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?