A stereotypical image of a “pot smoker” is a 20-something dude with long hair in a tie-dyed t-shirt sitting on a shabby couch (probably in his mom’s basement) in front of a bong with smoky haze filling the room. You know the look. A more accurate image is the photo above of everyday people, from all walks of life, using cannabis for a host of different reasons that might include sleep, stress reduction, focus, pain management, relaxation, and sure, fun. And they ain’t on their mom’s couch in the basement!
Cannabis is slowly being recognized as a legitimate wellness tool (at least in 37 US states), and the reason has everything to do with the “cannabinoids” found in the plant (e.g., THC, CBD) and how they interact with receptors in what the “endocannabinoid system.” This system exists in literally every living organism with a spine and regulates the body’s equilibrium. To learn more and find links to the underlying science, check out this article, Delta 9 — It’s Not the Latest COVID Variant!
While cannabis is having a moment today, it has actually been part of medicine and cultural rituals for millennia. As recently as the early 20th century you could walk into just about any pharmacy in the US and find cannabis offered as a cure for pain, inflammation and other ailments. So how did we end up with the “Dude, where’s my car?” image?
The degenerate pot smoker depiction was in fact a carefully crafted government strategy that began in the 1930s and 1940s when the term the ‘Devil’s lettuce’ originated. This quickly evolved into “jazz cabbage” highlighting criminal, prejudiced intentions as cannabis was popular among black Jazz musicians of the era. The implication was that the music was the result of “sinful drug indulgences.” This horribly racist portrait became pervasive in the media and there was no one countering the narrative. Etsy has a whole section dedicated to vintage anti-marihuana (original spelling) posters with taglines like “Wild Women, Wild Beats, Has the Link Been Found?” Sigh.
In the turbulent times of the 1960s and 70s this war against cannabis users–specifically hippies and black people–exploded. John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under Richard Nixon is famously quoted as saying: “You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people…You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.” Ehrlichman further clarified, “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.”
Shortly thereafter, cannabis became a Schedule-1 drug, alongside heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and “other substances, or chemicals defined as drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” (FDA) To this day, cannabis activists have been fighting two battles, one to show legitimate, beneficial uses of cannabis, and another to lay bare the devastating effects of locking up millions of mostly black and brown people for non-violent cannabis “crimes.”
It’s time to stop thinking about cannabis as the “Devil’s lettuce” and start seeing it as a tool for wellness, relaxation, and fun. It’s time for better conversations about cannabis.
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