If one can remember anything about cannabis, it’s often the first time—and the last time—one imbibed it. 

Everything else is a blur of puff-puff-pass, gurgling bong water or the electric rush of realizing those were pot brownies about half an hour after eating them.

My first time was with my lifelong pal, O., in the early ’80s, during Christmas break our freshman year in high school. Boomer parents in that transitional period between hippie and yuppie-dom were pretty laissez faire about how they stowed their stashes. We found it, we smoked it, then proceeded to eat all the candy in the house while watching a random VHS training tape of a domestically challenged person learning to use a spatula.

The last time I smoked pot was during the pandemic when a bumper crop of new cannabis businesses were showering the media with free samples delivered to our home offices. I appreciated the descriptions of the products’ potential effects and how much of any particular compound they contained. This legislated development was a far cry from the chemical Russian roulette that casual and infrequent users like myself had long endured (despite the salesmanship of the mulletted 30-somethings dealing weed from their dirt bikes, who circled Petaluma High like mustachioed vultures).

Like most people of a certain age, I prefer my weed Fentanyl-free and also, just generally free. So, when a media care package arrived, I seized the opportunity to momentarily put down my perennial wine glass and shift into some professional pot smoking. Included in the review kit was a pre-rolled joint, which I immediately thought should take the mantle from sliced bread as one of innovation’s greatest conveniences.

I lit it and took a drag. Bueno. I took another. Buennno. Another. Buennnnno. And then … it hit me all at once. I went from bueno to “bueNope” as I suddenly felt like I was inside a falling elevator—a simultaneous sensation of vertigo and claustrophobia, with a liberal smattering of my favorite, dementophobia—the fear of going insane—adding a certain extra elan to the moment. And by moment, I mean the hours it took to finally come down.

My experience may be unusual since my neurochemistry is a high wire act of psychoactive stratagems designed to minimize manic panic. Add any exotic ingredient, and this Mulligan stew boils right over.

And yet, I’m also curious. Not least because I’m susceptible to the word “lounge,” which I recently spied on a billboard looming over Petaluma’s Midtown. My favorite reptile is lounge lizard, and “louche,” my default sensibility, is just a typo away from it. The billboard read: “The Lounge at Mercy—Come Smoke & Chill.”

Thanks to new state regulations, local dispensaries like Mercy Wellness can now invite customers to enjoy their purchases on-site, opening a new business lane to our local bud industry. More to the point, as a man with perceptibly “no chill,” I’m in the market to get some. 

Do I smoke weed and chance, once again, angering the wine gods upon whose purple seas I’ve long floated this operation? Will I finally be smited into total madness? Or am I less likely to lose my shit in a public setting surrounded by professionals? After all, it’s called The Lounge, not The Panic Room—what could possibly go wrong? But if anyone sees me wielding a spatula, stand back—I’ve seen the video, and I know how to use it.

When Elon Musk smoked weed on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2018, there was a general freakout. The media treated it as if Musk had done something naughty, even though pot was already legal in California by then.

And they didn’t focus much on the fact that Musk also drank whiskey during the 2-½-hour show, nor on the fact that he mucked about with a flamethrower and a samurai sword during the “interview.” He took one big hit of a spliff (weed mixed with tobacco) and suddenly he was “doing drugs.”

Hilariously, ABC7 in Los Angeles presented its self-serious report with the headline “Musk appears to smoke pot during interview; Tesla stock falls 9 percent,” as if it were possible that Musk had been faking the whole thing.

That stock dive, though, got to the heart of what most likely concerned most investors, and that has lately become a topic of national conversation as Musk has moved into a powerful position in the federal government: the man acted like a troubled tween throughout the show.

The episode amounted to a real-time case-study in arrested development on the part of both men. The conversation, though it touched on “issues,” like artificial intelligence, mostly came off like a couple of obnoxious 12-year-olds hanging out in a tree fort.

For many, the Rogan appearance was a revelation. Musk hadn’t been media-shy before that, exactly, but he hadn’t tended to do a ton of interviews or big public appearances. And when he did, he tended to be soft-spoken and to hew to what had until very recently been basic social conventions (though he was increasingly saying troubling things).

