Editor's Notes

In this, the 30th anniversary of the Summer of Love, it
seems appropriate to reminisce about what we were
doing and thinking during those few months in 1967
when the country was celebrating its centennial and the
countercultural revolution was sweeping the western
world. A lot of us went to Expo where we melted in the
heat and were skinned by rapacious habitant
entrepreneurs. Nonetheless, we came away from our
first experience of Quebec with mostly good feelings
about the province and its people; so good, in fact, that
we were sappy separatist sympathizers and willing
dupes for federalist appeasers for the next couple of decades.

For a lot of baby boomers, something else happened that summer that had a
similarly lingering effect: we smoked our first joint. It was a scary,
giddy and rather
anticlimactic experience. (Nobody hallucinated except the extremely wishful
thinkers.) But it was undeniably pleasant, and a perfect complement to
the questing
idealism of the times. Almost immediately it became a coming of age
ritual, a shared
experience with other denimclad, longhaired young people that signalled our
common interest in music, art, books and rebellion.

Sitting around under the trees in the schoolyard and passing the fragrant
reefer from
mouth to mouth, everyone was quite certain that our ethos would one day rule
society. In many ways, some of which are hugely regrettable, we were right.
Strangely, however, we were dead wrong in our central assumption that
marijuanathe powerful totem that stood at the centre of our neopagan
beliefswould soon be legal.

The huge constituency that favoured legalization began to break up in the late
1970s. The generation ahead of it was unrelentingly suspicious and hostile; the
generation behind was largely uninterested in the philosophical or
pharmacological
enthusiasms of the boomers. Grace Slick's stirring command to "feed your
head" in
the psychedelic anthem White Rabbit meant nothing to them.

As boomers aged, settled into jobs and families, cut their hair or
watched it fall out,
and felt their youthful ideals give way to middleaged insecurities, pot
began to
heighten their anxieties rather than salve them. A lot of people sharply
reduced their
consumption or gave it up altogether. Unlike reformed tobacco smokers,
relatively
few became rabidly antiweed. They simply lost interest, and the push for
legalization ground to a predictable halt.

Reactionary puritans seized control of the agenda and launched the war on
drugs in
the 1980s. By then, however, the smuggling routes and distribution
systems were
thoroughly embedded in the economy. Moreover, even though the boomer market
had waned, it was still substantial, and the generations behind it were also
producing sizeable numbers of consumers. The war was thus exposed as futile,
costly and destructive, not least because it fuelled the growth of criminal
organizations engaged in activities far more socially damaging than
marijuana could
ever be. It also poisoned relations between law enforcers and otherwise
lawabiding citizens who smoked dope.

Today there is an overwhelming sense that most people have tired of the war.
Decades of widespread consumption have produced few casualties and scant
medical evidence of serious harm. User demographics transcend all ages, classes
and ideologies. Even this magazine, the alleged bellwether of all things
reactionary,
has concluded that there are bigger fish to fry. Consequently, as Davis
Sheremata
explains in this week's cover story, the prospects for decriminalization
(at least) are
better today than they have been since boomers took their first toke.

Paul Bunner