The lever we can all pull in 2021: Weed
Personal and professional life during the pandemic has been hard on most of us. The isolation, layered with fear, tensions to mask or not to mask, and a presidential election have deepened the divides across the country. This is not surprising because without the opportunity to develop shared experiences, which is really tough to do sans in real life — and even with zoom — we don’t move closer to one another’s perspectives, but more easily drift apart. We aren’t just silo-ed via Facebook algorithms; it’s more limited, physical spaces than ever before.
Fortunately, cannabis seems to be a unique, multifaceted plant/idea/industry/medicine/social justice lever that we can jointly pull. In red and blue states, people are saying yes to weed. Attitudes towards legalization, regardless of personal use, have the majority of Americans supporting it, despite the federal government’s decades long campaigns to mislead the public, criminalize communities of color, and deprive its citizens of medicinal, therapeutic, and generally joy-inducing molecules.
Cannabis has been shown to do the exact opposite of cause harm even when studies were designed to help “unbiasedly’’ prove harmful effects. You can check out the history of the report generated by the Shafer Commission to learn how prohibition efforts omitted empirical studies to gain momentum towards prohibition. In a nutshell, the commission urged the federal government to reframe the American “drug problem” or else risk perpetuating the same issues present in the 70s — instead of doing this, we went in the opposite direction: we ramped up incarceration, especially in non-white populations, exacerbating racial tensions because arrests at any point in life can have deleterious impacts within and across family units; classified weed in such a way that deemed it to have zero medical use with high levels of risk for addiction or abuse (on par with heroine); created medical marijuana refugees, forcing families to uproot themselves in order to provide life-saving treatments for their children suffering from debilitating seizures; and, though I don’t have all the facts on this, highly discouraged the cultivation of hemp as an industrial crop, which was previously farmed by our founding fathers, to be used for hundreds of commercial uses as a renewable crop, unnecessarily taking us farther away from environmental sustainability.
Even with all the wrong turns, we’ve pivoted towards sensible policy and reform. And it feels good to see rational progress during a time when so much of our days are spent trying to make sense of what is going on in the world. I can’t speak for everyone, but it makes sense to legalize cannabis if it creates jobs, facilitates restorative justice movements, chips away at the opioid epidemic, and brings joy into people’s lives during a time when many feel alone. While we likely cannot expect the Senate to duplicate passage of the MORE Act in 2021, we can continue to support work by organizations such as The Last Prisoner Project, Cannabis for Black Lives, and The Wholistic Foundation. The progress and triumph of moving cannabis from illicit to essential should be celebrated, yet we must temper this with the fact that thousands of people are sitting in prison for minor marijuana offenses — The Last Prisoner Project tackles this head on; we can seize this opportunity for wealth and job creation at a massive scale, but let’s be sure to build equity at the same time — Cannabis for Black Lives takes a three-pronged approach through financial support, people upliftment, and amplification of Black voices in the legal cannabis space; let’s be excited that more than 30 states now have medical marijuana laws on the books but that people largely comply with the ideas that weed makes you lazy and acts as a gateway drug while suffering from debilitating addictions to pharmaceuticals — The Wholisitc Foundation recently completed the first-ever cannabinoid anxiety relief study, exploring cannabis efficacy for anxiety aggravated by COVID-19.
In the academic literature, there’s a thing called sensemaking (yes, that is the research term), defined as the process by which people give meaning to their collective experiences (Weick, 1995). Collectively, cannabis is looking like a good thing for all of us: new jobs, revenues for state and local budgets, decriminalization and normalization of a plant that boasts myriad medical and therapeutic benefits, an more often than not, an overall good time. It makes sense for us to support a plant that provides many different levers we can pull in building a more resilient world.
