Tag Archives: marijuana

FEATURED
A Counterperspective: Celebrating 4/20 from my Dorm Window

Can you celebrate 4/20 without “protesting existing marijuana laws” on the hill?

grumpy cat - stayin' inside

The following article may be appealing to prefrosh who think all of Wesleyan is like this and are reacting like this, whether or not WesFest falls on 4/20.

Around noon on Saturday morning, as I took my first and nearly last steps out of Clark Hall on this most glorious holiday, the repugnant stench of weed began to attack my scent receptors. Walking by Foss on my way to Usdan brunch proved that I was already late for the party—the games had begun.

I had been proactive in my avoidance of the anticipated craziness. Not really, but it was a happy coincidence that we were planning a social program around my friend’s birthday, which was the day before. We had arranged for a projector and screen in order to play Super Smash Brothers Melee as a hall. Asking for the equipment and calling it a social program also got us money for pizza, which is awesome. Thanks, ResLife!

Thus, I left the dorm a second time, to get the giant screen and projector from Bennett Hall. This time I noticed the Whey Station chillin’ in the WestCo Courtyard and people baking in the sun on Foss (see what I did there?). I enjoyed the trippy musical accompaniment as I carried the heavy metal contraption back to my dorm. I entered Clark once more, never to venture out again.

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FEATURED
#ThisIsHigh: Students “Choose to Protest Existing Marijuana Laws,” P-Safe Protests Students Protesting Existing Marijuana Laws

Using photoshopped Michael Roth ’78 heads to avoid incriminating students definitely hasn’t gotten old yet, right?

For the fifth or tenth or maybe even twentieth year in a row, hundreds of students gathered on Foss Hill at 4:20 on April 20 to submerge the Middletown skyline in a sea of smoke as potent as any since the Grateful Dead serenaded Foss in 1970. Only this time Dean Rick Culliton gave the practice a name. He called it “protesting existing marijuana laws.” Did you have a civically engaged weekend?

Leave it to students to give it a hashtag:

Once again, the weather was quite a bit friendlier to 4/20 than it’s been to Spring Fling in recent years, and members of Public Safety harshed some students’ mellow by tramping around with video cameras and stamping out joints left and right.

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FEATURED
WesFest Ends on Friday, Possibly Maybe Because of 4/20, We Think

It’s 4/20 and WesFest is over! Here’s what happened when I tried to find out why.

Scenes from WesFest 2009, which narrowly avoided falling on 4/20.

Why is this WesFest different from all other WesFests?

The answer is so obvious you may not have realized it: WesFest began on a Wednesday rather than a Thursday this year and, as per the official schedule, it’s now over. But the weekend is only getting started! What gives?

The issue first came to my attention way back in November, when the Office of Admissions tried pushing WesFest to a Mon-Tues-Wed format and some WSA members registered their discontent. Noticing that 4/20 falls this year on the third Saturday of April (traditionally the last day of WesFest), the reasoning seemed pretty obvious:

As Dean Culliton reminded us yesterday, it’s no secret that the powers that be are a little squeamish about traditional 4/20 proceedings. Add prefrosh to the mix, and it’s an entirely new crisis. This story is well recounted in Jacques Steinberg’s The Gatekeepers, when a student is waitlisted after writing her college essay about getting caught with a weed brownie in high school; she subsequently visits Wesleyan on April 20, 2000, and feels stung by the hypocrisy of it all. The most recent time WesFest fell on 4/20 was 2008, when Director of ResLife Fran Koerting was quoted in the Argus as saying that Admissions would not let the two holidays overlap again. Apparently the problem was that if students were smoking marijuana on Foss Hill, prefrosh might think that “anything goes on here”:

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FEATURED
Hickenlooper ’74 on Weed Legalization: “Don’t Break Out the Cheetos or Goldfish Too Quickly”

In case you missed it, Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize recreational marijuana usage this past Tuesday on Election Day, two examples among many progressive reforms that were approved by voters across the country. However, while many were celebrating in the streets, Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper ’74 warned Coloradans from indulging in their new rights too quickly. As Fox News reported the governor saying:

“The voters have spoken and we have to respect their will,” Hickenlooper said in a statement Tuesday night. “This will be a complicated process, but we intend to follow through. That said, federal law still says marijuana is an illegal drug, so don’t break out the Cheetos or gold fish too quickly.”

