed, zaza, a jazz cigarette and marijuana. In the course of this debate I’ve heard many of our colleagues from across the aisle discuss that smoking or ingesting marijuana is an indication of lawlessness and a deteriorating quality of life, makes one lazy and a burden to society, serves as a gateway drug.

marijuana

Friday

Marc Siegel

Why weed is the most dangerous drug in America

Weed is the most dangerous drug in America. The main reason for this is the fact that most people don’t think it is. In fact, they typically think just the opposite. They believe not only that pot is safe, but also that it has true medicinal qualities. Little do they know that those benefits are barely worth the paper you wrap your joint in. Marijuana is most commonly touted as a balm for anxiety. But it may actually increase anxiety to the point of psychosis – especially for those with underlying psychiatric conditions. Combine it with a diet of daily intake of violent video games and social media – as did Joshua Jahn, the man who shot three victims at a Dallas ICE facility – and you’ve got all the makings of an unstable American.

weed

Tuesday

Cockburn

Place your bets: what drugs is Biden on?

Who has a better chance of passing a drug test, Joe Biden or Hunter? At this point, Cockburn thinks it's probably a coin toss. What he’d rather know is what the president is doped up on in his more energetic moments. Thanks to an online betting platform, voters can now gamble on which drug they think Biden is using.   “BetOnline.ag, which infamously set odds on who the White House cocaine belonged to, has created a wagering market for which drug Biden will test positive for,” Josh Barton, a BetOnline rep, told Cockburn. So far, the odds favor amphetamine followed by methamphetamine. Bettors think Biden is poppin' more Adderall than a college student during finals week.

drugs joe biden

Friday

Neal Pollack

Snoop Dogg really quitting weed would be a huge public service

My phone screamed on the bedside table at 4:30 a.m. I’d been playing poker at a home game in Culver City until late in the night, so I didn’t answer, and I also didn’t answer the other six times it rang in the next two hours. When I finally woke up, I had a text from the “BBC OS” asking if I could talk. “What is the BBC OS?” I wondered. Then I realized it was the actual BBC’s Overnight Service. Still, why were they calling me at dawn? And then when I went online, I realized they wanted to know my thoughts about the fact that Snoop Dogg had announced, on his Instagram, that he, “after much consideration and conversation with my family ... decided to give up smoke.” He accompanied this announcement with a photo of himself, hands in prayer, looking quite plaintive.

Monday

David Marcus

Tragedy strikes: Americans are smoking more weed than tobacco

An unfortunate milestone has been passed in the United States as it is reported that for the first time ever there are more marijuana smokers than cigarette smokers in our once great nation. To put it bluntly, so to speak, this societal transformation has taken iconic American glamor, the Marlboro Man, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and replaced it with Cheech, Chong and Otto the school bus driver from The Simpsons. Here in New York City, where once men in suits and hats and square dames in heels hustled, cigarette betwixt fingers, plowing ahead to the future, it now just smells like weed. Everywhere. Rockefeller Center? Smells like weed. Subway stations? Smell like weed. Washington Square Park? Well, OK, Washington Square Park always smelled like weed. But you get the point.

Friday

Stephen L. Miller

Don’t blame America for Brittney Griner’s fate

I sympathize with Brittney Griner. The WNBA star currently detained in Russia is arguably the face of her sport. This week Griner pleaded guilty in court to possession of hash oil upon her entry to Russia. She has been detained for several weeks now; her and her family have made several pleas to the Biden administration to step in and free her, which they should — without giving up notorious Russian arms dealers or criminals. (President Biden, meanwhile, has been remarkably lenient towards the Russian nationals who use illicit substances with his son — but that's a tale for another time.) The conflict in Ukraine and the Biden administration’s proxy war against Russia complicates this matter further — once again, Biden and his State Department find themselves in a jam.

brittney griner

Friday

Mary Eberstadt

More drugs!

In rural upstate New York, where I grew up, pot-smoking was disproportionately a sport of farmers’ kids. That’s because inequitable ownership of land meant that some people could grow weed more discreetly than others. Among those with acres to till, private oases of marijuana were easily created by their offspring out of sight — especially, I recall, in between tall rows of feed corn. And with easier access to the drug, the sons and daughters of farmers also seemed to smoke more of it than the kids who were forced to rely on retail. This brings us to a paradox that, while not exactly one of Zeno’s, amounted to my earliest intuition of a chicken-and-egg problem.

drugs

Wednesday

Madeleine Kearns

Big Dope

Young people are now more likely to consume marijuana than to smoke tobacco. The social acceptance of tobacco is falling, just as the popularity of weed is getting higher. A 2019 Gallup poll found that 12 percent of US adults (and 22 percent of those aged 18 to 29) said they smoke marijuana. It won’t be too long, I predict, before we look back in horror at the widespread acceptance of cannabis use. It’s easy to forget that anti-tobacco researchers had to plod on at tortoise pace for years before they were able to prove what they had long suspected to be true (and what we all now take for granted): the causal link between smoking and lung cancer. Big Tobacco was so rich and powerful that its lobbying suppressed the true dangers.

cannabis weed

Saturday

Christopher Sandford

Gone to pot: drugs in the Pacific Northwest

It is two o’clock on an unusually mild December afternoon here in suburban Seattle, and I’m sitting on my back porch smoking marijuana.Passively smoking, I should add, lest I shock any reader by this lapse, but smoking nonetheless. Since 2012, when the voters of Washington State chose to decriminalize it, my part of town has been especially fragrant with the acrid smell of pot. A thick haze of the stuff lingers long in the air these quiet lockdown days.

drugs

Sunday

Dominic Green

Horse sense

Nietzsche trained as a cavalryman, but injured himself attempting an unorthodox dismount. His last public act was to throw himself sobbing around the neck of a flogged horse in Turin. In the decades after the philosopher was carried to the asylum, we put horses out to pasture. Our constant companions, first domesticated on the Eurasian steppe some four- to six thousand years ago, were displaced by a new symbol of mobility and freedom, the internal combustion engine. In Farewell to the Horse (2017), the German historian Ulrich Raulff identifies the moment we abandoned our real four-legged friend as the moment we became modern — which is to say, lost amid freedom. If Americans are more lost than most, it is because they have more freedom than most.

beach bum

Friday

Dominic Green

The weedman cometh

Two local entrepreneurs are applying to open a weed shop next to the supermarket and just around the corner from our family neighborhood in Cambridge, Mass. So I went to the community meeting at the local VFA. The meeting was at four in the afternoon, when most of the parents were at work or on the school run. Hardly anyone turned up. The entrepreneurs were highly entrepreneurial, friendly, and professional. They stacked the room with their old friends, all firm advocates for the healing virtues of getting totally toasted, day in, day out. They came with a slide show, and promises to create jobs for the local community, including LGBTQ people and reformed convicts.

weedman cannabis weed