While Musk fanboys loved the podcast as much as they would later convince themselves they loved the Cybertruck, many others were plotzed by how immature, awkward and vaguely creepy he seemed. His spliff-hit was, at most, one tiny part of what perplexed people: one of the richest men in the world, and the leader of two major companies (Tesla and SpaceX)—long presented by the media as a “visionary”—turned out to be an addled manchild.

And now, he’s wielding enormous powers as a top member of the Trump administration, in charge of (oy) “DOGE,” a basically made-up “department” in the federal government that’s supposedly dedicated to “cost-cutting,” but which seems mostly aimed at vindictively gutting big swaths of the government based on the whims, resentments and authoritarian ideologies of both Musk and Trump.

Still, on the Rogan show, and later, Musk said some stuff about both weed and drugs that seems interesting in light of subsequent events, revelations and rampant speculation over whether he might be abusing hard drugs, especially ketamine.

The speculation isn’t surprising given Musk’s increasingly bizarre public behavior over the past several years. In 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk had “told people he microdoses ketamine for depression, and he also takes full doses of ketamine at parties, according to the people who have witnessed his drug use and others who have direct knowledge of it.”

Low doses of ketamine are a legit use for treatment of depression. Full doses at “parties” is not. He told Rogan that he had only rarely smoked weed, mainly because it’s “not very good for productivity.”

That Wall Street Journal story wasn’t just about Musk, but about how trendy drug use had become among Silicon Valley execs. Many of them use ketamine and psychedelics “as gateways to business breakthroughs,” as the Journal put it. That’s not exactly the stuff of Timothy Leary. It seems like maybe those guys don’t really understand the function of such drugs for recreation, for mind expansion or for treating mood disorders.

Given how terrible so many Silicon Valley companies have become lately—jamming the Internet with AI slop, sabotaging their core functions for no discernable reason, designing ridiculous, dangerous and unneeded products, etc.—maybe they should find different “gateways.” And if they just want “recreation,” may I suggest they just smoke a joint now and again?

Even in this age of shamelessness, it’s been astonishing to watch business leaders bend the knee to Donald Trump as he prepares to take office.

Newspaper owners like the Los Angeles Times’ Patrick Soon-Shiong and the Washington Post’s Jeff Bezos, after years of staying mostly hands-off, have suddenly forced their journalists to move in a pro-Trump direction.

CEOs of companies including Apple (Tim Cook) Uber (Dara Khosrowshahi) and Amazon (Bezos again) have written million-dollar checks to Trump’s inaugural committee, forsaking their basic human dignity in return for government perks including, perhaps “not going to prison.”

But no mogul has debased himself more than Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (whom Trump has threatened with a life sentence). He cut the check. He bent the knee. But he also publicly and explicitly signed on with Trump’s authoritarian cause, declaring in the name of “free speech” that the fading social-media service he started as a way to rate the attractiveness of college women will now allow all kinds of bigotry and dangerous conspiracy theories to be posted unchecked. (While he was at it, he ordered that tampons be removed from the company’s men’s rooms. Really.)

And yet, if you search on Facebook (or Instagram, or Threads) for “cannabis,” you’ll be out of luck, and if you mention weed, you still might be censored. That was really weird even before all this, but it’s far weirder now that Facebook users are allowed to say, for instance, that Covid vaccines might kill you or that being gay or trans is a symptom of “mental illness.”

The company isn’t talking outside of issuing statements and having its weird, pallid CEO go on Joe Rogan to say all kinds of loopy shit, like how American business needs more “masculine energy.” But it appears that, as before, Facebook still considers cannabis an illegal “drug” and will continue to block searches and even censor content (albeit in a haphazard, impossible-to-predict fashion). In its announcement of the policy changes, Facebook stated that it will “continue to focus on tackling illegal and high-severity violations, like terrorism, drugs, fraud and scams.”

So, presumably, you can tell people to inject bleach or declare that their sexuality is a sickness, but don’t go talking about how high you got last night, or (more to the point, really) how weed helped get you off fentanyl or relieved your chronic pain. Also, don’t talk about how you want to blow up the Washington Monument, which is nearly as bad.