In return, some supporters responded to the governor’s warning by sending him packs of the above-mentioned munchies snacks. 

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P-Safe: “Pictures Are a Way of Identifying People”

This past Friday, we posted coverage of P-Safe officers displaying a newfound interest in photography as an—ahem—relaxed crowd of students spent 4/20 on Foss. The post garnered a number of speculative comments. P-Safe can’t actually use the footage, assured a few hasty replies:

From my WSA days, I learned PSAFE uses the cameras as a deterrent. They CANNOT use the footage in SJB hearings as evidence against you. They do it to freak you out but it has no judicial weight.

Not so, suggests a brief story on the front page of today’s Argus. Glance at the fine print below Andy Ribner ’14’s fantastic photo and recoil: there’s a rather explicit heads-up from your friendly neighborhood P-Safe director Dave Meyer:

Director of PSafe Dave Meyer said that PSafe will use the footage to identify students engaging in drug use and send them to the Student Judicial Board.

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CT Decriminalizes MJ

Wes Students on 4/20We can pretend that this is irrelevant to Wesleyan, but over the past week and a half we’ve talked about ~100 Wes students per year getting disciplined for drug abuse and the seizure of 29 pounds of weed in Middletown mail.

While the decriminalization of marijuana doesn’t actually legalize it, it does change the way Connecticut law treats offenses.  Connecticut will be the fourteenth state to have this attitude towards Wesleyan’s favorite herb, in line with Massachusetts and New York.  The Hartford Courant has a pretty good description of what the rules might look like next month:

The decriminalization bill would make the possession of a half-ounce of marijuana or less–about 30 joints — akin to receiving a speeding ticket rather than a criminal offense. First-time offenders would face a $150 fine; second and subsequent offenses would draw a penalty of at least $200 but no more than $500.

Under current laws, people in possession of up to four ounces can be jailed for a year in addition to a $1,000 fine.  That’s a pretty significant shift.  Before you celebrate with a joint of your own though, know that it won’t be quite as simple for many Wes students:

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EVENT
Students for Sensible Drug Policy at Usdan/Olin

Beezy Burveezy ’13 wants you to actually get involved (le gasp!) if you want the man out of your business:

Bills to legalize medical marijuana and to decriminalize possession of less than an ounce of marijuana in Connecticut are incredibly likely to pass this spring. After decades of work on the part of those who advocate for marijuana policy reform, this is a very exciting moment. Students for Sensible Drug Policy will be tabling in Usdan this Sunday, Monday and Tuesday at lunch and Olin in the evening to distribute more information about medical marijuana in general and the upcoming bills.

Here’s an article about these bills, and links to their language:

Times: Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday from around 12-2 at Usdan and 8-10 at Olin.

Middletown Wants to Stop You from Getting Medical Marijuana Before It’s Even Legal

Wesleyan’s passion for pot has been noted tons of times already, but how important of an issue is it?  Apparently too important for the Middletown City Planners to ignore. They’re considering an amendment to restrict places where pot can be sold, even medical marijuana, to buildings that are an “over 50-bed hospital, a pharmacy, or a medical clinic with more than five practitioners.”  Plus, whatever such place will have to be at least 100 feet from residential areas unless an exception is made.

But wait…not even medical marijuana is legal in Connecticut.  The Deputy City Planning Director says they want to prevent pot abuse preemptively because:

the planning department staff believes that Middletown could be ripe for such dispensaries, citing Wesleyan University’s ranking as 18th in the “Reefer Madness” category of the Princeton Review’s 2009 college guide and Middletown landing in the 39th spot of the Daily Beast’s list of the nation’s 40 most pot-loving communities.

