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HIGH TIME

An interview with ALYSON MARTIN and NUSHIN RASHIDIAN on the move toward LEGALIZING CANNABIS

BY MARK LEVITON

The cannabis plant had been used by humans as medicine and enjoyed for its psychoactive properties for thousands of years, but in 1937 it came under strict federal regulation in the United States. Harry J. Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics — who made some notoriously racist comments — waged war on cannabis, also called “reefer” or “marihuana,” Mexican slang for “the weed that intoxicates.”

In 1971 President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” and every federal administration since has continued the campaign. Despite this, almost all Americans now live in states where cannabis is legal to use in some form as medicine, and in eighteen states it’s legal for adults to use for recreation. It is regulated and taxed by state and local governments, which often spend that revenue on badly needed social services. Medical cannabis is used to treat multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, nausea caused by cancer treatments, and other ailments.

Journalists Nushin Rashidian and Alyson Martin have written about cannabis and drug policy for more than ten years in The Atlantic, Esquire, The Nation, and other publications. “It seems that nothing can kill the cannabis plant,” they write, “not seventy-five years of prohibition, nor decades of reefer madness, nor forty years of the drug war.” Yet the federal government continues to treat cannabis as having no medicinal value and considers it as dangerous as heroin. Millions have been arrested for marijuana possession, a disproportionate number of them Black or brown.

Martin and Rashidian founded the news organization Cannabis Wire to report on marijuana regulation and law, the economics and science of its cultivation and use, and the implications its legal status has for criminal justice and individual liberties (cannabiswire.com). Rashidian told me that from the start they “were really passionate about educating journalists to ask the right questions to give them the tools they needed to cover a subject that was very new for many of them.” She and Martin are the coauthors of A New Leaf: The End of Cannabis Prohibition, which examines the history of cannabis use and the road to today’s imperfect, ever-shifting legal and scientific status quo.

Martin attended the College of Saint Rose in her hometown of Albany, New York, while Rashidian studied at the University of California’s Irvine campus; both obtained advanced degrees from New York City’s Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where they met and are now adjunct faculty. For many years they traveled the country, from Seattle to Washington, D.C., covering news stories about cannabis. (Martin says she’s driven across the U.S. six times in her red VW Beetle.) Right now the COVID-19 pandemic has confined them to their home base in New York City. We talked by video chat.