The Great Weed Rebrand
Weed — sorry CANNABIS — has come a LONG way over the last century. I mean, look at how they portrayed it in the 1930s and 40s:
When I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, things weren’t really much better. Nancy Reagan was in the White House and she was hellbent on forcing her “conservative” values upon the nation. This meant portraying drug use as a moral failing, something evil, and exaggerating the consequences beyond parody. The video I am posting below is a REAL thing that these people thought was a good idea.
Setting aside the fact that 90% of the people in this video (including Bobby Brown & Whitney Houston) were drug users and that Stacy Keach was arrested for cocaine possession a week before this was delivered to high schools across the country, it is impossible to overstate just how ludicrous it is. It was part and parcel of the thinking at the time. Addiction wasn’t a public health concern or medical issue. It was a moral failing. Remember this classic ditty that children across America were forced to learn through “drug education” programs in public school?
Users are losers. They are criminals. They can quit anytime, just tell them to.
No wonder we have the problems with addiction and mental health we do today. I was inundated with messages like this about drugs for most of my life. They aren’t much better than the hysterical one shown in Reefer Madness. But over the last decade, there has been a notable shift in both public opinions about drugs (weed specifically) and how acceptable they should be in society.
Look at how fancy those weed boutiques are! They should be selling hand cream and purses to divorcees, not weed. But this is the world we live in now. Users aren’t losers — users are bougie! Marijuana isn’t about getting high and watching movies — it’s about HEALTH. Weed is a drug. Cannabis is MEDICINE. It’s both impressive and concerning at the same time.
This morning while listening to The Current, the host mentioned that according to a recent Gallup poll, Americans are more likely to smoke weed than cigarettes. I double-checked online to make sure it was true and yep, sure enough, it is.
Overall, I think this is probably a GOOD thing. Nicotine is very dangerous and super addicting. Using marijuana for pain relief in place of narcotics is also good. But I do think that something nefarious is being swept under the rug with all this “weed as a healthy thing” rebranding that’s going on. Weed is still a drug. It has negative consequences like any other drug. Even stuff that we perceive as harmless like Tylenol and aspirin have side effects. Weed is no different.
And by the way, if you smoke weed every day — you’re a smoker. It’s no different than smoking tobacco. In fact, marijuana smoke can actually be worse for you than cigarette smoke, depending on how you use it. Your lungs are still being filled with tar and ash. Your mouth, throat, and chest are being bombarded with carcinogens. That’s still burning hot air you’re sucking in. So while we’re celebrating that only one in ten people smoke now compared to HALF fifty years ago, let’s not lose sight of reality. Cannabis is many things, many of them good, but there is still a lot of harm to come from smoking it.
There are also impacts on the brain that have to be considered too. Again, drugs work because they enhance or alter brain activity. Weed is no different. There is still A LOT that scientists and doctors don’t understand about how the whole thing works. That’s true for cannabis, SSRIs, and Tylenol, just to name a few. People under 25 should probably avoid using it. At least with weed being legal in some places they can begin studying it.
Putting people in jail and fining them obscene amounts of money has never been the right solution to drug issues. It doesn’t matter if it’s cannabis, heroin, oxys, or cocaine. We’ve been fighting the “war on drugs” for almost half a century and literally nothing has changed in terms of drug use. We did manage to lock up a staggering amount of people though. Considering that they are disproportionately Black and Brown folks, I have to wonder if that wasn’t the goal all along.
All of this is to say that weed SHOULD be legal everywhere. Humans have been cultivating it for as long as we’ve cultivated stuff. There are obvious medical and personal benefits to it. The war on drugs has been tremendously destructive and accomplished nothing positive. Adults have the right to decide what to do with their bodies.
It’s hard to imagine weed becoming what it has. It is still very weird whenever I go back east to a state where it is legal and I see people with it or stores that sell it. I remember some very shady drug deals taking place in very shady areas and being scared for my life or worse. Now, there are boutiques that sell it, and nobody bats an eye. That’s quite a rebrand for one lifetime.
I wonder what else we could accomplish.