THE SPLITTING IMAGE OF POT

On the One Hand, Marijuana Is Practically Legal - More Mainstream,
Accessorized, and Taken for Granted Than Ever Before. On the Other,
Kids Are Getting Busted in the City in Record Numbers. Guess Which Kids.

Any righteous cannabisalista knows the timeline, the grand saga of
humanity's interface with the vegetable mind of the planet.

Back in 8000 B.C., before Genesis in Sarah Palin's book, the sentient
were weaving hemp plant into loincloths. The Chinese had it in their
pharmacopoeia by 2700 B.C. The Founding Fathers used pot processed
into paper stock to write a draft of the Declaration of Independence
in 1776, which made sense, since Thomas Jefferson and George
Washington, along with their slaves, of course, had been raising the
crop for decades.

There are other, darker dates, too, like June 14, 1937, when
Congress, four years after repealing alcohol prohibition, passed the
"Marihuana Tax Act," which essentially outlawed the use of "all parts
of the plant Cannabis sativa L.," including the "growing," "the seeds
thereof," and "the resin extracted from any part of such plant."

As far as yours truly is concerned, however, the most important date
in pot history took place on a chilly early-December night shortly
after the Great Blackout of 1965, when, seated on the pitcher's mound
of a frost-covered baseball diamond in Alley Pond Park, Queens, I
first got high on the stuff.

That means I've been a pothead for going on 44 years now, or
approximately 72.1 percent of my current life. Should I live to be
100, that percentage will increase to 83 percent, since, as Fats
Waller implied when he sang "If You're a Viper," you're always a viper.

I mention this so you know where I'm coming from, but even if I once
knew a guy who claimed to have been the dealer to several members of
the Knickerbocker championship teams, I make no claim to being a weed
savant. For me, grass is simply the right tool for the job, a
semi-reliable skeleton key to the such-as-it-is creative, an enabler
of brainwork.

Outside of continuing to smoke it, sometimes every day, sometimes not
for months, or years, I pretty much stopped thinking about marijuana
as a cosmologic/shamanic/political entity around 1980, that
insufficiently repressed beginning of the somnambulant Reagan time
tunnel, when grass came with seeds and stems and zombies still
skulked Washington Square Park reciting their "loose joints" mantra:
"Smoke, smoke ... try before buy, never die ... smoke, smoke ..."

Back then, despite the occasional shouting in the street and polite
libertarian proselytizing by William F. Buckley on Firing Line, there
was not much thought that pot would ever be legal.

Illegality was key to its ethos, central to the outlaw romance.

All over the U.S. of A., people were tanking up, driving drunk,
killing themselves and others, and still those hot Coors girls were
on the TV selling beer at halftime. The whole country was strung out
on Prozac. But get caught smoking a joint while reading a Thomas
Merton book in the park and it was the Big House for you. What could
be more emblematic of the rapaciousness of the culture?

That's how it was until ... maybe now.

Could it be that, at long last, the Great Pot Moment is upon us?

The planets are aligning.

First and foremost is the recession; there's nothing like a little
cash-flow problem to make societies reconsider supposed core values.

The balance sheet couldn't be clearer. We have the so-called War on
Drugs, the yawning money pit that used to send its mirror-shade
warriors to far-flung corners of the globe, like the Golden Triangle
of Burma and the Colombian Amazon, where they'd confront evil kingpins.

Now, after 40 years, the front lines have moved to the streets of
Juarez, where stray bullets can easily pick off old ladies in the
Wal-Mart parking in El Paso, Texas, even as Mexico itself has
decriminalized pot possession as well as a devil's medicine cabinet
of other drugs.

At the current $40 billion per annum, even General Westmoreland would
have trouble calling this progress.

