She was baby sitting one night for the little niña of the Hispanic family she was living with when the older siblings came home with some marijuana and asked her if she wanted to try it. She was horrified! She lectured them and admonished them and told them to get that stuff out of the house right now or else she would tell the parentes!
She was very indignant and actually afraid that the cops would somehow bust right in at that moment and take us all to jail. They went into the far back yard to smoke it and when they came back in smelling of it and loaded, she was disgusted.
About three years later at her 21st birthday while sitting in a circle in the living room of her apartment listening to Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, and Credence Clearwater, she took her first hit of a joint.
She was a slow starter she guessed, but from that moment on she took an avid interest in sorting out the seeds, crumbling the leaf from the stems, perfecting her rolling technique so that everyone just handed the can to her when it came time to smoke. She learned to roll perfect joints.
- Not the pin rolls that you can’t even draw a breath through.
- Not camel backs with the hump in the middle and two very thin ends that are impossible to light and fall apart half way through.
- Not the fatties that crumble or break or cast off falling clumps of burning leaves that almost set your shirt on fire.
- Not the seed popping joints that almost put out your eye or leave telltale little holes burned into your polyester.
- Not the kind that punch through the delicate paper because someone hasn’t taken out all the stems.
She rolled perfect joints that looked like thinner, shorter commercial cigarettes…by hand, she might add….not made with those cumbersome handheld rolling machines that never seemed to work right anyway.
She learned the types of marijuana and all the vocabulary too:
- home grown
- Maui Wowie
- Thai stick
- Mexican
- ganja
- Columbian
- hydroponic
- weed
- reefer
- smoke
- sinsemilla
- shake
- bud
- leaf
- kif
- hash
That was then. Eventually the rigors of child rearing and the ethics of her job required her to get it right. She gave up all the partying. Got straight. But she never judged anyone about their drug or alcohol use. She had seen plenty of people able to function under the influence. She understood the allure of changing things up, of getting even in a complicated world. She choose to be straight.
But she has a lot of friends who smoke marijuana recreationally. They hold down good jobs, are good parents, and good citizens of the world. They should be able to get it legally. It should be regulated similarly to alcohol and tobacco and it should be taxed for the government’s benefit. Young people under the age of eighteen should not be able to buy it or use it.
(First published 9/7/11)
Read Mary Jane for Lulu’s current view on marijuana.
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