“Haphazard and impossible-to-predict” is a wild understatement. Facebook’s content “moderation” has always been something of a joke. For years, I have periodically reported a particular page that’s full of horrifying racism and clearly violates the company’s terms of service, only to be told, every time, that in fact it doesn’t. And there is a ton of weed-oriented stuff on Facebook, including whole pages and groups dedicated to the topic, that goes entirely uncensored, often for years. At the same time, though, other weed content is subject to being vaporized, and nobody knows what the criteria are.

But the bigger problem is that searches for cannabis content are blocked by keyword. The cannabis-policy news site Marijuana Moment took note of the continued censorship last week. Reporter Ben Adlin reported that “even when searching for accounts that merely regulate state-legal marijuana, engage in political advocacy or simply report news related to the issue,” you can’t find them via Facebook search. “A query for ‘Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission,’ ‘Marijuana Policy Project,’ or ‘Marijuana Moment,’ for example, yields no results and instead displays a notice encouraging users: ‘If you see the sale of drugs, please report it.’”

It should be noted that you can find those pages via Google.

All of this mess highlights how difficult it is to moderate content on a large social-media site, even when you have the best of intentions, as Facebook once pretended it had. But it also highlights how terrible Facebook in particular has always been on this score. It has changed moderation strategies so often over the years that it ultimately became impossible to gauge their effectiveness beyond concluding that it wasn’t very effective at all.

But if you still need a reason to abandon Facebook and all of Meta’s social-media sites, the fact that you can’t search on “cannabis” but you can search on the N-word should be enough.

Although there has been a relative lack of scientific studies of cannabis over the years (thanks to pot being illegal for most of modern U.S. history), some subjects have gotten enough scrutiny that conclusions can be drawn. Among the most solid of them is that it’s all but certain that weed is highly effective in getting people off opiates.

Since states started legalizing pot about a decade ago, researchers have been studying the effects that legal weed, in particular, have had on opiate addiction. A major challenge for them, though, has been the varying timelines of legalization. Although the general conclusion of most research is that pot helps people get off opioids, the level of effectiveness has been hard to measure. A newly released study (completed in 2023, but published last month), which looked specifically at mortality rates, claims to have solved this problem.

Many studies have looked at rates of addiction, but relatively few have examined how many overdose deaths might be prevented thanks to legal weed, as this one did.

“Although the causal effects of marijuana legalization on opioid mortality rates is a well-examined topic, there is no general consensus on the direction and magnitude of its effects,” according to the researchers from Texas Tech University and several other institutions. They point out that results of previous studies, while adding to the consensus that cannabis use is effective for ending opiate addiction, have shown widely varied results, making it hard to determine just how effective it is. “Most studies examining the effect of staggered marijuana legalization policies in the U.S. suffer from this problem, which partly explains the inconsistent estimates,” the researchers said.

The effectiveness of state-level legalization of adult-use cannabis grows over time. While a few states started legalizing nearly a dozen years ago, others legalized just this year. The results vary greatly from state to state.

By accounting for the time disparities, the researchers concluded that there is a “consistent negative relationship” between legalization and fatal overdoses, with more significant effects in states that legalized cannabis earlier in the opioid crisis.

“Recreational marijuana legalization (RML) is associated with a decrease in approximately 3.5 deaths per 100,000 individuals,” the study concluded. “[B]roadening recreational marijuana access could help address the opioid epidemic. Previous research largely indicates that marijuana (primarily for medical use) can reduce opioid prescriptions, and we find it may also successfully reduce overdose deaths.”

Crucially, they said, “this effect increases with earlier implementation of RML.” Furthermore, the effects are apparent almost immediately after legalization, but become stronger with time and, in their study, “persisted after five years.”

“Groups that implemented RML in later years do not have as much post-treatment data, but their short-term trends are consistent with the effects in the first group of states,” the study noted.

Several points are important to note: first, the study has not yet been peer reviewed. Also, it didn’t examine hospitalizations, overdoses that didn’t result in death, or any “abuse measures” other than overdose fatalities. And, while the results appear to be pretty solid, the researchers warn that it looked only at states where pot has been legalized for adult use, so the earliest data is just 11 years old, while other data is much newer. “This,” they said, “limits our ability to assess longer-term effects on opioid overdose deaths and related variables.”