Compare that with the phantasmagoria currently going on in
California, where the legal medical-marijuana dispensaries ask only a
driver's license and a medical letter attesting to some vague
ailment--insomnia will do--to begin running a tab at a
state-sanctioned, 31-flavor dispensary. Somehow, even with many
medical-marijuana outfits advertising "validated parking" and
"happy-hour specials," Western civilization as we know it has not
tumbled into the sea. In November 2010, initiatives are expected to
be on the California ballot to "tax and regulate" (i.e., legalize)
marijuana altogether. Taxing the state's estimated annual 8.6
million-pound, $14 billion pot crop (more than any amber wave of
grain, high-fructose corn syrup included) could bring as much as $3
billion to $4 billion in revenue, enough to buy a couple of B-2
bombers or, failing that, keep a few libraries open an hour more a day.

Pot hasn't been the preserve of the Birkenstock wearer for years.

At least the last three American presidents have been tokers, and you
know Bush inhaled, for all the good it did the rest of us. Obama will
no doubt tread lightly with the health-care loonies on his neck, not
to mention the conservative black clergy he doesn't want to alienate,
but he's already presided over curtailing federal busts of
medical-marijuana dealers who are in compliance with state laws. A
lively blogosphere debate ensued over whether Obama could really
afford to expend any of his political capital on a bud-in-every-bong
policy, as the legalize-it forces were hoping.

But the move confirmed officially what many had long known.

Pot smoking simply does not carry the stigma it once did, even in the
straightest society.

As it turns out, not all those bong-using college students gave up
the stuff when they graduated.

The other day, I was scanning Andrew Sullivan's blog, reading posts
from salarymen, think-tankers, and Big Board watchers, baring their
souls over their continued pot use, long after they were supposed to
have put aside such childish things and switched to single-malt scotch.

The drug of the counterculture now belongs to a hitherto unglimpsed
silent majority, one that knows how to get things done, even legislatively.

The real engine of this is the pot itself.

In the old days, there were two basic varieties of grass, the shit
that got you fucked up and the shit that didn't. But now, as is known
to any stoner not still searching the skies for that last DC-3 full
of Panama Red, pot has been gourmandized. You got your indicas, your
sativas, your indoor-grown, outdoor-grown, your feminized, your
Kushes, your Hazes, with a new, horticulturally hot number rolling
down the gene-spliced pike every day. Historically speaking, a good
deal of this flowering comes courtesy of our friendly drug warriors
over at the DEA, whose G-man interdiction/kill-at-the-source policy
did much to wipe out (anyone remember Jimmy Carter's paraquat
crop-dusters?) international shipments, thereby mobilizing
ex-Berkeley botany majors and other supposedly lazy
Mendocino/Humboldt County hippies to grow their own.

Beyond this is a budding secondary market.

With upmarket pot prices holding at $60 to $70 for an eighth of an
ounce, what high-end toker can be satisfied with an intake system
based on a 75-cent pack of Zig-Zag when, for a mere $600, you can
have a sleekly designed ashless Volcano "vaporizer" to place next to
the Bialetti cappuccino-maker? For those about to be drug-tested,
there is the Whizzinator, a strap-on extra prick containing "clean"
body-temperature piss that you deftly whip out any time your
employer/coach/drug counselor hands you a plastic cup. All of this is
available in the Internet's seemingly infinite gray market, where
grass-centric URLs offer capsule commentary on the myriad pot
strains, including breeding-lineage descriptions right out of the
Racing Form (e.g., "Blueberry strain--blue haze X Aussie Duck, from
Azura and award-winning Jack Herrer"), date and place of incept,
maturation times, buzz properties, etc.

On a recent sweltering afternoon, in lieu of downloading a few
seasons of Weeds, I made my way to a top-secret mid-Manhattan
location for a little remedial "tasting" administered by the esteemed
senior cultivation editor of High Times magazine, known by the nom de
guerre Danny Danko. Along with a mini-minyan of like-minded devotees,
we hovered over a small but mighty collection of strains: the Chem
Dog, the Purps (so named for its red-blue neonish hue), and an
assortment of Kush (OG and Bubba) from medical-marijuana dispensaries
in Los Angeles and the city by the Bay now referred to as Oaksterdam.

While preparing the samples, Danny Danko, 37, a self-confessed "pot
nerd" with a seemingly bottomless capacity for THC ingestion,
explained his ethic.

