Cannabis scapegoating
I smoke outside, but got evicted for weed last night
It will live forever in the archives of my Black Humor Hall of Fame, that I got bounced for weed while while seriously digging into the effects of minimized cannabis.
Tis delicious, as only irony can be.
This email was to be an update of programming changes set to hit the Sojourn because my tutoring work returns tomorrow. The job is in Northeast LA, and I’m damn glad to have the day gig. That’s what this email was supposed to get into, but instead of offering a casual update about new content, I’m here to tell you that I lost my beloved housing arrangement, which is a sober one.
Apparently I’m responsible for a lingering aroma cannabis.
“Just say you’ll smoke outside!” someone advised.
“I already do smoke outside,” I replied.
You know how people how AA people apologize for everyone they’ve
hurt in their drunken misadventures? I think some people ought to
apologize for the harm caused by their fanatical sobriety.
What’s funny is, I experienced a stoner turning point in this housing arrangement. The harsh rules curtailed any lingering impulses to enjoy THC beyond rationality, which led to the aforementioned exploration of minimal cannabis.
It was not, of course, all uplift and self-improvement bromides. Stoner living in a sober house can feel like awaking from a coma to Reagan’s America. It’s a world where the the plant called cannabis is always reeking.
(Marijuana Math: Faintly detectable = reeking)
In the office I was evicted from on Saturday night.
Losing that place reminds me of when I got cut from the Sandusky High School baseball team on the first day of tryouts, sophomore year. I wasn’t a great baseball player, but I’d played a credible center field on the town’s second-place Babe Ruth League team. Getting cut like that blindsided young, sensitive Donnell Alexander.
And I felt terrible about it for years, until I figured out that my reputation as a shameless weed user probably got me embarrassed like that. This was Reagan’s America, not a simulation.
In her recent appearance on this Substack’s podcast, journalist Jackie Bryant and I were on the rescheduling of cannabis and the hurdles to federal legalization. To cap that conversation Bryant said, “[J]ust fuckin legalize it! Just do it!”
The United States will never just do that. For the foreseeable future, legalization efforts will be hamstrung. An anti-weed hostility’s been bred into the the culture over nearly a century. Harry Anslinger’s Jim Crow-era federal prohibition program—which re-branded cannabis as “marijuana” to damn it with swarthy association—originated that. Reefer Madness is only Anslinger’s most famous weed hysteria production. Anslinger did so much more Washington opinion-shaping behind the scenes.
Beyond being intolerant, a deep core of Americans fuckin’ despise weed, as though it’s their patriotic duty to do so. The Israel Defense Army and leaders of Hamas will give each other handjobs before American haters develop anything in in the ballpark of cannabis love.
Are you not entertained?
WTAF