Opioid misuse often begins with a legal prescription, usually for pain. The use of cannabis to relieve pain has been established fairly solidly, although it can vary greatly among various types of pain and by what the underlying maladies are. So far, the only use of medical cannabis officially sanctioned by the U.S. government is to treat certain types of seizures. In 2018, Epidiolex became the first, and so far only, FDA-approved drug derived from cannabis.

As more research piles up confirming pot’s pain-reducing effects, it seems likely that, eventually, the FDA will approve more medications that will address the kinds of maladies that lead to opioid addiction. Of course, that will become a lot easier once the federal government legalizes weed for all American adults.

As pretty much everyone expected last New Year’s Day, 2024 has turned out to be a challenging and in some respects horrendous year for cannabis in California.

The biggest hurdle to a thriving pot market in the state and nationally remains the continued illegality of cannabis at the federal level. With the election of Donald Trump as president and with the Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, it seems likely that this hurdle will remain in place for at least the next few years, though some reforms such as descheduling pot and allowing banks to do business with weed companies might yet come through.

But federal illegality means that California companies can neither export nor import pot, which makes them vulnerable to volatile prices for bud and concentrates.

Retail prices, meanwhile, have to remain high no matter what to cover the continued high costs faced by dispensaries. In particular, they must pay the ruinous taxes imposed by the state—and often also by local governments. Those taxes—15% in the case of the state excise tax—come on top of normal sales taxes. The resulting high prices send potential customers back into the arms of unlicensed pot sellers, resulting in what more than one observer has called a “death spiral” of the legal industry all along the supply chain.

California growers, who have struggled most of the time since they started selling weed legally in 2018, got a tiny bit of relief this year. Several previous growing seasons were harmed by bad weather, wildfires or both, and that didn’t happen this year, which has seen the “best harvest ever,” according to one Humboldt County grower who talked to MJBusinessDaily last month. But that good news comes on top of years of strife, and it’s estimated that only about a quarter of farms growing legal weed in the Emerald Triangle just a few years ago are still operating.

Outdoor growers, however, got a bit of boost from the pesticide scandal that erupted in the summer, when WeedWeek and the Los Angeles Times reported that there were “alarming levels of pesticides in pot products across the state,” despite the state’s supposedly strict testing regime. But that didn’t help indoor growers or anybody else in the legal-weed business, of course. Through 2024, a state industry that saw sales actually fall in each of the previous two years continued to sink, with many companies large and small going out of business, employment shrinking, and the number of separate brands store shelves diving to below one-quarter of their peak.

Much of this is thanks to idiotic business strategies and grotesque profligacy, as in the case of the large, national dispensary chain MedMen, which folded early this year.

But it’s also a result of policy. High taxes are just one issue. Another major one is the California constitution’s “home rule” provision, which allows localities to decide whether to allow cannabis businesses to set up shop. Large swaths of the state are still “pot deserts.” This situation has improved in recent years, but geographically, more than half the state is bereft of legal weed. Michigan, a far smaller state, has 8.7 dispensaries per 100,000 residents. California has just 3.2. Monthly sales per capita shows the problem even more starkly: monthly sales per Michigan resident are at about $23; in California, that figure is just over $9.

Perhaps the most dispiriting fact of all is that the state government doesn’t appear to be willing to take these issues on in any serious way. Several years ago, when the state was running big budget surpluses, there was a lot of optimism that the excise tax could be severely cut, and many bills were proposed. But then came deficits in the wake of the pandemic.

The budget is now supposedly “roughly balanced,” but Gov. Newsom has warned that it will likely go into deficit again with Trump promising to, for example, impose ruinous tariffs on imported goods and deport millions of immigrants, which would hurt governments across the country.

The most likely scenario for at least the coming year, then, is: more layoffs, more business exits, continued high retail prices, and an increasingly  thriving illicit market.

With federal legalization now (perhaps) a far-off pipe dream as Republicans descend into the White House and Congress to assume full control of the government, one of the chief hopes for California’s badly ailing pot industry has (perhaps) been dashed.