A green thumb is not enough to assure the creation of meaningful
marijuana, Danko said. "Just because you can grow a tomato that might
win a prize at the 4-H club, or a summer squash that'll knock the
socks off the Iron Chef, doesn't mean you can grow good weed. Give
two growers the same seeds and the same conditions, and you can get
two completely different qualities of pot. There's nutrients and
care, but there's an intuitive factor, too--a deep understanding of
the physical, mental, and spiritual benefits of cannabis.

This isn't a geranium, it is an art, an act of alchemy."

We started out on the Purps but soon hit the harder stuff.

With the lexicon of winespeak now lapping over into pot punditry,
kindgreenbuds.com describes the Purps as possessing "hints of buttery
caramel coffee and woodsy floral pine." Couldn't say I understood all
that from a couple of hits, but the Purps, a spicy little thing, did
provide a gleeful cheap amusement-park high not unlike chubby Orson
Welles's tumbling down the fun-house chute in The Lady From Shanghai.

This playland was soon bulldozed by the Kush. An ancient indica
strain supposedly dating back to the Hindu Kush, where the stubby
plant is used mostly to make hashish, the Kush in its
multi-variegations has long been the rage among suburban and ghetto
youth who gravitate toward the strain's stinky olfactory properties
and Romilar-esque "couch-lock" stone.

It was here that I learned something about pot, then and now. Prime
in the canon of present-day prohibitionists is the claim that today's
pot is so much stronger that it bears no relation to the stuff
nostalgic baby-boom parents might have smoked.

The message: Forget your personal experience, the devil weed
currently being peddled to your children is a study-habit-destroying
beast of a wholly other stripe. No doubt, there is merit to this
argument (after decades of some of the most obsessive R&D on the
planet, you wouldn't think the pot would be weaker), but I couldn't
fully buy it. This was because the fancy weed I was smoking, and
paying twenty times as much for, wasn't getting me more smashed, at
least not in the way I wanted to be.

"I hear this a lot, because back then, you were probably smoking
sativas imported from Jamaica, Vietnam, and Mexico," Danko informed
me. Sativas imparted "a head high," as opposed to the largely "body
high" of indicas.

The problem with this, he went on, was that tropical sativas, being a
large (some as high as fourteen feet!) and difficult plant to grow
(the Kush has bigger yields and a shorter flowering time), especially
under surreptitious conditions, were rare in today's market.

My lament was a common one among older heads, Danko said, adding that
"the good sativa is the grail of the modern smoker."

Luckily, following the various Kushes, I was able to cleanse the
mind-body palate with the mighty Chem Dog, a notable indica-sativa
hybrid, reputedly first grown by a lapsed military man--the
Chemdog--who came into the possession of a number of seeds following
a 1991 Grateful Dead concert.

It was after some moments of communing with this puissant plant life
that I was in the proper state to confront the conundrum of the day,
i.e., "The Existential State of Weed in Its Various Manifestations in
the Five-Borough Area of New York City, circa 2009."

Race Has Always Been the Driving Wheel of Reefer Madness.

And what a woolly hairball of contradiction it is!

There is all of the above, the whole Mendelian cornucopia of the New
Pot with its dizzying array of botanical choice and intake gizmos.
Yet the cold, hard fact is, New York City, which first banned pot in
1914 under the Board of Health "Sanitary Code" (the Times story of
the day described cannabis as having "practically the same effect as
morphine and cocaine"), has always been a backwater when it comes to reefer.

The Big Apple viper may gain some small comfort from the fact that
getting stoned in California usually leads to being surrounded by
stoned Californians, but this does little to mitigate the envy. Here,
in the alleged intellectual capital of the world, where we have no
medical marijuana (even borderline-red states like Nevada and
Colorado do), at the end of the day, you know you're going to be
calling that same old delivery service that comes an hour late and
won't do walk-ups above the third floor.

In this day and age, nearly 30 years after the AMA began flirting
with decriminalizing marijuana, you might think New York City
marijuana-possession arrests would be in deep decline.

