Last night CNN aired “Weed 3,” Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s third installment of a timely series about his re-discovery of cannabis and its many benefits. Today my news feed is flooded with pithy pot headlines and re-published articles about America’s increasing acceptance, the status of the feds’ stance and various states’ cannabis legislation, beginner’s guides and “everything you need to know” about cannabis, seniors and marijuana, women and weed, multimillion dollar cannabis investment funds, and Colorado, Colorado, Colorado. Photos abound depicting revelers partaking in weekend events in honor of today’s holiday. My email is bombarded with “Happy 420” messages from product vendors and newsletters from dispensaries declaring their special, blockbusting 420 deals. It’s a lot of hype. And hype makes me nervous.
Obviously the upside is that all this mostly positive coverage is opening public perception to a more enlightened discourse on what increasingly appears to be an extraordinary plant. But it makes me uneasy that these boastful celebrations of cannabis—on a day considered by some to be a “sacred stoner holiday,” by others a day of opportunistic marketing— will diffuse the fact that we are still in the midst of a real, long-suffering American war against its civilians. Despite what Obama sorta said about the appropriateness of “carefully prescribed medical use of marijuana” and that we should follow the science, and despite the fact that nearly half of U.S. states (plus D.C.) have gone ahead and enacted their own laws ordaining its medical validity, the federal government remains quietly hostile about cannabis. Plant-loving people are still getting profiled, arrested, fined, locked up, and potentially viewed as drug detritus by family members, employers, schools, insurance companies, and the White House.
As I am often told by friends in the industry, cannabis teaches us many lessons. Certainly one thing cannabis teaches us is levity, and the healing power of joy and laughter. We can’t be serious, dour-faced, preaching activists all the time. Believe me, I get that! Today (even its silly, overhyped bits) should be celebrated for everyone whose tireless activism has gotten us to this point. But their work is far from over.
Over the past few years, I’ve dealt professionally with mainstream media on the cannabis industry’s most pressing issues. Reporters and editors are assigned and approved assignments through a cycle of a trending story, and likewise their publication will refuse to run a story if it exists outside of that cycle or a topic becomes “over-saturated.” But I hope that the media blitz of this past weekend and especially today won’t prevent these same outlets from continuing to explore the stories and people who are still suffering, still fighting hard, still struggling to make a difference, and to teach cannabis’s other lessons of compassion and resilience, long after Snoop Dogg “gets higher” in Denver for his sold-out 420 Wellness Retreat Concert.
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