I was just going to post something similar (also a Colorado resident).
It is amazing how normal the whole thing has become here. A lot of coworkers very openly talk about it. It is advertised openly and the retail spots are very respectable. A lot of the stereotypes of stoners are melting away.
It is always a shock to my system when I go to a state where it isn’t legal and I’m always taken aback that it is such a hot topic of conversation. I don’t partake but know many people who do (including my wife), but hearing people talk about having dealers, or an area being’ dry just sounds so foreign to me.
It has just been such a positive development for us here in Colorado that I can’t even comprehend why everyone hasn’t followed suit.
Yeah in San Francisco /Bay Area at least its already just “a thing”. For whetever reason I think vaping weed is much more common in public than a smoking a old school joint, but I have seen both during weekday lunch times in downtown SF.
The cops dont really seem to care, they absolutely DO care about drunk or high driving though and thats where they are rightfully putting their biggest efforts.
I have a place at the bottom of Mt. Baker in Washington. It’s a ski hill, so there is a weed shop about 5 minutes from my place, on the way up. It’s just not a thing anymore. No one cares and if you want to pick up something to smoke or eat for your day of snowboarding, enjoy!
Really, I expected long before now. I went to college at Berkeley in the early 80s, and they were passing out free joints in front of the administration building on campus. My fraternity’s adviser was a Berkeley cop who did bong hits with us in uniform. Berkeley city council had passed an ordinance that require every cop to who made a MJ arrest/ticket come before the city council and explain why he was wasting valuable resources.
I knew the People’s Republic of Berkeley was ahead of its time, but that it took 35 years surprised me.
My friends and I saw Jethro Tull at Shea Stadium in 1976. Massive crowd. Big police presence. Cops near us were taking hits from joints and pipes. We had some amazing hash. Our cop was wasted.
And pretty broadly too, giving a lot of discretion to doctors prescribing it.
This bodes well. I’ve been in discussions more and more often about legalization and have been very surprised hearing almost unanimous approval for it, right here in North Carolina. Despite that, our lawmakers keep pushing requests to relax marijuana law and expand medical use here into legislative off ramps so that they never go up for full vote.
I still feel as though the first southeastern state to legalize will have a huge head start on increased tax revenue, and I could very well see that happening if it went to a state vote somewhere around here. But for this year, there are no southeastern states holding that vote. At this rate, the entire western half of the US will be legalized before a single southern state jumps on the bandwagon.
Other states that will be voting on it this year:
Michigan
Arizona
Utah
Missouri
Nebraska
Some of those seem to be pipe dream votes, but to be fair, I thought Oklahoma was as well.
No youre not. Marijuana has been the subject of a government misinformation program. It has become severely stigmatized for the expressed purpose of keeping it illegal. Society is full of functioning alcoholics and people don’t give it a second though but use marijuana on a regular basis and you are branded a criminal or worse. I myself have medical conditions that give me chronic pain. I was living on a diet of perfectly legal opioids that were controlling the pain but slowly killing me. When marijuana was legalized in my state for medicinal use, my doctor felt I was an excellent candidate for it, as he wanted me off the opioids as much as possible. I am far better for it. I now only take the hard stuff when I have a severe flare up. I am far more functional and feel much better than when I was taking oxy daily. An herbal vaporizer is the way to go ( or medical marijuana edibles ) as smoking anything, including marijuana can be very detrimental to one’s health.