You might even figure that Charlie Rangel, the four-decade
congressman from Harlem and longtime leader of the Select Committee
on Narcotics, had his finger on the pulse when he told a House
subcommittee that "I don't remember the last time anyone was arrested
in the city of New York for marijuana."

Uh ... wrong!

The fact is, New York City is the marijuana-arrest capital of the
country and maybe the world.

Since 1997, according to statistics complied by the New York State
Division of Criminal Justice Services, 430,000 people age 16 and
older have been pinched in the city for possession of marijuana,
often for quantities as little as a joint, a reign of "broken window"
terror-policing that kicked off in the nasty Giuliani years and has
only escalated under Bloomberg and Ray Kelly. More than 40,000 were
busted last year, and at least another 40,000, or more than the
entire population of Elmira, will be busted this year. Somehow, it
comes as no shell-shocker that, again according to the state figures,
more than 80 percent of those arrested on pot charges are either
black or Hispanic.

From the days of Harry Anslinger--who, as the more or less permanent
head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (J. Edgar Hoover-like, he
served for 32 years, appointed by the Hoover, FDR, Truman,
Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations), raved about how most pot
smokers were "Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers" whose
"Satanic music, jazz and swing" was driving white women into a sexual
frenzy--race has always been the driving wheel of reefer madness.

It was no fun to find this dynamic still at work in the beloved hometown.

But there they were, down in night court at 100 Centre Street, one
marijuana arrestee of color after another, standing before the judge
to have their class-B misdemeanor possession case heard.

Legal Aid lawyers defend most of these people.

Said one lawyer, "The cops have their areas of concentration when it
comes to these violations. Sometimes we'll get a lot of arrests for
so-called trespassing, which often means a person was caught hanging
out in front of a project; it doesn't matter if they live right
across the street. But marijuana is very constant, a hardy perennial,
you might say, rolling in regularly like the tide. The amounts are
almost always tiny, which shows that for all the talk about going
after the big guys, cops are mostly arresting low-end users.

A lot of people say they were nabbed only minutes after they got the
stuff, so it seems as if the cops are just sitting on known spots and
busting whoever comes out. Most arrestees will receive an ACD, or
'adjournment contemplating dismissal,' a kind of probation.

It is rare, but repeaters could get time. At the very least, it
messes up your night riding around handcuffed in a paddy wagon."

Harry Levine, a Queens College sociology professor who has been
compiling marijuana arrest figures for years, says, "The cops prefer pot busts.

They're easy, because the people are almost never violent and, as
opposed to drunks, hardly ever throw up in the car. Some of this has
to do with the reduction in crime over the years.

Pot arrests are great for keeping the quota numbers up. These kind of
arrests toss people into the system, get their fingerprints on file.
The bias of these arrests is in the statistics."

The NYPD (good luck on getting the Public Information department to
respond to your phone calls or e-mails on this particular topic)
belittles these charges, saying the arrest stats are "absurdly inflated."

The kicker in this is the apparently almost unknown fact that
possession of 25 grams, or seven-eighths of an ounce--much more than
the few joints that are getting people arrested--is not a crime in
New York State and has not been since the passage of the Marijuana
Reform Act of 1977, or 32 years ago. (Right here add sound of
potheads slapping their foreheads, like, how come they didn't know
that?) There are exceptions, however.

If the pot is "burning or open to public view," then the 25-gram deal
is off. It is this provision that has been the basis for the arrest
outbreak, many civil libertarians contend.

The scenario of what happens on the street, as told to me by several
arrestees, is remarkably similar.

It goes like this: You're black, or Spanish, or some white-boy fellow
traveler with a cockeyed Bulls cap and falling-down pants.

The cops come up to you, usually while you're in a car, and ask you
if you're doing anything you shouldn't. You say, "No, officer," and
they say, "You don't have anything in your pocket you're not supposed
to have, do you, because if you do and I find it, it'll be a lot
worse for you." It is at that point, because you are young, nervous,
possibly simple, and ignorant of the law, you might comply and take
the joint you'd been saving out of your pocket. Then, zam: Suddenly,
your protection under the Marijuana Reform Act vanishes because the
weed is now in "public view." The handcuffs, the paddy wagon, and the
aforementioned court date soon follow.

