We Were Wrong About Pot

We may be wrong again.

If you’d like to look at a pretty picture of a poppy from my garden and then stop reading, that’s fine with me. This will not be an easy essay.

1.

I’m trying to understand drugs. Street drugs. I suspect that someone I know is using, as we call it, and I’m trying to figure out how to interact with them. Do I let this person come help me in the garden? If so, do I lock the doors to the house?

When I say using, I don’t mean pot. I mean other drugs I don’t understand.

Not that I understand pot. But I do understand that it’s not the devil’s snot, like I was taught.

2.

When I grew up everybody believed the going narratives. Without question. The FBI and the 6 o’clock news and the church promulgated these narratives. So did the terrifying drug-sniffing dogs that combed our classrooms at the high school.

Most of the narratives weren’t even true.

In the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, when somebody was arrested for pot they went to prison. Federal prison. In some places they still do. Getting caught with marijuana meant your name and photo on the front page of the newspaper. Big blocky letters.

Our sheriff—J.B. “Red” Carter—an intensely likable man who fought at the Battle of the Bulge and was a good friend of my dad—was caught flying enormous amounts of marijuana into South Georgia. About a dozen people, some of them women, were involved in the operation, and most went to prison. Sheriff Carter spent the last two decades of his life behind bars.

Now marijuana is plant medicine. It helps kids with seizures. It helps cancer patients. It actually doesn’t rot your brain. It’s legal in 38 of 50 states for medical use and in 24 states for recreational use. People go to Colorado for pot vacations and never leave the pot hotel. Folks in Alaska can grow five plants a year for their own use. You can go to Northampton, Massachusetts to any number of dispensaries and get any kind of pot you want, easy as buying an ice-cream and just as many flavors.

I think about the people who pioneered this sea change. Some of them paid big fines. Spent years locked up. Still locked up. On probation. A lot of black men got locked up and still aren’t out.

3.

This is where I get very angry—almost enraged—at myself. As a child I heard very opinionated narratives, so of course I too thought smoking pot was like stealing your mama’s wedding ring. I never tried it myself. I was told that if I even tried pot, I’d become something called a junkie, and the next stop was a roadside ditch.

Why why why didn’t I think for myself?

4.

A strange aside—tons of pot were pouring into southern Georgia in the 70s and 80s. We were rural. An airstrip could be hidden. We are close to South American producers.

Now?

There’s a state-licensed, 100K-square-foot grow facility for medical marijuana 15 miles from my home.

5.

I was wrong about pot. I was told wrong. So I’m trying to think differently, have a more open, inquiring mind about street drugs. I hear the narratives—the rotted teeth, the tweaking, the desperation, the sex-selling, the documentaries of the tranq-laden streets of LA and Philadelphia.

6.

I have a friend who whipped a decade-long addiction to heroin. It was a miracle. I ask him questions. Why did you do drugs? What’s it like? What do you mean it feels ecstatic? How exactly? Where in your body? How does a person know where to get something like meth? Could you get me some right now? How much?

7.

Most street drugs are cheap. Really cheap.

Except there’s fentanyl to worry about. My friend said he’d be dead now if fentanyl had been a thing when he was using.

I’m glad he’s not dead.

8.

A couple weeks ago Raven scheduled an endoscopy to find out why his stomach was hurting. He had to be sedated, so he needed me to drive him home. Raven is a Vietnam-era vet, and he uses the VA in Dublin, Georgia, so I found myself early one morning in the VA waiting room with one other person, a nattily dressed man wearing a maroon leisure suit and polished loafers.

I was editing the new book on writing, and I had an Advanced Reading Copy, so my name was on the cover. When the gentleman asked me what I was doing I told him, and he looked me up on Facebook and sent me a friend request right there.

We started to chat and I put the book down. He had brought his uncle to the VA.

“That was your uncle?”

“Yeah, I look older than he does.”

“How old are you?”

“45.”

“You do look older than 45,” I said. I spoke candidly, not meanly.

“I’ve had some rough times,” he said.

Sometimes I let my intuition run wild. “Drugs?”

He said yes, and I kept asking him questions, and he answered every one, and I believe that he answered them honestly. His drug of choice was crack. He wanted to be done with it, but he fell off the wagon now and then. His daughter wouldn’t speak to him. (He showed me her photo—movie-star gorgeous.) His two sons would hang out, though. (He showed me their photos, also gorgeous.) They didn’t do drugs.

Pretty soon Raven came out groggy and hungry, and I bade the man in the maroon suit goodbye. At home I accepted his friend request.

All that would have faded into the past except that two mornings later I received a message from the man.

3 a.m.