While it wouldn’t solve every problem, by a long shot, federal legalization would at least open up new markets for cannabis companies that are prepared to import and export their products, and at least theoretically give a big boost to smaller firms, too, including local dispensaries.

With an unstable federal government led by a lunatic, it’s impossible to know for sure whether legalization might happen despite general GOP opposition. But the prospects don’t look good, and that leaves California pot companies sitting with the problems they’ve had ever since California voters legalized weed eight years ago (that is, but for a few bright spots, like during the worst of the Covid pandemic, when sales soared). And yet more problems might be on the horizon.

The bad news continues to pile up: bankruptcies, layoffs, cutbacks, high prices, thin profit margins and enormous losses. Public companies like the Salinas-based Lowell Farms have laid off tons of people (nearly half the workforce in Lowell Farms’ case). Lowell reported a loss of $3.6 million in its most recent quarter. Gold Flora, meanwhile, reported a quarterly loss of a swoon-inducing $18.8 million and the Costa-Mesa-based company is reportedly having trouble paying its debts (at least one lawsuit alleges that, anyway). The company also announced that it would be trimming its staff by 10%.

All that combined with other grim news led John Schroyer of the trade publication Green Market Report to wonder “how long until more of them join the conga line into receivership and bankruptcy?”

Probably not long. This situation is not what anyone expected (or promised) in 2016. The reasons for it are the same intertwined ones the California industry has been facing all along: high taxes, the state’s “home rule” provision (which allows local governments to ban cannabis companies from setting up shop), and the continued success of the illicit pot industry, where people can get their weed cheaper and, often, with less hassle.

Some of these problems could be solved, or at least lessened, with government action. Lowering taxes, for example. But the state government is doing the precise opposite. The industry and consumers alike have complained all along about the state’s 15% excise tax on weed, which comes on top of the regular sales tax and any additional local taxes.

So with the industry in crisis, you’d think maybe the Legislature and governor would be looking for ways to lower it, right? Wrong. The tax is set to increase to an outright insane 19% in July barring some intervention in the Legislature in the coming session. This is part of the bargain that was reached in 2022 when the state eliminated the cultivation tax, which was itself ruinous—particularly for growers, but really for the whole industry.

Adding four points to the excise tax doesn’t seem like much of a bargain, though. All it will do is send more people back to the illicit market, and the ones who buy from dispensaries are refusing to pay more than they already are, meaning that the additional cost will be borne entirely by the industry.

There is a huge effort under way to forestall the increase, but it’s impossible to tell at this point how successful it might be. Dustin Moore, a founder of the Embarc chain of dispensaries, told Green Market Report that the potential increase represents “an existential threat to the industry.”

During a recent industry conference, Nicole Elliott, director of the California Department of Cannabis Control, told attendees that “reforms are needed,” and encouraged them to lobby lawmakers.

But efforts to lower the tax during years when the state government had a budget surplus went nowhere. Given that the state is now running deep deficits, with the Trump administration poised to stick it to California in several ways that would make things worse, the challenge will be that much greater. But so is the industry crisis, so maybe enough lawmakers and Gavin Newsom (who reportedly brokered the deal to trade one tax for another) will finally see the light.

Everybody should know that the cannabis business includes a fair number of fascists among its ranks, maybe even more than the average consumer-facing industry.

And of course tons of people who just voted for Donald Trump are avid weed-consumers. Just look at how many people have pot-themed pages among their Facebook likes right next to pictures of Marjorie Taylor Greene brandishing an assault rifle, or Trump’s mugshot.

But as with many of the people who voted for Trump because “he’s a businessman” or “he tells it like it is,” many of those people are likely to soon find out that they got way more than they bargained for.

Some of the execs at the big cannabis companies are probably high-fiving each other right now, since federal regulations of all kinds, including the weak-sauce restrictions on industry concentration, seem likely to be gutted. That spells trouble for smaller operations that are already struggling under the yoke of Big Weed.