Now that he is ahead of Rudy's numbers, Mike Bloomberg, who once
famously answered a question from this magazine about his pot use by
saying "you bet I did, and I enjoyed it," has presided over more
marijuana busts than any mayor anywhere.

This could be compared with the record of another New York City
mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, who, in response to the 1937 federal ban
on pot, requested a report by the New York Academy of Medicine, which
concluded that, contrary to Harry Anslinger's claim that pot was an
"assassin of youth," marijuana was not medically addictive; not under
the control of a single organized group; did not lead to morphine,
heroin, or cocaine addiction; and was not the determining factor in
the commission of major crimes, and that "publicity concerning the
catastrophic effects of marihuana smoking in New York is unfounded."

Once upon a mid-seventies time, the Yippies, then fronted by downtown
immortals Dana Beal and the garbologist A.J. Weberman, staged a
pot-legalization march up Fifth Avenue that ended in a rally at the
Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park. The big attraction was a giant
glass jar filled with joints; anyone picking the number of reefers in
the jar would win it. The winner, some shambling longhair troglodyte,
broke open the jar and threw the joints into the crowd, prompting a
crush toward the stage.

Alarmed, Weberman took the microphone and started screaming, "It is
only crappy Mexican! Don't kill yourself for crappy Mexican!"

"Ah, the good old days," says Richard Gottfried, sitting in his
state-assemblyman office on lower Broadway. Gottfried, who was a
23-year-old Columbia Law student when he was first elected as
assemblyman from Manhattan's West Side in 1970 (he's been there ever
since), is the author of the 1977 Reform Act. Hearing what people
were saying about alleged police use of the "public view" phrase of
the law, Gottfried rubbed at his still red-flecked professorial beard
and said, "Why, if these searches are being conducted in this way ...
that would be a textbook example of entrapment, wouldn't it?" He
seemed shocked, absolutely shocked, that such practices were going on
right here in New York City.

In 1997, Gottfried, a largely unsung hero of sane drug policy, wrote
New York State's first medical-marijuana legislation. "It stayed in
committee a while," says Gottfried. "With things like this,
politicians tend to be very, very timid." Nonetheless, Gottfried is
confident medical marijuana is on the immediate horizon.

It was passed by the Assembly in 2007, and Gottfried says it would
have gotten through the Senate this past spring "if June 8th hadn't happened."

"Strange as it sounds, I think this is one issue that might actually
be nonideological," says Gottfried. "During the floor debate, these
legislators, liberal and conservative, were almost in tears as they
told their personal stories about how they and their loved ones had
been helped by marijuana, how it brought relief from chronic pain,
how it aided family members in last days of terminal diseases.

It was quite moving."

This doesn't mean we should expect Californication 2 here, Gottfried
says. "Medical-marijuana laws differ radically from state to state.
There's California and everywhere else." In Maryland, you can't be
jailed for medical marijuana, but there's no provision for obtaining
it, which leaves elderly M.S. sufferers in the bizarre situation of
having to potentially go out and score like a randy teenager.

The New York version of the law will be "modest," Gottfried says. As
opposed to the "doctor's letter" mills in Cali, permissions will be
very carefully monitored, with legal possession limited to two and a
half ounces. "The penalties for violating the medical-marijuana laws
will be stiffer than regular possession," Gottfried says.

What Really Mattered Was That My Kids Understood That Just Because I
Used It Didn't Mean They Should.

If this was the best that could be done at this time, so be it. But
why not simply be aboveboard about it? How many medical-marijuana
patients are there really, at least compared with those who use the
stuff for mental and emotional well-being, not to mention flat-out potheads?

"You're talking about recreational users?" Gottfried asked. "You're
talking about tax-and-regulate legalization?"

"Well ... yeah. How do you feel about that?"

