Saturday, November 5, 2016

And It's High Time, Too

It's 2016, the Baby Boomers have been in charge for decades, we're in a perpetual state of war, pot's still illegal, and I'm as surprised as anybody. We didn't have the tightest grip on our principles when we were young but those two items--legal pot and no more war--sure seemed solid at the time.

Recreational pot is now legal in a few backwaters such as my own state of Oregon, though. When I was young, I visualized legal pot as being just like regular pot only not illegal. That is, you'd come by it because you knew a guy, or knew a guy who knew a guy, and you'd buy a big bag of it and roll your own. Or you'd have plants in your garden. I didn't quite imagine going into a store and picking something off the shelf.

And if I did, and I squinted hard into the future, I suppose I would have imagined a store that looked like an old-time apothecary, with its shelves of gleaming labeled jars and a middle-aged fellow in muttonchops and a cap sweeping dust off the wide-plank floors, only with the Twinkie aisle of a Seven-Eleven running right down the middle.

My own history with pot began with giggles and ended with Whoa Nelly Just Bring Me Back And I'll Never Do This Again. (More than once.) We passed little joints around, we got comfortably high. Then I went to England for my junior year and there the kids rolled joints the size of canoes and passed them around with both hands. Different style, same result. I returned to the U.S. in 1973 and something horticultural had happened in my absence. The same size toke I'd taken two years earlier now sent me to the edge of a precipice. The ground I stood on was "my life until now" and the ravine was "and here is insanity." Hang on and hope the cliff doesn't crumble.

I'm not interested in pot anymore, but Dave and I decided to visit a pot store just to see how it was set up, and also because sometimes Dave and I would both prefer he was in a different mood than the one he's in. The place we picked out (there's one next to every Starbucks) actually says "Apothecary" on it, and sure enough there are shelves of little glass jars, but that was just their front room, and the jars held their homemade essential oils. It seemed wholesome as hell. Right up until Dave disappeared behind an ominously locked door. If you wanted to buy some pot, you had to be escorted to the inner sanctum, and you had to show your I.D. I didn't have my I.D. on me, so Dave went in alone.

Well. The locked door. I know what's behind the locked door. That's where the lady in the lascivious vintage '50s dress was reclining on the davenport with a crazed, and nonetheless come-hither, look, deep in the throes of reefer madness. Maybe she was for sale too. I frowned at the door until Dave came back out, which was more promptly than he would have if the reefer-madness lady had been available.

They're real sophisticated about pot now. They've been hybridizing the stuff for decades and now they differentiate it by which little letters it has in it. You have your high-THC pot and your high-CBD pot. Used to be someone would hand you some and say it was all right or it was really good stuff, man and you kind of took  his word for it--that was about it for quality assurance. Now they have head pot and body pot. They have pot for karaoke night and pot for an hour of hula-hoops. They have pot for lower back pain and cancer pot and hangnail pot. Give the Budmaster a list of things you want adjusted ("spider bite, fibromyalgia, gloom") and he'll look thoughtful and select a particular product. They've got it dialed in. They'll sell you raw, rolled, edible. Brownies, cookies, chocolates. One variety for in-law visits, one for Walking Dead marathons. For the budget-minded, the Mailman Special (floor sweepings). You name it.

"Chocolates," Dave said.

"If you haven't had any pot for thirty years, I recommend taking just a half dose for starters and see how it goes," the good woman at the register said, selling him two doses.

He went home and took a half dose. Then he ate the rest of it, because chocolate. Got a thoughtful look to him. Slept all night. Take that, F.D.A.

42 comments:

  1. Thanks for your interesting post on pot. It sounds like Dave did not turn into a drug crazed dope fiend, ha ha. I am told that the current marijuana is much stronger than the pot of the 1970s.

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    1. I'm here to tell you the pot of the 1974s is much stronger than the pot of the 1970s. And you're right--none of Dave's crazy is dope-induced.

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  2. "ended with Whoa Nelly Just Bring Me Back And I'll Never Do This Again. (More than once.)" Those were my last experiences. And that made me laugh so much when I read this! Most of my group now goes in for all sorts of pain stuff like neuropathy and hip pain and mostly looking for topical creams to rub on body parts. My concern on anything edible is that the world's worst munchies will kick in and I will end up face down in a bowl of cake frosting or cookie dough. So those of us down here continue to have our pot in a tube or salve... Such an aging baby boomer I am....

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    1. Supposedly the CBD pot doesn't get you off at all. So there's that. On the other hand, I'm having a little trouble understanding the problem with being face down in a bowl of cake frosting. Mmm, cake frosting.

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  3. Never touched the stuff, although I can still recognize the smell, having attended a few floor parties during my higher education.

    But I'm reading with interest :)

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  4. Pot never gave me that "Whoa Nelly Just Bring Me Back And I'll Never Do This Again" experience, but a few other things did. That was during the blessedly brief period in my life when I was such a silly flower child I'd just ingest anything of which someone said "here, try this - you'll love it!" I'm glad to have survived that phase with my sanity largely intact. Although, how would I actually know? I can't remember when I last smoked pot. It stopped being pleasurable quite some time ago.