Miss Ray…I have a question…could you please cash me a few dollars…I need it…anything would help…thanks

9.

I didn’t send him money.

I worry that hiring the person to help me in the garden is the wrong thing to do. What if they overdose on fentanyl from money they earn from me?

10.

Meanwhile, some things get stolen. Nothing big, a change purse from my car. I should have locked it.

11.

A beanpole of a young man got pulled over by the police in front of our county courthouse. I was watching from the Archives. The man was tweaking—badly. He was jerking and spinning, lunging and leaping. I was pretty sure the officers were going to shoot him. The Tattnall County Sheriff’s Department deserves an award. They got the man arrested and off to jail, nobody got hurt.

12.

During the pandemic my cousin Maggie died of an overdose. She was 23. Here’s her obituary if you want to see it. I would rather you not mention this in the comments.

A lot of people in my family have addiction issues. It runs with mental health issues. Some of them have died. I’d truly rather not talk about it.

We all know someone. We probably know multiple someones. The traumatic stress runs wide and deep.

I’m definitely not going to read Barbara Kingsolver’s book. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

13.

My friend who was addicted to heroin and got free talked to me about all the overdoses that happened during the pandemic. NPR said the overdoses were happening because we were isolated, because the support nets for folks struggling with addiction had broken. NA and AA groups weren’t able to meet.

Naw, my friend said. None of that. It’s the payouts. The CARES Act. If a person gets $1200 handed to them, they’re going to use $1200.

14.

A friend has a friend who continues to use street drugs despite the fentanyl threat. This person drug-tests everything before they use it.

“Where do you get the test kits?”

“Believe it or not, you can order them from Amazon.”

15.

My farrier confides to me that he was addicted to crack for 9 years. He’s a great farrier, very good with the horses, and I like him a lot. He’s not using now, and he has a beautiful set of natural teeth.

If he could spend 9 years with a crack addiction and be fine, maybe the narrative is wrong.

16.

And I want to figure out the narrative for myself. Not by trying street drugs. I have too addictive a personality and too frail a genetics to risk that. But surely I can be open-minded and really listen. Surely I can ask the right questions to know why this is happening. At my front door.

17.

That’s where I was standing when my neighbor told me that he was on crack for some years. “You can’t get rid of an addiction,” he told me. “You have to find another addiction to replace the destructive one.”

18.

My son Silas is 35 and graduated from Brattleboro Union High School in Vermont. He has lost a lot of high-school buddies to drugs. Another died this week, a young woman, 32 years old.

The obituary doesn’t say accidental overdose.

Why not? Why aren’t we making the loss absolutely clear?

19.

What I’m trying to say is that we were wrong about pot. We put on our big cowboy hats and we lied, lied, lied. Our national bullheadedness ruined a lot of lives.

Pot is not meth or crank or tranq or whatever. Those ruin lives too. Adult lives, kid lives, grandparent lives, unborn lives. Sometimes they leave no life at all. My mom listens to the police scanner and there’s at least one overdose a week.

But. We may be wrong about the way we’re dealing with street drugs.

I don’t have any answers. I’m just saying we may be wrong.

I’m also saying that I think a lot of people among us are using. I’m saying that it’s hard to tell.

I’m saying that prison sentences obviously aren’t working. Fixing this is going to take something else. Those folks sitting in prison for drugs—that’s not working either. The ones currently incarcerated for marijuana—not working. The U.S. is ridiculous to stay in this limbo-state, half-legalized and admitting we were wrong and half-illegalized, still arresting. The War on Drugs still rages but only in places.

I’m not going to war against drugs.

20.

I’m going to war against addictive narratives that destroy lives. Against not listening. Against not really caring. Against heartlessness. Against racism. Against poverty. Against the big issues that brought us all this.

21.

If you or someone you love is dealing with addiction, peace be with you. Because I don’t know how to help you, since I don’t even know how to help the people in my own life. I’m trying to figure it out.

Peace, peace, peace, peace, peace.

Postscript

Since this piece went out, many people have been writing me with thoughts, their own challenges either personally or in family with street drugs, marijuana, and addictions. Some have sent resources, and I will list them here.

Bivins, Matt. “A Deep Dive Into the Opioid Crisis.”

Hollandsworth, Skip. The “Longhorn Football Mom” Who Made the Lege Pay Attention.

Joy, David. Where All Light Tends To Go.

Kingsolver, Barbara. Demon Copperhead.

Macy, Beth. Dopesick.

Macy, Beth. Raising Lazarus.

Mate, Gabor. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction.

Pollan, Michael. How to Change Your Mind.

Pollan, Michael. This is Your Mind on Plants.