High Time

Thank you for Mark Leviton’s interview with Alyson Martin and Nushin Rashidian on the legalization of cannabis. I support legalization because of cannabis’s beneficial (medicinal and recreational) properties, and because it will end the racist sentencing that has disproportionately incarcerated Black people for drug offenses.

I live in the “Emerald Triangle” of Northern California, where the cannabis crop has supported our local economy for years. Unfortunately we are struggling to fight off a corporate invasion that seeks to monopolize the industry by buying up large tracts of land for industrial production. These companies don’t care about the environment, our increasingly scarce water, the dangers of wildfires, or our community’s economic health. Yet our board of supervisors is inviting corporate growers by dramatically expanding the amount of land that can be used for cannabis production.

A sad story, indeed. Even a beneficial and medicinal plant can ruin the land and its people when capitalism gets its claws into it. Locals are fighting back, however; a petition to repeal the ordinance allowing large growers received more than six thousand signatures.

Since I’m a lifelong pothead, the first thing I read when my July 2021 issue arrived was Mark Leviton’s interview with Alyson Martin and Nushin Rashidian about the move toward legalizing cannabis [“High Time”]. I didn’t learn much, but then I already read a lot of cannabis-related news.

The Dog-Eared Page that followed was much more enlightening. Carl Sagan was an astronomical pothead? Who knew. And who knew he could write so well — and so boldly, though behind the pseudonym of “Mr. X.” Sagan says, “I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis . . . unavailable to us without such drugs.” He goes on to say, “I find in the morning a message from myself the night before” (when he was high and inspired) “informing me that there is a world around us which we barely sense, or that we can become one with the universe.” One with the universe? What else can one be?

In Mark Leviton’s interview “High Time” [July 2021], Alyson Martin and Nushin Rashidian tackle the rise of cannabis with clear-eyed facts and straight talk — not the Reefer Madness lies I was fed in college. I had my first toke during the Nixon administration, at the start of the War on Drugs. The act of sharing a joint with others was part of the counterculture of those times.

One night a friend and I broke into a campus building and smoked pot by the fireplace in the echoey interior. When a security guard’s flashlight found us, we thought our futures were doomed. But since we were white and in college, we were sent back to our dorm. If we’d been Black, I now know, things might have been different.