STILETTO STONERS

They've got killer careers and enviable social lives. They're also
major potheads. Why are so many smart, successful women lighting up
in their off-hours?

Jennifer Pelham* kicks off her black Marc Jacobs pumps, slips out of
her trim Theory blazer, and collapses on the couch. The 29-year-old
corporate attorney for one of Manhattan's top law firms has just
clocked another 12-hour day, and though it's over, she's having a
hard time shaking off her frustrations. (A partner had eviscerated
the contract she'd drafted, then left before Pelham had a chance to
explain herself.) Still distracted, Pelham orders dinner--sushi, as
usual--then reaches for a plastic orange prescription bottle standing
on the corner of her coffee table alongside a glass pipe and blue Bic
lighter, just as the cleaning lady left them. She twists off the cap,
pinches off a piece of the fragrant green bud inside, gingerly places
it in the bowl of the pipe, and lights up. Over the next 30 minutes,
she takes three deep drags, enough to drown out the noise whirring in
her head. Then she eats.

"I hate the term pothead--it connotes that I'm high 24/7, which I'm
not," Pelham says, wincing. "I don't need it to get through my day. I
just enjoy it when my day is over." Her nightly ritual costs only $50
a month, a pittance compared with the cost of her monthly gym
membership or a Saturday night out with her fiance, an investment
banker, who occasionally smokes with her. At 5'4", slim and
athletic--she ran three miles a day while in law school--Pelham
insists that pot is the ideal antidote to a hairy workday: It never
induces a post-happy-hour hangover and, unlike the Xanax a doctor
once prescribed for her anxiety, never leaves her groggy or numb.
"Look, every female attorney I know has some vice or another," Pelham
shrugs, tucking her long brown hair behind her ears, her 3-carat
cushion-cut engagement ring catching the light. "It's really not a big deal."

Most of us know someone like Jennifer Pelham, a balls-to-the-wall
career animal whose idea of decompressing after a grueling day isn't
a glass of Chardonnay but a toke (or three) of marijuana--not just
every now and again, but on a regular basis--the type who stashes a
pack of E-Z Wider rolling paper in the silverware drawer or keeps a
pipe at the ready next to a pile of bills. According to a recent
study by The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration, an estimated 8 million American women smoked up in
the past year--a lowball figure that reflects only those willing to
cop to it. Among them is the upper-middle-class Pottery Barn set: One
in five women who admitted to indulging in the previous month lives
in a household earning more than $75,000 a year. They cut a wide
swath across the professional spectrum, including lawyers, editors,
insurance agents, TV producers, and financial biggies, looking
nothing like the blotto hippie teens of Dazed and Confused or the
unemployed, out-of-shape schlubsters who are a staple of the Judd
Apatow canon. By all outward appearances, they are card-carrying,
type A workaholics who just happen to prefer kicking back with a
blunt instead of a bottle.

"I love to have a glass of wine now and again, but going out and
downing sugary cocktails isn't fun for me. And drinking is so much
more expensive," says Debbie Schwartz, a 28-year-old reality-show
production manager who recently moved to New York from Los Angeles.
Her job is relentless--15-hour days spent coordinating a million
moving pieces, managing expenses, setting production schedules, and
mollifying gimme-gimme talent. Her company just slashed her budget in
half, which has left Schwartz scrambling to cut costs so that she
won't have to lay off employees. After work, she can't think of
anything she'd rather not do than throw on a pair of heels and some
makeup to hit the local bars. "I'll go to the gym for an hour, then
come back home and smoke a joint while I listen to jazz and read a
book--I just finished The Fountainhead. It's my moment for myself
before I have to get up and do it all over again tomorrow. It's my
bubble bath," Schwartz explains. She doesn't keep her illicit habit
under wraps, either. There's no need, since several people in her
office use the same "dealer"--a colleague who takes orders for their
department.

If Schwartz's example proves anything, it's how ridiculously easy it
is to procure pot these days. In some cities, it's as simple as
ordering a pizza, delivered right to the door. Sound reckless? Not
when you consider that marijuana has already been decriminalized in
13 states. In cities like Boston and Denver, small-time pot busts are
minor offenses on a par with parking violations; first-time offenders
earn a token fine--$100 or so--and a talking-to from law enforcement.
In California, where the distribution of marijuana for medicinal
purposes was legalized in 1996, some 31,000 residents carry cards
that make purchasing locally grown weed from any of the state's
estimated 500 dispensaries as easy as filling a prescription at the
local pharmacy. Abuse of the system is rife: "Everybody has a friend
who has a card," says Gabrielle Doron, a 29-year-old L.A.-based event
planner. "My friend will call me up and say, 'I'm going to the store,
you want anything?' It's just not very hard to get."

