December 6, 2012 is a day Seattle will always remember. On that day, the streets of Capitol Hill were awash with revelry as Washington officially deemed pot socially acceptable. Or did it? The social approval of using Tetrahydrocannabinol containing plants in their various states and forms has long been around. As any piece of visual media does, Reefer Madness (1936) spoke to a certain public concern; one generative of paranoid anxieties and yet one worthy of dramatic consideration. Legislation has finally caught up with culture. Or has it? Spirits are good and smoke hangs high but this new era in Washington (and Colorado) has its ambivalences. Employment discrimination is upheld (although cigarette smoking can be discriminated against as well). You cannot legal buy or sell it anywhere but you can possess it or grow it if you are a medicinal patient. And it is still being used in courts as derogatory claims. It is going to be regarded like alcohol is, which has long enjoyed a contradictory place in American lives, being legal but with any consumption putting one at risk for a number of alcohol related crimes. Weed is going to hold a similar place in Washington law and while I agree we are not yet ready for a full scale decriminalization, it is putting us in a tricky situation until retail markets open up. Forward moving, I think it is going to be a process for using to become fully legal in a social way. It is still a highly stigmatized drug although the negative connotations applied are less injurious than other drugs. It is, some would say, the everyman's drug. A comic drug; one that brings like minds together and disparate minds closer. It is a also poised at the interested intersection of medicine and recreation. As a healing compound, it is controlled and access points are well, not all access. As a recreational substance, however, it will eventually become easier to come by than the medicine and this delegitimizes its use for medicinal purposes. As it is, no planned changes to the medical marijuana law are up on the table. This undermining of its medicinal properties is not entirely without merit. The medical marijuana clinic system in Washington is known, by the public and medical practitioners alike, as a joke. One can walk in to a clinic and get an authorization with no medical records that prove any of the 'qualifying conditions' and no referral. They can then walk right in to a dispensary, within the same hour, and purchase 'medicine'. With this 'medicine' now being set to reach the open market, I wonder about the dynamic now between the recreational user and the medicinal user. Some would say quality may be different (better?) at the clinics but the horticultural standards are essentially nonexistent and this market, as it stands, is highly unregulated. Sold to an open public, however, there will definitely be standards in place. In fact, Washington's notoriously stringent Liquor Control Board will take over its regulation. Could medicinal users be at a disadvantage here? Could their safety be overlooked while recreational users, in the year or so it will take to open up the market, are met with product that is more regulated? Does this seem like a logical organization? What still needs to be hashed out to mediate the Federal rulings and the State's law? There is a rupture here, between a human's right of access to healing medicines and the 'access stigma' the state still fosters. This stigma makes how you procure your medicine flexible in its morality and legality. Many questions will need to be answered over the next year or so in Washington and Colorado as the public market is established and the culture becomes more acquainted with the idea of decriminalization. For now, a social arbitration exists during every purchase, sale, growth or use of marijuana in all its forms and states. Judgment is withheld, or so the law suggests, at the state level but not Federally. This is a major source of contention among users and though this has always plagued medicinal users since 1998, I can foresee major disconnects between all users and all institutions.
My hopes for this process are better and more consistent access for medicinal patients and lessened stigma against this set of users. I want to address this and bring this to conversation in a way respectful of medicinal users. It is crucial to our continued understanding of this patient group that we keep this discussion on the table despite the new laws that have passed in Washington and Colorado. As it stands, Seattle maintains several medicinal marijuana access points but many (so many) are positioned near areas of notorious criminal activity or inconveniently away from major transportation routes. I have honestly been disappointed at how Washington has handled their medicinal marijuana system and hold legitimate concern for the new open market we are about to come upon.
Reefer Madness: Tell Your Children
1938 Louis J. Gasnier, dir. 66 min.
George A. Hirliman Productions. Hollywood.
