It is incomprehensible that SLO doesn’t yet have a countywide Peace, Freedom, and Marijuana Festival, complete with giant blunt floats and free bags of weed thrown to the crowd—that Highway 101 isn’t crowded on both sides by pungent, verdant cannabis fields swaying in the breeze.
What is this, Mayberry R.F.D.? Are we all a bunch of drooling goobers?
Look, folks: The war on marijuana was a lie. It was waged by chemical companies afraid their poisons would be replaced by natural cannabis products and by control freaks and authoritarians afraid that people might have wild ideas under the influence of pot and start thinking for themselves.
Further, it was a complete waste of time and money. There was always pot next to the schools, and in the schools. There’s pot in the DMV, in the churches, in the Starbucks, in the libraries. There is pot everywhere. There always has been. Somehow we survived. The idea that marijuana was “evil” was a sham.
Diablo Canyon is closing.
Marijuana can be a billion-plus-dollar local industry.
If you’re having trouble connecting those two ideas into one big picture, maybe you should consider having a puff. Time is wasting!
Sean R. Shealy
San Luis Obispo
This article appears in Pride 2019.
Billion dollar industry… I’m sure it will be a billion dollar industry like table grapes, which takes about the same amount of labor and resources to produce. And like table grapes, big profits for a few and crap jobs for the rest. But hey, $7.95 per pound and available everywhere amirite bro.
“that people might have wild ideas under the influence of pot and start thinking for themselves”
That’s one of my favorite boomer tropes. Look where it’s gotten us. I think the reality on that one is quite the opposite. Weed puts you to sleep, sometimes literally, where your brain activity reaches it’s most suggestible state. Pot smokers are not free thinkers. And the idea that weed is somehow spiritually enlightening is even more ridiculous. Smoking weed has nothing to do with spirituality. All you want is a cope to deal with societies lack of spiritually. Real spirituality involves UNPLEASANT activities – fasting, self denial, and study; not getting stoned and claiming to be enlightened.
Weed is no panacea.