Smoking Weed Used To Be Cool

Now it’s lame. What gives?

Trigger Warning: This entire post is going to be a middle-aged man complaining that things are different now compared to when he was younger. Do with that information what you will.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that, at the present moment, smoking weed is probably the lamest, most uncool, least rebellious thing you could do. State licensed dispensaries are starting to pop up around New York City, blending perfectly into the urban topography. There’s one around the corner from my office, situated right next to a cupcake shop. Call me old fashioned, but the idea of taking a break from filling out Excel spreadsheets to go buy an eighth and stop off for a bourgeois buttercream treat, all while wearing a quarter zip and khaki pants, feels antithetical to the entire weed smoking experience. In that instance, you are not Bob Marley. You are Bob Saget.

And when you enter one of these dispensaries, what are you greeted with? An entire product suite meant to cater to any THC ingestion preference you might have. Is smoking actual weed too harsh for you? Then try a vape that you can rip in public while sharing a sidewalk with the elderly and new mothers pushing their babies in strollers, all without a second glance from anyone. Don’t feel like ingesting nickel and aluminum and microplastics into your lungs with a vape? Consider one of these Willy Wonka looking edibles. Don’t eat the whole thing though. It’s extremely potent and anything beyond one bite will have you convinced that everyone you know hates you and/or that you’re about to die. But we all know that’s the best part of getting high—the abject terror.

There’s also a wide assortment of tinctures, sprays, creams, and even THC infused bath bombs. Nothing says countercultural drug use like unwinding in the tub for a little “me” time after a long day of sending emails at your 21st century girlboss job.

Are you a man nearing 40 whose hips are tight from sitting in a desk chair for nearly half of your waking life? Maybe a THC/CBD combo balm can ease that for you. Forget about the fact that you used to smoke pot so you could listen to Radiohead and think brand new thoughts but it now only functions as pain relief for the aching in your joints brought on by the ceaseless march of time and the life-suppressing perils of modernity. It’s a miracle drug!

The worst part of it all though, I believe, is the total cultural permissiveness around weed. People openly discuss edible usage at work, in the same manner they would talk about last night’s episode of The White Lotus, and nobody bats an eye. I feel like if I showed up at the office on Ash Wednesday with a giant cross on my forehead I’d get more sideways glances than if I casually mentioned I ate a 100mg chocolate bar the night before. Whatever happened to shame? The whole appeal of an illicit activity is that you can’t tell everybody about it. It doesn’t hit the same if it’s fair game for discussion at the place that funds your 401k.

All joking aside, I do worry about what’s going to happen to the kids. Not that they’re going to smoke weed, that’s something teenagers are supposed to do. Although the schizophrenia inducing strength of modern weed strains does give some pause. Teens are more likely to have a Reefer Madness style freak out smoking on CIA grade Banana Berry Kush than whatever ditch weed was available to Millennials during the Bush years. No, what I’m worried about is the relative ease of the current weed smoking experience, and the loss of meaning that comes with increased access.

(Pardon me for starting a sentence this way, but) BACK IN MY DAY getting high was a whole thing. You had to call around (Good luck getting Gen Z to pick up the phone and dial a number) to see if anyone was holding. If you were lucky enough to find someone (Which was no guarantee. An entire Saturday night could pass without triangulating a proper pot source), you had to go meet them in some random McDonald’s parking lot, clumsily make the exchange away from the prying eyes of your suburban neighbors, and return to a secluded location–preferably the basement of a friend’s house when their parents weren’t home–before you could begin ingesting any controlled substances. The method of smoking was always up in the air (No pun intended) as well. No one in my friend group was stupid enough to keep used drug paraphernalia in the same house where their mom cooked dinners and their dad paid taxes. Those two worlds shouldn’t mix. Sometimes we smoked out of a cored apple, or a crushed Diet Coke can, or via a very poorly rolled joint, all after manually breaking up the low quality pot we bought. That’s another thing. All of the pot I see in dispensaries now is soft and fluffy, just one giant bud the size of a cotton ball. This is a cultural loss. Kids these days don’t even know what it’s like to pick out seeds and stems, and they’re worse off for it.

So contrast what I experienced versus what the experience is today. Think about how easy it is for a teenager to get pot, how overpowering it is, and all of the different ways they can ingest it, as highlighted above. When something is easy and accessible, when you don’t have to work for it or try as hard to get it, it doesn’t mean as much. It loses its value and its sense of sacredness. This is what’s happening with pot now. And because of this proliferation and subsequent loss of meaning, it doesn’t have the same transformative effect.

When I was younger, smoking pot felt like a shamanistic ritual. For fear of getting caught holding it, or having adults smell it on you, you’d go somewhere dark and secluded and secure where you wouldn’t be bothered. You literally had to separate yourself from society to enjoy it. And it’s in this separate space where the magic occurred. There was nothing around you except for your close friends and any artifacts or totems you had on hand to aid you in your journey (In my case - movies, music, video games, stand-up comedy specials, etc). But most importantly, you had yourself. In those quieter moments when your friends would be in another room, or outside on the phone, or off hooking up with some girl that had come over, you’d come face to face with your own thoughts, which now appeared with more clarity and vibrancy than they ever had before in your sober life. These are the transformative moments you need as you move into adulthood. This was the whole point of smoking pot in the first place. Whether you knew it or not, the end goal was always individuation. Eating junk food and laughing with your friends was just an added bonus.

There’s a lot of talk online these days about the “Disenchantment of the world.” What this phrase means, at least to me, is that we’ve optimized our society to such a degree that we’ve taken all the joy and meaning out of important things. We’ve approached deep and moving subjective experiences with a cold, rationalist worldview, broke them into pieces for examination, and discovered that they were always more than the sum of their parts. Smoking weed is cool and fun, right? What if we made it more readily available? That would certainly be a net positive, wouldn’t it?

What this kind of utilitarian approach fails to recognize is that there are so many hidden and unspoken pieces of an experience that make it what it is, that bind the structure together. Removing obstacles doesn’t make a good thing better. More often than not, the obstacle is what makes it worthwhile in the first place.

Last week, while walking to work, I saw a kid no older than 15 smoking a joint before heading into school. Now, kids getting high before the bell rings isn’t anything new. But there was something about the entire situation—the fact that the joint clearly came pre-rolled (sold that way in a storefront right next to a Chase bank), and that he was smoking while nonchalantly walking down a crowded New York City sidewalk at 8:30 in the morning—that really bummed me out. I’m sure he’s thrilled that pot is so easy for him to acquire, that it’s totally acceptable for him to smoke it in public, and that he seemingly doesn’t have to fear the wrath of any adult who catches him. But all I could think as I watched him walk away was “This poor kid doesn’t know what he’s missing.”