Gottfried smiled. "If marijuana had a similar status to liquor in
this country, a locally controlled system of distribution, the way
some states allow booze in the supermarket and some states are dry--I
wouldn't have a problem with that." But I shouldn't hold my breath,
the assemblyman said. "We are in a period of transition. It could be
a long transition."

"I'm functioning in the shadow of something that is bound to change,
except no one knows when or how," says Francis R., who has been in
the pot-delivery business for almost twenty years.

Mostly a painter "with some music thrown in," Francis started off as
a "runner" for a large Manhattan delivery service during the late
eighties, in the wake of the massive drug sweeps like "Operation
Pressure Point" that successfully ended the hard-drug street scene in
many parts of New York. A gentrifying city had no place for such
violence-prone local color.

The delivery services, like the bar-based cocaine trade and the
banishment of prostitutes from street corners and into "escort
services," where everything is done quietly and by appointment,
proved to be a pragmatic compromise between law enforcement, human
nature, and the need to keep the nightlife industry going.

In business for himself since shortly after 9/11, Francis has about
180 clients, of which 50 or so are "regular reorderers." Employing an
easy-to-park 250-cc. Japanese bike, Francis works "like 35 to 40
hours six days a week," starting at around one in the afternoon.

For this, he clears an average of about $150,000 a year, or about
$1,000 "retail" on a crappy day and up to three grand on "a great day."

Up until about 2004, Francis got much of his supply from Canada. "It
was mostly indicas trucked across the country from Vancouver, then
across the St. Lawrence Seaway, or Lake Erie. The first time I did
this, I couldn't believe it. It is totally dark, you couldn't see ten
feet. Then out of fog come these Indians ... Indians, in canoes,
paddling, like right out of the fucking Last of the Mohicans,
bringing in the weed." Eventually, however, the connection dried up.
Some busts were made, but mostly the quality decreased.

Now everything Francis sells is from California. He recently made one
of his regular trips to Mendocino County. "I had $25,000 in my
suitcase, and some friends tell me to drive up toward Ukiah, to the
Million Dollar Corner, which is called that because like a million
dollars is changing hands there in pot sales like every other day.
High as an elephant's eye, dude."

I took a pinch of Francis's new stuff to Danny Danko's "tasting," as
sort of a blindfold test to see if the experts would be able to
identify the strain.

This got kind of funny, these half-dozen pot gourmets investigating
the inch-and-a-half-high bud, smoking it, poking it, checking out its
tricombs under a magnifying glass like a no-shit Sherlock Holmes CSI
team. Someone thought it was a clone of the original Skunk No. 1,
others were certain it was in the Sour Diesel family.

One gentleman, who referred to himself as a "pot snob," put Francis's
high-priced spread down after a few tokes, declaring it "standard
product ... nothing to write home about." He based this opinion
primarily on the extreme "tightness" of the bud structure, which he
characterized as "your typical ass pellet." This was a sign of
"insufficient curing," the pot snob said, a giveaway that someone had
rushed the crop. He also objected to the blackness of the ash and the
fact that it had taken three match strokes to get the smoke going.

Francis was much put out by this assessment. "Everyone's a fucking
critic," he protested, defending his weed. "Got you stoned, didn't it?"

Francis said the cops weren't all that much of a factor. "For the
most part, I walk through the town unopposed." But what about the busts?

"What busts?"

I showed Francis a copy of the New York State marijuana-arrest stats.
He couldn't believe it. He didn't know a soul who had been pinched.
He was not, however, surprised by the ethnic breakdown. "I hate to
say it, but there's no way I'm hiring a black guy to work for me. The
chances of a black guy getting stopped is about 50 times more than a
white guy. I can't afford that. Fact is, pot is legal for white
people but not for black people, which is total bullshit."

Francis spends "a lot of time" thinking about legalization. "It is
coming, not tomorrow or the next day, but it is coming," he says.
This is the general opinion among his colleagues, Francis says. "I've
heard of guys buying liquor licenses, you know, to stay on the
inebriation side of things.

"Can't say I don't have mixed feelings about it," Francis went on. "I
like this job. It's served me well. Everyone is happy to see me when
I come around.

Can't say that for a dentist.

