I was in advanced composition my junior year of high school (a fancy name for AP English), the same year my parents put me on drug tests. Knowing that cannabis had never killed anyone or caused nearly as much damage to society as the war on drugs or legal pharmaceuticals, I wrote a paper on the prohibition of cannabis and its history as medicine.
My professor (who will remain nameless) read my paper and quickly rejected it. She told me, �Unless you have a PhD in botany, you didn�t write this.� First of all, I think only one paragraph even touched on botany; the rest was largely about the war on drugs and politics. I honestly wonder if she even read it. I asked her, “why have an advanced composition class at all if the moment you see an advanced paper, you reject it?”
Indiana in the 1990’s
It�s bad enough to discourage students from swinging for the fences, but I think what really killed my paper was the subject matter. This was Indiana in the 1990s�a place where cannabis prohibition was still alive and well�taught by professors in their 50s and 60s who had probably voted for Nixon and Reagan.
Where we are now
Fast forward to 2025, and legal cannabis is now either recreationally or medically accessible to about 90% of the country. At most, you might have to drive two hours to reach recreational cannabis. That�s only if you live in backward-ass places like Idaho or Indiana, the last two holdouts for any real medical legislation and certainly no recreational access.
I�d love to say I�m happy with the progress we�ve made. But honestly, I�m sickened by what we�ve turned the cannabis industry into in this country: essentially a fast-food version of the plant. From hemp-derived THC beverages sold at gas stations to the �Walmart weed� rolled out by the price-fixing oligopoly of multi-state operators like The Green Solution or Cresco Labs, it�s a mess.
Cannabis was once sold in pharmacies as medicine, and that�s where we need to get back to. Many leading voices in the space believe we�re in the Anheuser-Busch/Budweiser phase, and that eventually we�ll reach a renaissance-style craft beer consumer market. I�m not waiting around for that. And don�t get me wrong�there are some great craft cultivators out there, like L�Eagle and Verde Natural (both in Denver)�but they�re the exception. Ninety-five percent of what I see in stores and on the street (diversion, anyone?) comes from mass-produced, commodity-driven manufacturers. As far as I�m concerned, this stuff isn�t even weed. Between PGRs, pesticides, and everything else, you may as well be smoking Spice.
Conclusion
But I digress. The only thing I specifically remember about that high school paper was the last sentence: �This country needs to start solving the problems we are facing as opposed to perpetuating them.� Sadly, it seems we�re just creating a whole new set of problems.
