Feeling mellow, man: When you're high, nothing matters
What happens when the doors of perception open not to enlightenment but to repression
The subject of the day is marijuana, so let’s indulge in a little nostalgia. Do you remember the first time you smoked a joint?
I do, and that is part of the problem with pot. The act of smoking pot back in the day, when it was illegal, was such a special event that you can remember who you did it with and what the whole “getting high” thing felt like. If you’re my age, you can probably even remember the hopes and dreams for pot – with rock and roll music and something called “free love,” which was neither free nor love, would somehow combine to change the world.
Well, I haven’t smoked marijuana for fifty years. I’ve seen the world change, but not in the way that my 20- self expected. The results of the vote on November 5 should be enough to confirm that. You’ve read all the analysis about why people voted for Donald Trump – they felt forgotten, they were angry, they wanted to get back at the libs…on and on the reasons go, and we know to whom those reasons apply.
But what about the perplexing strength of the vote Trump received in urban America and among young people and those with college educations, especially among white voters? His numbers went up in that cohort of our fellow citizens and in those unlikely areas. What accounts for that part of Trump’s vote in 2024?
Post-election poll results have shown what can only be described as jaw-dropping cognitive dissonance in the voting public. In sector after sector, from women to young people to Black people to Hispanics, voters were seen to have voted against their own interests by marking their ballots for Trump. Some analysts have said those voters made the difference in battleground states.
Here's my question: how many of those people were pot smokers? What if part of being mellow isn’t so wonderful? What if being mellow has the side effect of just not caring very much about who’s running things in far away Washington D.C.?
I looked up the battleground states Kamala Harris lost. In every battleground state – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – marijuana is either completely legal or decriminalized to one degree or another. In North Carolina, up to 1.5 ounces is decriminalized. In Pennsylvania, it’s decriminalized by jurisdiction. Every jurisdiction where the Democratic vote went down from Biden’s totals in 2020 had decriminalized marijuana. The same in Georgia – marijuana is decriminalized in Atlanta, Fulton County, Savannah, Macon, all places where the Democratic vote was down from 2020 totals. In Wisconsin, it’s decriminalized in the Democratic strongholds of Milwaukee and Madison. In Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan, possession for recreational use is completely legal.
This is an excerpt from my weekly Salon column. To read the rest of the column, go here:
Reefer madness! Pot is legal on the west coast and we voted blue. I smoke high-quality Oregon pot daily and you best believe I take care of business. Correlating marijuana use with losing an election is beneath your usual powers of analysis. Your view of pot smoking is outdated.
I don’t know if I agree with you Lucian, the pot we smoked in our youth was nothing like what is in the market today. I have been a non-smoker for 40 years so taking a draw on even a vape pen induces very painful coughing. The last time I took a couple hits of some buds at a party maybe 10 years ago, I became comatose, sure the music sounded great but I could barely function, it wasn’t any fun at all, I needed to be driven home in my car by a buddy. It was almost like an acid trip where you needed to block out the better part of a day for the experience, who has time for that while in random company. I have no problem with psychedelics, I think they are sacraments, Huxley wrote about Mescaline in “The Doors to Perception”, and he was spot on. Kamala lost by 1.5 million votes over all and by way less than that in the electoral college. Alex Wagner did several pieces that aired last Friday evening, she interviewed union workers at a union hall and Hispanic men. Out of the maybe 80 union workers who were predominantly young, only 1 knew what the word Dobbs meant, that was not a typo, only 1. The oldest among them believed the democrats had their back, the rest by far the majority, while fully employed on infrastructure projects that will keep them working for the next 10 years, were worried that illegal migrants were taking all of our jobs and were going to vote for the clown. In her interviews with Hispanic men, none of them would even consider voting for Kamala, no matter how much she would help their community, because she was a woman and a woman of color, she needed to be in the kitchen cooking and making babies. Those interviews happened in September while the election was in full swing. Both of those groups would have benefited greatly by electing Kamala, both chose not to. In that union hall only 1 hand went up when asked if they knew what Dobbs meant, we are fucked, and it’s not because we are all stoned, it’s because we are no longer smart enough to see the trees in the forest. If pot played any part it was minor compared to ignorance in the electorate. 🤷♂️