Still, they already voted against banning any marijuana, including medical.  Ah, the priorities of Middletown.

[Source: The Middletown Press]

Giant Joint’s ancestors found?

A 2,700-year old grave recently discovered in the Gobi Desert has come with an unexpected finding: nearly two pounds of marijuana. From MSNBC:

Nearly two pounds of still-green plant material found in a 2,700-year-old grave in the Gobi Desert has just been identified as the world’s oldest marijuana stash, according to a paper in the latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Botany.

A barrage of tests proves the marijuana possessed potent psychoactive properties and casts doubt on the theory that the ancients only grew the plant for hemp in order to make clothing, rope and other objects.

They apparently were getting high too.

[…] What is in question, however, is how the marijuana was administered, since no pipes or other objects associated with smoking were found in the grave.

“Perhaps it was ingested orally,” Russo said. “It might also have been fumigated, as the Scythian tribes to the north did subsequently.”

MSNBC.com: “World’s oldest marijuana stash totally busted”

Thanks to Elizabeth S. ’12 for the tip.

Weed, the State of the Art

The New Yorker has a fascinating in-depth piece about the effect that the legalization of medicinal marijuana usage is having on the now semi-legal pot economy in California, which is centered around proliferating cannabis dispensaries, and is stimulating a thriving subculture of growers and buyers infused with organic food and Tibetan prayer flags:

Since 1996, when a referendum known as Proposition 215 was approved by California voters, it has been legal, under California state law, for authorized patients to possess or cultivate the drug. The proposition also allowed a grower to cultivate marijuana for a patient, as long as he had been designated a “primary caregiver” by that patient. …The language of the proposition was intentionally broad, covering any medical condition for which a licensed physician might judge marijuana to be an appropriate remedy—insomnia, say, or attention-deficit disorder.

…The [Tibetan prayer] flags identify their owners with serenity and the conscious path, rather than with the sinister world of urban dope dealers, who flaunt muscles and guns, and charge exorbitant prices for mediocre product. …The people I met in the high-end ganja business had an affinity for higher modes of thinking and being, including vegetarianism and eating organic food, practicing yoga, avoiding prescription drugs in favor of holistic healing methods, travelling to Indonesia and Thailand, fasting, and experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs. Many were also financially savvy, working long hours and making six-figure incomes.

…The limited legal protections afforded to pot growers and dispensary owners have turned marijuana cultivation and distribution in California into a classic “gray area” business, like gambling or strip clubs, which are tolerated or not, to varying degrees, depending on where you live and on how aggressive your local sheriff is feeling that afternoon.

…Only a small percentage of consumer marijuana sales in California occur within the medical-marijuana market. Even so, the dispensaries, by serving as a gold standard for producers and consumers, have fuelled the popularity of high-end strains in much the same way that the popularity of the Whole Foods grocery chain has brought heirloom lettuce to ordinary supermarkets. To serve these sophisticated new consumers, growers in California and elsewhere are producing hundreds of exotic new strains, whose effects are more varied, subtle, and powerful than the street-level pot available to tokers in the nineteen-seventies and eighties.

…Medical marijuana has made it easy for people like Emily, the Kid, and Captain Blue to see growing pot as a casual life-style choice. By going into the pot business, Emily had made the kind of compromise with reality that idealistic people often make when they get older and lose faith in their ability to effect wholesale change, and when they need the money.

Growing ganja lets you feel that you’re still living on the edge, especially when you’ve become a little complacent politically. Emily nodded, and took another puff. “The forest is still getting cut down or whatever,” she said, watching the fragrant smoke swirl in the breeze. “But you’re still working out here. You’re still subverting the Man. And you’re getting people high.”

This just might be the future of cannabis in the rest of America. Anyway, the article’s a lot more informative/reality-based than the various plot machinations of Weeds, which until now has been my main source of knowledge about the American shadow marijuana economy.

The New Yorker: Dr. Kush: How Medical Marijuana is Transforming the Pot Industry