Category: pot

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Food pot

Pot and popsicles

hidden dangerThere were four kids in our house when I was growing up. Because our Mom tried to avoid sweets but our Dad didn’t, when it came to packages of six popsicles, there was always one unclaimed popsicle that our Mom wasn’t going to eat.

That unclaimed popsicle became a sought after treat for us kids. The first kid to get home on a shopping day would lay claim to the orphan popsicle. The usual method was to open up the extra popsicle and give it a lick. This was the accepted technique amongst the kids for marking the extra popsicle as yours. It boiled down to controlling your scarce resource by repulsion.

What made me think of this was strolling past some vendors the other day. When I moved to Mexico years ago, the handicraft vendors seemed to be hawking pipes with stems that bore a strong resemblance to a human penis. What was that about? I imagined a few theories about this.

One idea was that tourists bought enough of these pipes as a novelty item that a demand was created. Or maybe Mexican potheads just had a cultural preference for that style of pipe. Another was that maybe this style of pipe was so weird that traveling potheads felt little attachment to it and so wouldn’t be tempted to smuggle it back home.

So back to the other day. I noticed there weren’t many penis pipes for sale by the street vendors. I’m not a pothead so maybe I just never noticed the decline until now. When I mentioned it to my friends I also told them my theories for the penis pipe. Then one friend who is a pot smoker mentioned his theory.

He thinks that the popularity of the style was probably due to its innate ability to control your scarce resource, because by using a penis pipe to smoke pot, and then offering it to someone else they’re more likely to decline if that’s how they have to smoke it. So you’re effectively managing your scarce resource.

Who knows really? But if that’s true, it’s not unlike keeping your popsicle yours by grossing out other people who want your scarce resource.

 

 

Categories
Food and Drink Ideas pot

New Markets?

vaporizer in a barIt’s 2013 and now that pot is legal in two states, I’m sure more states will follow their lead. And with a growing market around legalized pot there’ll be new business opportunities, large and small.

Is pot bad mainly because it was illegal? Or was pot illegal because it is bad? Probably the first choice. New pot smokers probably won’t feel guilty about inhaling for moral reasons, but they might for health reasons.

There’s a business opportunity at the ironic intersection of health conscious Americans, smoking pot, and the ban on smoking in public places. There’s a one word solution to this opportunity and that word is: vaporizers. Vaporizers let you inhale vapors instead of smoke and come in both portable and table top versions. I think the portable, rechargeable electric ones are going to really take off.

Portable vaporizers are sleek,cigar-sized, miniature ovens. They heat the leaf material  put into them to the sub-burning point releasing the sought after chemicals as a vapors, and not some of the bad ones (ashes,tars, etc), without generating smoke. You’ll be able to “smoke” in public because you won’t be producing smoke.

I’ve seen one once, on a plane I think, the passenger seated next to me had one for tobacco. They’ve been popular with semi-reformed tobacco smokers as well as enthusiastic, chronic pot smokers for some time. So they’ve had most of the bugs worked out I’d think.

The owners of bars, or whatever sort of public establishments wind up encouraging patrons to use adult beverages and pot, will need to promote using vaporizers for public consumption. Of course no one really knows how this will look when it settles down and becomes really accepted.

Maybe you’ll have first heard of the idea here first. But, I’m pretty sure if a non pothead living in another country is thinking about these business opportunities, there must be vaporizer manufacturers adding sifts in their factories.

Categories
Ideas Opinion pot

The New Pot

Pot’s on the way to acceptance. The momentum towards marijuana legalization continues to increase. Just recently, I saw a news article proclaiming California is reducing the penalty for pot possession to an infraction costing $100. Sort of like a speeding ticket I guess.

All the activity seems to be driven by the high costs of the failed war on drugs and a growing public nonchalance about the overblown worries about pot use. Is pot illegal because it’s bad? Or, is pot only bad because it’s illegal? More and more people are rallying behind the second question. Couple that with our government seeing an easy  source of income through taxation of pot; and legalization doesn’t seem far off.

Legalization does seem like the right thing to do. I’m not a pothead; I’d rather have a drink. For me pot leads to confused, muddled thinking compared to the relaxed thinking I associate with one or two drinks. Think about writing; there seem to be lots of successful writers who drink and not too many daily pot smokers.

Pot has changed over the years. Now, pot is what I’ll call “the new pot.” I don’t think it suddenly came on the scene. The new pot is the achievement of countless stoner Gregor Mendels combining and recombining many generations of pot plants over the years.

I have a unique perspective on the new pot. As a teen in the seventies I smoked pot sometimes, maybe four or five times a month. After a few years, I realized smoking pot made my thinking unclear; so I stopped. I stopped completely – feeling abstinence was easier than temperance.

Then much later, as I approached my 40th birthday, I reasoned that I’d proved a point. I hadn’t smoked pot in more than 20 years. Over that time I’d felt there’d been times when smoking pot might have been appropriate for social reasons (not peer pressure). It was simply an observation.

I decided to implement a new policy on my 40th birthday… to smoke pot if I felt like it in a social setting like a party.

The new plan was implemented, and what I found was a change in pot potency over my 20 year timeout. While I don’t buy pot and only encounter it at very random intervals, I’m shocked by how strong it is. More than a puff or two and you can be incapacitated.

I prefer the old unhybridized weak pot. In the same that I’d rather have a beer than a drink made with Everclear. For me, the new pot really undercuts the social aspect of smoking pot and promotes the act of smoking as merely a drug delivery method, attempting only to get the most bounce for the ounce.

The day may not be too far off when Americans will be able to buy a standardized pot product over the counter. Since we’re social animals, I suspect since their discovery, pot and alcohol used in moderation have been social lubricants and not used as a general anesthesia.

I’d like legalized pot to be closer to it’s natural strain instead of the new pot from the breeders working in clandestine greenhouses around the world. Which would you prefer, a few laughs and some Cheetos or to be sitting in an easy chair catatonic?