- Kelly O
- RYAN Professional, educated, “after 5 p.m.” pot smoker.
As we make our way through the first year of legal marijuana in Washington State, it’s important to remember the world we’re leaving behind. There’s the soon-to-be-lost language of pot-related euphemism, designed to foil eavesdropping authorities, which the passage of Initiative 502 rendered instantly unnecessary. (RIP, “fuzzy green sweaters,” “puffy salad,” and “arijuanamay.”)
More poignantly, there’s the loss of The Dealer and the entirety of pot-dealer culture. For decades, the acquisition of marijuana has required the help of an intermediary, who shouldered the risk of larger-scale marijuana possession for light profit and the right to spin endless soliloquies about Sasquatch sightings to his or her pot-seeking customers/hostages, who offered forced-smile forbearance and tried not to squirm on the dealer’s weird sofa—a battle greatly aided by the dealer who welcomed you with a humongous bong hit upon arrival… And so the beautiful dance progressed, until now, or whenever the hell actual marijuana products will be available in stores (see the timeline for legal pot here).
But there’s at least one old-school stoner relic that’ll probably hang around for a while, especially with Washington State being a relatively tiny island of legality in a nation that still considers marijuana a highly controlled substance: the stain of counterculture criminality. In theory, I-502 put recreational pot smokers in the same class as citizens who enjoy alcoholic beverages. But after decades of Cheech & Chong/Bill & Ted/Dazed and Confused “cannabis culture,” can even the most responsible recreational pot smoker fully escape the stigma of stonerism?
Mostly this is just a matter of accumulating enough real-life examples of regular old high-functioning pot appreciators to offset the decades of cartoon stereotypes, and upon posting a call for such citizens on Slog, I found a good, sturdy, respectably wary test subject…