But even Big Weed is subject to an “I never thought leopards would eat MY face” moment when the bros realize that hopes for federal legalization have been all but dashed, especially if the GOP takes both houses of Congress. They have the Senate, and, at this writing, it looks more likely than not that they’ll take the House, too. There’s nothing Big Weed desires more than federal legalization: you can’t truly be a domineering behemoth unless you can sell your wares across state lines.

That doesn’t necessarily mean legalization won’t happen, but even if it somehow does, the resulting legislation is likely to be completely fucked: again, especially for smaller players. Interestingly Project 2025, the “blueprint” for a second Trump administration written by his close allies and former (and future) staffers, and published by the ghoulish Heritage Foundation, contains no references to cannabis at all. But there’s tons of stuff in there about “dismantling the administrative state,” by eliminating whole swaths of regulatory agencies, including offices that investigate antitrust violations.

We probably don’t have to worry about that, though, since nationwide legalization seems more remote than it has since states started legalizing weed a decade or so ago. Up until last week it seemed like legalization was all but certain to happen in the coming few years. But this country’s “everyday Americans” have put the kibosh on that.

Though there are a fair number of GOP legislators, like the buffoonish and rapey Matt Gaetz of Florida, who favor legalization, the politics just don’t add up for it. In Marijuana Moment, William Garriott, a professor at Drake University in Des Moines and an expert on drug policy and pot legalization in particular, took note of what he calls the “red wall” that stands in the way of legalization. He noted that, on Election Day, voter initiatives to legalize failed in both Dakotas, as well as in Florida (even though Trump, who overwhelmingly won the state, announced he’d vote for it).

Twenty-six states still outlaw adult-use weed, and the congressional representatives in the vast majority of those states are unlikely to snub their constituents. While more than 70% of Americans now favor legalization, only slightly over half of Republicans do. And the Republicans who oppose it are often particularly exercised in their opposition.

Trump himself seems friendly toward legalization, as NPR News reported on Nov. 11. But the report, which extensively quoted optimistic statements from a flack from the U.S. Cannabis Council lobbying group, didn’t even mention legislation except in quoting Trump pledging to “work with Congress” on the issue. Congress of course would have to pass a measure for Trump to sign it. Or at least that’s how it worked in pre-2025 America.

In the meantime, the DEA’s re-scheduling that we all expected to happen (making pot a Schedule 3 drug rather than keeping it in Schedule 1 along with heroin: i.e., illegal in all situations) won’t come, if it does, until next year because the hearings were delayed until at least January or February. It seems like it might well still happen, but we can’t even bank on that anymore. We can’t really bank on anything.

Nobody should be a one-issue voter in 2024 unless that one issue is preserving democracy and the rule of law (or, perhaps, destroying those things if that’s your bag). But even if you insist on voting solely on cannabis reform, you have to vote for Kamala Harris.

Last week, Harris included legalizing adult-use (she used the word “recreational”) weed in a statement right alongside her other top priorities, reiterating what she has said in recent interviews and signaling that she sees legalization as being right up there with clean-energy initiatives, expanding Medicare and protecting reproductive rights.

The list contains 14 items in all. In presenting it on social media, Harris said, “Trump has an enemies list. I have a to-do list.”

Advocates of cannabis reform had previously been nervous about Harris, perhaps understandably given that, as San Francisco district attorney and later as attorney general, she prosecuted people for cannabis, sometimes zealously. On the other hand, most of those people had committed other crimes or had long rap sheets that included violence. And after all, weed was illegal, and her job was law enforcement.

She came out in favor of federal legalization when she became a U.S. senator, and that’s been her position ever since. But advocates’ nervousness returned when she became vice president, and basically clammed up about the issue, no doubt mainly because her boss, President Joe Biden, was ill-disposed to the idea. But as he has on several issues, Biden finally came around to favoring at least decriminalization, and indicating his openness to legalization.

Once she hit the campaign trail in July, she put pot reform back squarely on her agenda, and has brought it up a bunch of times. About 70 percent of Americans now support full, nationwide legalization, and Harris knows that for a not-tiny number of them, it’s a very important issue.

That’s particularly true of younger voters, who might look askance at Harris’s positions on issues like Israel’s war on Gaza or her conservative-leaning border policies. Championing pot reform is kind of a no-brainer, and Harris is the candidate in this race with a fully functioning brain.