Nor does getting high carry the same social stigma it did in the
Reagan-era "Just Say No" heyday--back when smoking a joint was the de
rigueur "special episode" of countless family-friendly sitcoms. "When
I was in high school, there were certain behaviors associated with
pot: promiscuity, not being career-minded, not wanting a
relationship," says Schwartz. "My mom told me that people would lace
pot with PCP and that I'd get hooked, or that I'd get the munchies
and get fat." All baloney, Schwartz learned once she became a bona
fide pothead eight years ago. She even managed to drop 25 pounds
despite smoking regularly. Her secret: She eats a healthy meal right
before she smokes, which seems to curb her appetite. "The munchies
are absolutely something you don't have to get into," Schwartz
maintains. "Of course, the desire to eat is always there. But even
when I'm not smoking, I still want a cupcake." Another myth debunked
by pantsuit-clad pot lovers: that devotees hole up in their
apartments in a thick cannabis stupor, blowing off friends and social
commitments. "I almost never smoke alone," says 28-year-old Gina
Bridges, a grants administrator for a Seattle-based nonprofit.
Bridges sometimes hosts low-key dinner parties with her husband and
friends, punctuated by dessert and bong hits. (She stopped smoking
when she recently became pregnant.) "Alcohol makes you feel more
social, but weed works in a different way. You're quieter, more
contemplative. My friends and I get more in depth about specific
issues," she says. What's more, Bridges says sex was much better when
she was high, helping her to shed her inhibitions. "Sometimes I'd
wonder, Am I doing the right thing? Am I getting him off? When I
smoke, it's all about me. I'm not worried so much about what he's
thinking. And it helps him enjoy it more, too, because I'm not
psyching myself out," she says.

But there are caveats. Some health experts say long-term pot users,
like cigarette smokers, are at increased risk for lung and neck
cancer. (Actual evidence proving a causal link between cannabis and
cancer is scant, however.) And thanks to technological advances in
cultivating weed--hydroponics, genetic manipulation--the strains
available on the market today can be five times as potent as they
were in the '70s and that much more addictive, according to antidrug
crusaders. (The addictiveness of marijuana is a highly controversial
subject; alcohol boasts a higher rate of addiction than cannabis.)
Furthermore, while it is the most widely used controlled substance in
the country, marijuana remains illegal in the eyes of the federal
government--in the same class as LSD or heroine--regardless of state
laws that regulate its usage. More than 90 percent of Fortune 500
companies, including American Express, General Electric, and Goldman
Sachs, subject job applicants to drug tests that, among other things,
probe for THC, the psychoactive component in pot. Get caught with it
in your system, and it's game over.

Last year, Rachel Murphy, a 36-year-old entertainment industry
publicist in New York and mother of a toddler, temporarily gave up
her nightly weed habit a week before taking a required urine test to
secure a life-insurance policy. (She only smokes once her daughter is
in bed.) Hours after the exam, she lit up. Two days later, the clinic
called to say there was a glitch in the test (unrelated to drugs) and
that she would have to retake it. "I was totally back on this
bandwagon of smoking a lot, and I didn't want to be bothered to have
to do this again," Murphy says. With three days until the test, she
frantically called her cousin, an insurance agent herself, who
advised Murphy to buy Ready Clean, a 16-ounce fruit punch that claims
to flush out the THC in urine if ingested within 48 hours of a drug
test. Rachel paid $50 and had the drink overnighted. "My husband was
standing over me the morning of the test saying, 'Drink! Drink! Chug
it!' I was like, 'I can't drink that fast.' He said, 'Rachel, this is
serious shit. We need life insurance--we have a baby--and we can't
get it because my wife smokes pot?'" One agonizing week later, Murphy
got the word that she'd passed her urine test.

The white-knuckle experience became a major source of tension in her
marriage, Murphy concedes, so she stopped smoking for a while. But it
didn't last. "I'm sorry, but I have a stressful job, I have a baby. I
need to unwind somehow, and I don't really like to drink," she
grumbles. So, while hanging out with married friends, most of whom
are also parents, Murphy will occasionally join in when one pulls out
a baggie and starts prepping a bowl. "I got kind of uptight," she
says of her weed-free phase. "And my husband was like, 'Actually, I
liked you better when you smoked.'"

*Names have been changed