Still, it'll be a great day if they legalize it. Because pot should be legal.

You know what would really bother me, though?

If gangster corporations like Philip Morris or Seagram's got a big
piece of the action.

That would really chap my ass. Because, basically, with a couple
scumbags here and there, this is an honorable business, a little-guy business.

It should stay that way."

Then Francis, being a swell fellow, told me he happened to have run
across "a little something" just the other night, something sweet.

"You got sativa?"

Francis shook his head. "October ... maybe late September. Maybe. But
this Dog ain't no bad dog." He'd let it go for like maybe a nickel
off, because I was putting him in a magazine article.

So I went down the road, to the F train, thinking about how I'd never
drawn a legal puff of marijuana in my life. The scenic overlook of
the paradigm shift shimmied before my eyes. I could already see the
YouTubes of the near future, the debates raging over government
versus corporate private-sector control, when every right-minded
left-libertarian pothead knows either would be a disaster, a slo-mo
shakedown to the Big Bud-weiser versus earnest microbrewers. No, it
wasn't going to be a total picnic when legalization came and people
started scoring inside 7-Elevens instead of behind them.

And there was another issue.

I'm not one of those potheads who wax on about the first time they
got stoned with their kids. Sounds like a landmine from every angle.

I mean, why make some moron hippie ceremony out of it? They knew I
smoked, I knew they smoked, unless it was some burglar who stole my
stash that night.

Still, it is a crossroads, when you smell the smoke coming from their
room. You feel obligated to tell both sides, even the D.A.R.E. side,
citing all sorts of facts and figures, including how, according to a
2008 Australian study, men who smoked at least five joints a day for
twenty years had smaller hippocampuses and amygdalas than nonusers.
What really mattered was that kids understood pot wasn't for
everyone, that just because I used it didn't mean they should.

Young brains didn't need that extra noise, I said, happy to set the
legal pot-smoking age at 21, like booze, or at the very least the day
a high-school diploma is attained.

Beyond that, there is nothing left to do but to pray none of them has
the addictive chip that makes people lose their good sense.

And, despite the best advice ("Whatever you do, don't get fucking
caught!"), kids sometimes can, and do, lose their good sense, if only
temporarily. Really, pinched with a gram, in the middle of a
celebratory smoke toast in honor of 420, the equivalent of pothead
New Year. How does that even happen?

So then, there you are, the pot dad and the newly crowned pot kid,
sitting in the office of a court-mandated drug professional who is
explaining why this two-month, four-nights-a-week, $10,000 program is
actually the right thing, because "marijuana is a gateway drug." At
this point, the temptation is to cover your ears like a Munch
painting and shout that mutual back-scratching between the
criminal-justice system and high-priced treatment centers is one more
reason that idiot drug laws have to go. But it is not that easy,
because no matter how much you want the kid to get the same benefits
from the mighty weed that it has given you, there is a deep
conviction that it would be better if he didn't smoke at all, at
least until he gets his act together, which might take a lot longer
than it has to if he keeps smoking. Still, it wasn't like he needed
some cop to participate in that decision-making process.

You can feel it, the war is on. A couple of months ago, the Times ran
a big piece ("Marijuana Is Gateway Drug for Two Debates," July 17,
2009) with updated Harry Anslinger-style quotes from poor souls made
homeless by their marijuana problem.

Words like dependence and habitual were prominently featured.

The DEA is on record as being against the legalization of "smoked"
marijuana for medical purposes. They say if people feel sick, they
should take Marinol, a nice pharmaceutical that is THC without the fun.

Liquor was against the law for fourteen years.

Pot's been banned for 72. Neither the cartels nor the prohibitionists
are going to just fold up and go away.

Not that I can worry about that. If I never smoke pot again, I'm
cool. I appreciate what the stuff's done for me already.

I ask only one thing: Should I contract an illness that even grass,
in its alleged miracle-drug mode, can't cure, then just wheel me over
to that guy sneaking a toke on the corner.

I'll breathe deep and, like the whiff of a just-baked madeleine, be
transported to the place inside my head that's always been home.