Quietly—with little notice or even controversy—Dallas passed a new marijuana law. Called ‘cite and release,’ the ordinance allows citizens to possess up to four ounces of weed without having to go to jail. Like, wow. This blows my mind. Finally the Man gives a wink/wink to all the people, young and old, who smoke pot … who are never ever going to stop smoking pot … for the past fifty years or so … whether it’s legal or not.
We are seeing nationwide a huge shift in the marijuana debate. There is no debate anymore. NORML is normal. Just breathe, breathe in the air …
It was bound to happen, though I figured it would be rather late in my lifetime. I remember when Ann Richards was given a hard time by the mass media for not answering the drug question as she ran for Texas governor. George W. Bush never had to answer the drug question either. Barack Obama answered and still was elected president twice. So our nation has changed. The majority of Americans do not care about this particular drug being illegal anymore.
The ’70s show
You will not believe this but … back at my old suburban high school, there were two outdoor smoking lounges for the students. Before my arrival, the campus had conducted a big debate and vote to allow a student smoking lounge so kids would stop smoking in the restrooms. And it worked really well. Yeah, in my day, the kids who smoked—and they were the cool kids even with subtle coughs and throat clearing and that awful smell on their clothes—would come to class, lay their pack of smokes on top of their desks, and pay attention to whatever subject was being taught. I’m not kidding.
Of course, along with the leniency toward smoking cigarettes, which were somehow legal for kids to get in those days, (I forget this point; seems like only age 18 and older could buy them, so how were we allowing kids to smoke cigarettes anyway?) came a pushing of the envelope. On occasion the sweet aroma of marijuana wafted from the teen smoke lounge and intermingled with the Camels and Virginia Slims. Society forgot that kids push boundaries. That’s what they do. That’s what childhood is for. Society also had forgotten that teen-agers are kids, albeit really big and immature kids.
I guess adults in those days were not going to see past the smoke and mirrors. Cocaine and heroin were the big drugs that worried parents. As the kids themselves would say, marijuana is like an aspirin compared to hard drugs. Then some kids did get hooked, searching for that elusive high and rush from harder drugs. But overall few who tried marijuana became drug addicts for any lengthy period.
The dance continued until the mid 1980s when the student smoking lounges—did I mention there were two, one for the new freshmen campus—were closed down. The times had changed dramatically with a full-fledged, alleged war on drugs in America. Youth were being programmed to just say no to drugs. But teen life and modern childhood come with a lot of baggage, more so if the kids come from parents who themselves do drugs. And that scenario was played out in a major anti-drug TV commercial: the one where the father walks into his adolescent boy’s bedroom and confronts him about a shoe box of pot, demanding to know where he learned to do this sort of thing. “You!” the kid retorts, “I learned it from watching you!” The father hangs his head and turns sadly in defeat.
Half baked idea
From Woodstock when Jerry Garcia held up a joint and proclaimed “Exhibit A,” police departments cutting out marijuana questions on recruit applications, to all the free-wheeling, pot-smoking, drug-toking movies and rock lyrics and concerts of the past half century, finally the figurative smoke has cleared. The debate is OVER. Pot won. My generation of former high school cigarette and pot smokers must be dancing in the streets. That is, if we can get off our hind ends without a walking cane.
Medical marijuana is becoming legalized throughout the nation and is recreational in Colorado. For the past few years, the Texas Legislature has some young elected official who tries to open the marijuana laws only to be shut down by the Old Gray Guard. But it’s just a matter of time before Texas sees the light, like Dallas. The majority of the voting public—democrat and republican—do not care about marijuana remaining illegal and especially with a prison sentence. And our prisons are mostly full of people convicted of nonviolent drug crimes.
The reason for Dallas City Council’s change of heart to permit a small amount of marijuana without a trip to jail came from listening to minority communities. A black ministerial alliance had asked for a cite-and-release solution for up to four ounces of weed, explaining how rare it is for black youth—but really many, many people of all ethnicities and ages—to get a break if caught by police for low-level offenses related to, say, driving, no license, no insurance, no registration, and then a bag of weed, too. If someone’s in jail, that person often loses a job, and many other financial problems follow. It’s a hole the individual can never escape financially.
The flip side, the law-and-order side, is Don’t Do Drugs. It’s that simple. But a society is not at all simple. There has never been in the course of human history a simple place, a simple time, a simple era. And societies evolve and change slowly yet radically … especially in the span of fifty to sixty years.
Marijuana may be nothing to go to jail over. It obviously does not create a violent streak. The effects of marijuana are not the same as legal alcohol consumption or manufactured illegal narcotics, even prescription drugs. Some pot smokers may feel the need to try harder drugs and will even spiral into addiction and criminal activity. But like the old hippies have been trying to tell us since the ’60s: Marijuana grows on God’s green earth for some reason. What could it be?