But what does this mean for the chances of actual reform? That depends on the congressional races. If Democrats take both houses of Congress, it seems likely that weed will be legalized within a matter of months. But at the moment, that seems unlikely (though perhaps less so than many seem to think, now that “the Republican Party is fascist” has in recent weeks become something like conventional wisdom).

The consensus among election forecasters, many of whom like it when there’s a tight race (and some of whom are just downright goofy), say the Democrats’ chances of taking over the Senate are pretty low. And even if they win the Senate back, they almost certainly won’t have a filibuster-proof majority, which means the Republicans will get to put the kibosh on any legalization bill that comes before them, just as they’ve been doing throughout the Biden administration. Harris has talked about filibuster reform, but at this point, there’s nothing for anyone to hang their hopes on.

In the meantime, states across the land are continuing to legalize. If voters approve any of the legalization initiatives in North Dakota, South Dakota or Florida, at least half the states will have legal, adult-use weed next year (the count is currently 24), while 38 states (and possibly Nebraska, which has medical-pot measures on its ballot this year) will have legal medical marijuana. Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania state legislature is weighing a bill to legalize by statute.

The Florida measure is interesting for a couple of reasons. Foremost, it requires a
“yes” vote of at least 60%. Recent polls indicate that the measure is likely to pass (one has 66% of respondents favoring it). Also, the measure, Amendment 13, is notable for inspiring Florida man Donald Trump to weigh in on cannabis policy. He says he’ll vote yes. Which, good, but Trump tends to capitulate to Republicans, so his vote will mean nothing if he wins the presidency and legalization lands on his desk (and of course, we’ll have all kinds of other problems to deal with if he wins).

We know for a fact, however, that President Harris would sign such a bill.

One of the weirdest outcomes of cannabis legalization is that the cops, who for decades were intent on busting people for weed on behalf of the state and its laws, now bust people largely on behalf of the legal pot industry.

This isn’t wrong, necessarily. It’s just weird. Often, after a raid on an illicit grow operation or an unlicensed dispensary, spokespeople for the P.D. or prosecutor’s office emphasize the impact that illicit weed has on legitimate pot businesses. But otherwise, the busts seem much the same as they did before legalization, with “dope on the table” and all the rest of it. The same phenomenon plays out in legal states across the country.

Of course, before legalization, such busts had little impact on either the supply of or demand for weed. The same is true now of illicit weed. The so-called “black market” continues apace, especially in California, fueled by bad state and local policies and high taxes that send people into the arms of their local pot dealer.

That doesn’t mean that cops shouldn’t enforce the laws, of course. If they didn’t, the situation might be even worse (though precisely how much worse is hard to know).

In many cases, police seem as zealous as they ever did, and some of the busts they pull off, or attempt to pull off, are outright amusing.

Last week we learned that, nearly a year ago, the Los Angeles Police Department raided what it thought was an illegal cannabis operation. It turned out to be a medical imaging center. The owners of NoHo Diagnostic Center have filed a lawsuit against the department, claiming that their civil rights were violated. The lawsuit, first reported by Law 360, did not specify damages.

Somehow, the cops got the idea that the MRI center, in the Van Nuys neighborhood, was an illegal grow operation, and that the MRI business was just a front. Part of what led them to believe this was that the site’s electricity use was found to be higher than average, which should give pause to any business or private citizen that uses a lot of electricity. (One wonders: will they ever raid a crypto data center?) The cops also claimed they smelled weed.

The raid occurred on Oct. 18 of last year. One employee was on the site at the time, and was detained while the cops walked around wondering why it looked like a medical-imaging center and not like a pot farm. According to the lawsuit, the raid was “nothing short of a disorganized circus, with no apparent rules, procedures, or even a hint of coordination.” The cops found no weed on the site.

This is all really funny stuff (though not for the victims, of course) but the hilarity doesn’t end there. According to the lawsuit, one of the cops walked past a sign outside an MRI room warning that metal was prohibited in the room. He was carrying a rifle that, the lawsuit alleges, was sucked out of his hand and was attached to the magnetized machine. Yeah, bitch! Magnets!

