Why I Love Cannabis: A fifty-year affair

I love cannabis. I have been consuming it for more than 50 years. It may sound strange to love a plant, but I do. It’s my favorite vegetable, by far.

I love cannabis because it makes me feel good and helps soothe my unquiet mind. It helps me cope with anxiety and stress, helps me focus, it even helps me write. Sometimes.

My affair with cannabis began in 1973. There was a guy in town who would sell a quarter ounce of weed for $5. We called this a “nickel bag.” A “dime bag,” or half ounce, was $10. A full ounce – if you could either afford it or find someone willing to sell it – was $20. Probably a third of whatever size bag you bought was unsmokable stems and seeds. Zig-Zag and Big Bambu were the rolling papers that were available. And there were pipes of all sorts ranging from small corn cob pipes from a five and dime store, to home-made ones carved from wood or assembled with small plumbing pipes and fittings. The small alligator clamps in electrical hobby kits made excellent roach clips. Does anyone remember Radio Shack?

The weed we smoked 50 years ago – we were told – was from Mexico. It was great. It got us high. It seemed crazy that this simple, innocent plant could be the source of a potential felony. We didn’t care. The reward of getting high either alone or with friends – usually somewhere out in the woods beyond the neighborhood and prying eyes of adults or narcs – far outweighed the criminal risk. If this wasn’t love at first sight, it was close.

My love affair with cannabis has had a strong geographic influence over the past five decades.

After growing up in New England in the 1970s, I lived in northern California for most of the ’80s while going to graduate school. In those days, Mendocino and Humboldt counties – where I lived and worked as a college student – were part of the infamous emerald triangle. California weed took my love of cannabis to a new level. I was fascinated with the phenomenally strong and abundant weed (and the growers who produced it) in that part of the world. My efforts to grow weed in New England were fool’s errands. The weed growers in California who could produce a pound of high-quality buds from a single plant were in a league of their own. They were gods.

To me, the quality and quantity of Northern California cannabis was unprecedented. At about $200 an ounce, prime buds were not cheap. But they were prime. A couple of hits of the sticky “sinsemilla” buds had effects comparable to smoking an entire joint of the old Mexican pot from the past. My first West Coast toke took my love for cannabis to new heights.

After my time in California, I spent the next three decades working in the South, where penalties for cannabis possession were – and still are – far more draconian than New England or California. While I still loved cannabis, the geography of my professional career drastically curtailed my consumption. The risk of a felony far outweighed the reward of getting high.

As a result, cannabis became a very small and very limited part of my life for about 33 years. I consumed cannabis on vacations once a year or so when I went to New England or California to visit family and friends. The risk of consuming cannabis in the South was just too great.

Since I loved cannabis even when it was illegal, I love it even more now that I live in a state where it is legal.

I never thought I would live to see the day when I could walk into a store and purchase legal cannabis. I mentioned this to the budtender behind the counter at a dispensary in Colorado back in 2014, just after cannabis was legalized there, and she told me she heard customers make statements like this every day. For months.

I have returned to Rhode Island and live in the town where I was born. Legal cannabis, and my love of cannabis, was a big part of the decision to return to my ancestral homeland. Living in the South, where cannabis was a crime, for three decades was more than enough. If absence makes the heart grow fonder, then my three decades in the American South made my heart even fonder for cannabis.