On welcoming legal marijuana despite this one weird trick: I’ve never smoked weed

This starts with a confession: I’ve never smoked weed. Not through my teen years, my college years, my “I’m an adult and can do what I want” years, nor, as of yet, my Millennial-entering-40s-with-anxiety years. Actually, I hear THC can help with that.

have had patients take tolerance breaks and, as opposed to other drugs, where you would have withdrawal symptoms, I’m not saying you’re not going to have zero, but you do not have withdrawal symptoms and cravings and yearnings as deep and rooted as opioids and heroin.”

The July 1 law will not have a huge effect on medical marijuana card holders, according to Reeder, but it will bring some perks. Cardholders, she said, will not have to pay the 9% tax that noncardholders will be charged. Also, for those who opt to grow legal medical plants, a person with a card will be permitted to grow four plants per household, compared to two for those who do not have a card.

As access opens, Reeder, who is 53, said she loves to see the momentum of the movement.

“From back in 1996 in California, when it first started, to now, so many years later, it’s mind-boggling that it has taken this long.”

Learn more at cannatracker.net.

Crystal Schelle is a journalist whose work has been published locally, regionally and nationally. She enjoys trivia, cats and streaming movies.

I’m not entirely sure why I’ve never mowed the grass, puffed the dragon, torched up or gotten high, although I think the reasons have varied throughout different stages of life. At my earliest recollection, it could have been simply that I was one of those kids for whom D.A.R.E. was very effective. Indeed, the D.A.R.E. Scare found fertile soil in my sixth grade mind in the ‘90s.

JOSEPH PETERSON

peat it all for weeks on end. The morning we found the joint, Seth “joked” that we should smoke it, testing the waters with me, no doubt. I said no, of course. We should throw it away, I insisted! He pitched the notion, then, that he’d just take it for me and throw it away himself since he needed to go home anyway. With sufficient sideeye to let him know I was suspicious about his intentions, I made him promise he’d throw it away. Then I handed it to him. I’m sure it went directly into the garbage, though I only saw it go into his pocket.

suit of experiential gratification. This runaway curiosity brings a feeling of discontentment sometimes, a sense of missing out on something. I must know things for myself! Perhaps this, too, finds its root in my religious upbringing.

Times do change, however, and societies evolve. It’s hardly controversial these days to acknowledge that marijuana has many positive applications, medically and recreationally, and I’m certainly not in opposition to the wide use of its many benefits. Legalized weed is good policy, and generally I subscribe to the maxim “let people enjoy things.”

But I had the fear of God’s disapproval as well, thanks to a religious upbringing that seemed to align most to the priorities of the Raegan administration and its War on Drugs. And yet, my religion also forbade drinking coffee, and I’d always sneak down the bulk aisle at the grocery store just to get an intoxicating whiff. Now, I’m completely devoted to the stuff. So, no, my faith alone couldn’t have given me the resistance needed to “just say no” had I really been interested in a wake and bake.

That last bit is a broader realization I’ve come to far too late in life. The audacity to think that my ability to resist a temptation was based on anything other than a direct correlation to my interest in it had me believe I was better or stronger just for saying no to weed. In truth, I couldn’t find the appeal. I do remember finding a joint in the gutter one summer riding bikes with my best friend, Seth, around our neighborhood.

Those were days we lived in our swimming trunks and flip flops, because this was Arizona, where nearly every backyard had a pool. We’d bike, swim, sleep on the trampoline and re-

So there I left it. The unexamined lack of interest that I perceived as a satisfying self righteousness to resist! That was when I was 12. I’m less encumbered now by a religious code to abstain, and juvenile fears have long since dissipated, replaced with more sensible notions regarding the Devil’s lettuce. I’m left, then, without any smoke (pun!) or mirrors to face the real reasons why weed has remained on my list of things I naturally eschew, right up there next to pickled pigs feet.

You see, I’m curious about everything. It’s a personal article of faith, a declaration of identity, even. Curiosity, as a virtue, is one of my chosen cornerstone values in life, a lodestar to how I live and how I parent. A passionate generalist, I embrace the mile-wide-inch-deep jab journalists often lob at themselves, before others can, I suppose. But it’s what drives me to be able to write and find time to collect the stories of others and put them to paper. I am, by nature and intention, unrepentantly curious.

But the dark side of curiosity, if there is one, is that at a certain point, it can start to feel like obligation, and obligation begets a pressure, concocted in my own mind, to scratch the itch of wonderment, to satisfy the pur-

Regardless of my own past reasons to abstain, as a fully certified adult in 2023 — or so the graying hairs in my beard presume — in full possession of my own faculties, I’m just in time to finally live in a state where the shackles of illegality around marijuana are on the cusp of being shed. And yet, as recreational weed becomes almost as freely attainable as milk in the Free State, will that trigger a budding (pun!) curiosity to burn one? I’m open to it, but the most I can feasibly muster at the moment is that I might try a gummy sometime if I have a hard time sleeping. The allure of hot boxing as a pastime, however, still alludes.

(Am I even saying these euphemisms correctly?)

I guess in one sense, I’m relieved. Relieved that there is something on this wide, spinning planet I’m chronically (pun!) disinterested in experiencing. Hark! My curiosity has its limits! Wait a minute. Is this what contentment feels like? If so, I think maybe I’ll just ride that high for now.

Joseph Peterson can usually be found reading the weathered plaques of obscure monuments he sees while wandering the city. He counts public libraries, public lands and places where local community is fostered among his favorite kinds of places.