This particular cop hit the machine’s emergency “off” switch, which the lawsuit alleges damaged the machine. He also allegedly left a magazine of ammunition behind in the room. The LAPD hasn’t commented on any of this.

While much of the enforcement of current pot laws might be silly, unjust or dangerous, much of it is not. Last month, state authorities raided a bunch of storefronts in Los Angeles where the operators were selling cannabis products clearly meant to appeal to children (or people with the minds of children) with packages depicting cartoon characters or designed to look like candy. The labels also fraudulently bore the symbol required on cannabis products to show that they are legal. The Unified Cannabis Enforcement Taskforce hit 11 storefronts and seized $2.2 million of products.

While enforcement of laws is necessary (else why have those laws on the books?) a better approach for the state and cities might be to lower pot taxes and implement other reforms that would provide incentives for consumers to get their cannabis from professionally run, licensed pot dispensaries. It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen any time soon.

In 2018, a loophole in federal law created a market for potentially problematic or even dangerous hemp products that can get you high. Kids can easily buy them, and often do. The market exists in a netherworld governed neither by laws prohibiting pot nor by laws governing how legal weed can be bought and sold.

Six years later, it looks like lawmakers at the state level, including in California, are finally getting around to addressing this problem.

When Republican Senate Majority Leader and staunch pot prohibitionist Mitch McConnell was promoting the ultimately successful measure to legalize hemp in 2018, it might not have occurred to him that, soon, teenagers (and adults) across the land would be ordering cannabis products online, made from hemp, that could get them high, and that this would be widely interpreted as perfectly legal. More likely, he was thinking almost entirely about the support and largesse of the sizable hemp industry in his home state of Kentucky.

But it was known well before the passage of the 2018 Farm Bill to which the hemp measure was attached that THC could be extracted from hemp to produce intoxicating products, so maybe McConnell did know, and just didn’t care, which would be less than surprising.

To be fair, though, most people’s knowledge of hemp didn’t extend much beyond the fact that hemp is related to the marijuana plant (both are cannabis) and the fact that it has a bunch of practical and industrial uses. Some people knew it contained a bit of THC, the main psychoactive component of the pot plant, but that in its natural state, hemp could not get a person high. Almost nobody outside the nerdy confines of pot research knew that delta-8 THC and other psychoactive elements found in all cannabis plants could be extracted from hemp and concentrated in products that have effects similar to those of what we usually think of as pot.

The ignorance of these facts on the part of regulators and lawmakers led to the gaping legal loophole that allowed the market for intoxicating hemp to flourish. The Farm Bill specified a maximum THC level of the delta-9 type allowed in hemp, but no other THC type (like delta-8) is even mentioned in the law. So technically, any hemp-derived product with enough psychoactive ingredients to get you high was widely considered legal unless it contained enough delta-9 to put it over the Farm Bill’s limit.

Tons of peddlers emerged, many of them downright skeevy. The intoxicating hemp products are now available online to anyone, even in states where weed is still illegal. Some of those products are potentially harmful (especially vapes) and are produced without any oversight or inspection at all. This sub-industry continued to grow even as lawmakers and others were making noises about banning the products.

Those noises are now turning into action. Gov. Gavin Newsom recently proposed a set of “emergency regulations” that some observers say would be among the strictest in the country. The proposal would require that hemp products contain no amount of detectable THC. Oddly, given that provision, the regulation would require that sales of all hemp products be limited to people 21 and over.

Noting that the hemp industry has fought hard against restrictions, Newsom said at a press conference this month that “in the industry, there’s full responsibility for not policing itself for the proliferation of these intoxicating products that are hurting our children.” He noted that some grocery stores and other shops carry them, and often will sell them to kids. His proposal comes after the Legislature failed to pass a proposed bill this summer. He called it an “interim” solution to give time to lawmakers at the state and federal levels to finally take action.

The problem won’t be totally solved, though, until the Farm Bill loophole is closed. Unfortunately, as is common in recent years, the new Farm Bill keeps getting delayed while various special interests wrangle for goodies. Meanwhile, the Senate under Mitch McConnell is still refusing to take up a measure that would help some: legalizing (and thus regulating) pot.