The straight dope on pot’s place in polite society

In America today, the cannabis conversation has shifted from “Dude, where’s my car,” to “Dude, what’s my ROI on this killer Blueberry Kush after I give the local and state governments their percentage?”

It looks like this might just go down as the year the counterculture came bursting from the billowing haze of a thousand Phish concerts and summer reggae jams to don a suit, tie and spreadsheet to talk the economics of recreational pot usage.

The greenbacks are definitely softening society’s position toward the green buds, taking cannabis to a very mainstream place and making governors, legislators, police chiefs and presidents reconsider their long-held opinions on the decriminalization of marijuana for all Americans, not just the “medicinal” users who have come by their cards in a variety of legit and sketchy ways.

How much more mainstream do you get when easily three-quarters of this year’s NFL-watching public were aware that the alternative name for Super Bowl XLVIII was the Pot Bowl? Both teams, Washington state’s Seattle Seahawks and Colorado’s Denver Broncos, hailed from the first states in the union to legalize recreational use.

That is not counterculture. That is in your face in a very big way.

And it hasn’t stopped. While we’re still having the conversation about medicinal marijuana in California, and moratoriums of cannabis dispensaries in cities up and down the coast, including right here in the Valley, Colorado is counting its fat stacks of cash going straight into the state’s general fund.

Critics will say that the real revenue falls far short of the projections, yet the special marijuana taxes in Colorado are significant. With $98 million in projected revenue through the end of the year, slower than predicted revenues through the first of the year still saw $7.5 million in January. And it seems the real costs to Colorado that would reportedly offset the revenue gained in critics’ minds have not quite materialized, a fact conceded, begrudgingly, by the state’s governor in recent weeks.

Many Americans, it appears, are over the fear factor tied to marijuana, and even share a widely accepted opinion that pot and the people who smoke it for any purpose are collateral damage in what has been one of many failed aspects of misdirected drug war that has resulted in a bloated state and federal prison system full of small-time pot crimes. This tidal shift in public perception due to the economic possibilities is eroding the headlock of alarm and dread people like Nancy Reagan helped put us in 30-plus years ago.

This week, the “scientific” community fought back hard with the results of a new study that shows evidence that even casual marijuana use can cause changes to the parts of the brain that control motivation and emotion. Well, duh. What pot smoker hasn’t been lazier and thought things were funnier?

Beyond that, though, where were the peer reviews, the larger sample sizes, and who the hell considers casual use as two joints a day? Casual use in most people’s minds would probably be two bowls a week; two joints a day is somewhere between Cheech and Chong and Snoop Lion. Lest we forget how much damage legal alcohol use can do to the brain, causing serious impairment of cognitive faculties, causing blackouts, destroying neurotransmitters and permanently remapping connections from sustained use. Nothing is safe; and some things are worse than others.

Marijuana hasn’t exactly come out of the closet of acceptance in the way that other social issues have, yet its place among polite society is not going to travel backward; once the counterculture sees the sun, it grows and adapts to the mainstream, it doesn’t curl up and die, receding back among the fringes.

The pot is too sweet to ignore any longer. If that last sentence means the drug, then you will be one of the million users to come out of the closet or start imbibing anew. But I meant that last sentence in reference to the pot o’ gold, or the tax revenue and ancillary revenue, a potential formula to emerge from self-imposed tax referendums, fee hikes and austerity measures to make sure there is enough to go around in our state and others.

The feds are “optimistic” about what is going on in Washington and Colorado, and California’s Democratic Party has now added decriminalization and recreational use to its party plank. Lukewarm endorsements, indeed, but they are continued tidal waves of evolving acceptance.

This column first appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, May 2, 2014.