I used to be so alone, just me, my bong, a dog, and the sound of the rustling leaves out the window in the quiet Idaho night. Or, wait, was that a rustle? It kind of sounded more like an intruder? Carrying a shotgun? But the dog didn’t seem to notice. So I’m sure it was nothing. Wait. That snap! That was not the river breaking over stone where it always curved! That was definitely a boot crunching sticks, getting sucked into the mud right below my room. There was literally someone coming to kill me. Why was my guard dog asleep?
Weed made me paranoid. But only when I smoked it alone, contemplating the general existential horror of life for a then 16-year-old girl. When I was with my people, my fellow potheads (as we called ourselves), it was bliss. With our squad assembled, to put it in modern parlance, we could do anything. Hot-box the car on the way to school! Sit in the sunshine and feel alive! Roll a joint in the shape of T for some reason!
There were not many of us. We were other, both in school and in society at large. Smoking pot in the '90s, like in most of the decades after the '60s when the hippies made weed-smoking a veritable subculture, was a divisive act. It divided us from the "normals" and bound us together. We had our rituals. We had a single expensive bong that we shared, hiding it in different car trunks or backpacks depending on whose week it was. We worked together, as a team, to procure fresh buds (an incredibly hard task in a tiny town with literally one road and only one drug dealer that we teenagers were aware of).
And we had 420. Why was pot celebrated on Hitler's birthday? No one knew. No one cared. All that mattered was that for that one special day our people stood up and said, "Yep, I smoke pot. In fact, I love it. And so do all these people wearing strangely large pants and hideous multi-colored hats." That one stupid holiday made us feel like we weren’t so alone after all. There were people just like us---in their basements, hot-boxing their cars down different canyon roads, putting in eyedrops before going into different English classes (I’m sorry, again, Mr. [REDACTED]), writing other bad poems in notebooks---all over this fair land.
April 20 was our one singular day to be proud. It was the day to say, in a slow-but-unified voice, "This is who we are, and we don’t care that you think we're lazy and dumb and we smell bad. We've also got things going on." Sure, cannabis frequently obstructed our ability to follow a simple Law & Order plot, but we also had important insights into the Frosted Flakes logo (future brand marketing genius), how memories from childhood are more vivid than recent ones (future neuroscientist), and how the word "worry" is weird because it used to literally mean "to chew" and now it’s kind of like your mind is chewing on your problems when you worry (future linguist). Weed helped us see things differently from other people, and we needed 420 to feel, for one day, like we belonged.
We don’t need it anymore.
Medical marijuana is now legal in 24 states, plus Washington D.C. Recreational marijuana is now legal in four states. Marijuana is an enormous, legal, and profitable industry. College kids can literally get a card to buy it from a store like they're living in goddamned Amsterdam or some shit. No more forking over cash for what turns out to be oregano. No more clandestine meetings in the park. Smoking—or vaping, or whatever the kids are doing these days—has been de-stigmatized.
We can thank the baby boomers for that. Many millennials and Gen Xers grew up with parents who’d smoked pot in the '60s and just didn’t think it was that big a deal. That leniency mixed with the realization that there’s a lot of money to be made in weed has changed the way the culture sees marijuana and the people who love it.
So sure, tweet "#420" today. Smoke a blunt or whatever (but not a spliff, because tobacco is still really bad, guys). But the truth is, every day is 420 now. You can put your flag down. We won. We’re not a subculture anymore. We’re part of the mainstream. And though I don’t actually smoke pot now because of that old paranoia thing, I do feel a little less alone.
