Mellow, man: Nothing matters when it comes to marijuana

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-something self expected. The results of the vote on Nov. 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? 

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.

I may as well come out right here and say what I’m getting at: pot makes you mellow, man. That has been one of its main “positive” effects for as long as people have smoked it. The people behind the legalization of pot going back to the hippie era, the NORML movement crowd, and eventually even those who might be described as more serious who argued for the legalization of marijuana — everyone pointed to its beneficial side effect of making people more peaceful, less likely to get into fights, more accepting of others…mellow, man.

But 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.? 

All those problems in this country — income inequality, lack of health insurance, diminished or completely lacking health care itself, the disappearance of manufacturing jobs, even abortion bans and stuff like homelessness — who can keep up with it all? They’re all problems that can’t be solved.

But if a problem is insoluble, it’s not a problem anymore; it’s just the way things are. I will concede that you don’t have to be high on pot to have a kind of throw your hands up and say forget about it attitude. 

There is no evidence to prove that pot smoking may have cost Kamala Harris the election. I doubt there is polling that is specific enough to show what we might call the marijuana vote going toward Trump or away from Harris or even just not showing up to vote. But you can see where I’m going with this. Anything that makes you not care about what happens is dangerous when it comes to democracy.

So, I’ll just throw in an anecdote. I had a friend in Sag Harbor who had a PhD in economics and spent his life as an official in the United Auto Workers, first as an organizer, later as a negotiator with automakers for big union contracts.  He was as militant a union man as I ever met, and I have met a few in my day, and moreover, he was drop-dead brilliant. He could pick apart an argument you made with one or two incisive slashes of history, facts, humor or logic, mostly all four put together in ways you’d never heard before. Talking with him at a morning coffee gathering of like-minded souls was downright thrilling.

Unless he came to coffee stoned, then he just sat there and grinned and nodded, occasionally throwing in a non sequitur that made no sense at all and suffered additionally from not being at all witty or funny, which he always was when he wasn’t stoned. Marijuana had the effect of temporarily disabling him, I guess you could say. Being mellow while stoned isn’t just a side effect of the drug.  It can be the effect, and alter your life in ways you wouldn’t ordinarily expect.

I don’t intend this column to be either a jeremiad or a lambasting of marijuana. Here’s another anecdote that presents at least a little hope about pot smoking, if not an actual endorsement. A friend who lived in San Diego, California, has friends in the SDPD who told him that when they got a domestic call out or a noise complaint, when the front door opened, if they smelled alcohol, they would unbutton their holsters. If they smelled pot, they would relax, knowing things would be cool and there would be no violence.

It obviously can’t be proven that there has been some sort of conspiracy to legalize pot to keep the rabble happy and more or less under control. Legalization is too spotty and differentiated to make that case, even when you take into consideration that the legalization of pot for medical use in 39 states has clearly opened the door for its use recreationally, for which it is legal in 24 states.

But in the red states where pot remains illegal, the rabble doesn’t need to be controlled chemically with marijuana. Red state governments pass repressive laws accomplishing that goal very nicely, thank you very much.

It’s the blue areas of the purple states that didn’t hold up their end of the bargain for Democrats in November that worry me. Marijuana isn’t classified as a dangerous drug, but I’m afraid it can have the narcotic effect of making people care less about what is happening around them. When what is going on in this country begins to verge on authoritarianism, not caring is a danger to our democracy and to ourselves. That’s all I’m saying.