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    1. I don't remember either, but I do know it was several years--YEARS--after I should have quit. We are not all of us all that sharp.

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  5. I too imbibed back in the day. For a while. Until the faintest whiff put my tummy into violent revolt. They could use me as a sniffer dog. If I am helplessly retching there is pot somewhere.

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    1. That is truly horrible. That's almost worse than insanity.

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  6. I've been using marijuana since I was 24. There have been no bad experiences (unless you count coughing) and now, at the age of 72, I'm partial to the edibles. The only illegal drug I'd prefer is psylocybin, from mushrooms on cow patties.

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  7. The smell always made me feel queasy.Imagine! I was in London and practically all my friends smoked and one guy used to bring cookies back from Holland on a regular basis.And I hate the smell of patchouli, for the same reason.Patchouli was what the hippies drenched themselves and their clothes in, in the belief that it would mask the smell of weed.But it was nowhere near as frightening as acid.

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    1. Huh! I always thought we burned incense to mask the smell of pot, and wore patchouli to mask the scent of extravagantly unwashed clothing.

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    2. The smell of patchouli gets right up in my sinuses and gives me migraines, I wish that stuff was banned. Riding the buses in winter is hell for me.

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    3. Heard that. I don't really want to smell anything on anyone.

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  8. You ever think we might wake up in Golden Gate Park, summer of '67, and find we've hallucinated the past 49 years? "Oh Wow," we'd say. "Oh wow!"

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  9. Chocolate pot? That will be my intro to cannabis when I visit my son in Seattle next month! Woo hoo!

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    1. Putting it on my list of things to do while there.

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    2. But is that really your intro? First timer?

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    3. Chocolate? Pot? Booking my flight for Oregon now.

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  10. ALL of my memories related to pot have to do with uncontrollable giggles that go on for hours, accompanied by a wish to hide under a blanket. The last time was at a picnic on the lawn of Tanglewood where I ended up with the picnic blanket over my head while Yo-Yo Ma played...I'm keenly interested in this thred as my Mahjongg group of 4 has been hashing (hah!) over "how to get some". So my question is this: Can someone with an out of state ID buy pot in Oregon? And do you have a guest room?

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  11. let me have some of that lower back pot - I'll report back, haha

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  12. Ah yes, been in a pot store in Seattle, who'd a thunk it, back then in Portland, circa 1970...dancinfool and Geo, can relate to your posts.
    I admit to still taking the occasional toke, actually more now than before retirement, 6 years ago. And yeah, gotta be careful with the present stuff. Ain't like the ten buck lids we bought in the Park Blocks in the day.
    The main thing I notice is weed does not have the same effect on me as decades past, I still get 'high', but it's not the same. Mostly sleepy and lethargic.
    I've not tried the edibles, since eating some brownies at a party at that white castle on the hill south of broadway, visible from PSU looking south..

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    1. Okay, that there white castle? The Piggott castle? There are no right angles in it (except the vertical ones), so if it looked extra weird, it really was.

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    2. I remember that! I may have thought it was the brownies.

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  13. We have at least 3 "green" [here they are all painted green so one can recognize them without any signage on the front] stores within a mile of our house here in the greater Seattle area. Not quite as many as Starbucks, but about equal with the Tulley's.

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    1. Well, they're particularly prevalent in this neighborhood. Couldn't say why--but this is a nice peaceful spot.

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  14. I now know more about pot than I ever did, and let me tell you, what I did know could fit on the point of a pin with room to spare. It's something I was never interested in and very few people in my town ever took any. That was "big city" stuff. There was one girl who came to school with glazed or spinning eyeballs occasionally, but she had moved there from the city and she also wore skirts that showed a lot more thigh than we had ever seen. (mini skirts weren't quite as mini as they would eventually become)

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    1. I like that: "glazed or spinning." I guess I grew up in the big city, although there were bigger for sure. I must be a tad younger than you because BOY OH BOY did we do mini. It was hell picking up a dropped pencil. If I'd had a prolapsed uterus, it wouldn't have been a secret.

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    2. yep, we're a little behind here downunder, we didn't even get colour TV until the seventies and you lot had dishwashers and clothes dryers long before we did, microwaves too.

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  15. I remember when smoking changed from a happy social activity to a "what the hell is IN that stuff?" activity. It was a little unnerving. That said, I'm with Dave on this. If I could get hold of some I am very likely to use it occasionally. And get a good night's sleep.

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    1. Pretty cheap, too. I think it was like $6.75 for two chocolates.

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  16. I used to smoke daily. (Remember? I don't.) I haven't smoked pot in about 25 years except for the time Peter went out of town and I tried some of his. I was terrified that there'd be an earthquake or that someone might call and I promptly went to bed and pulled the covers over my head. But now that California has made it legal, I'm tempted to try it again in a custom formulation.

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    1. Dave just had his second chocolate last night. I believe he fell right asleep and stayed that way. If I try it, it will be the kind that doesn't get you high. I think they can balance it all out for you just like looking at a tap list and checking the IBUs.

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