America ceded ground this week in its longest and dumbest war: the War on Drugs. The Drug Enforcement Agency will reclassify marijuana as a Schedule III drug. For decades, the feds considered weed a Schedule I drug on par with heroin and LSD. At Schedule III, pot will share space with such illustrious chemicals as steroids, testosterone, and ketamine.
The scheduling system is antiquated and silly. Valium and Xanax are both Schedule IV, meaning the DEA sees them as having a "low potential for abuse and low risk of dependence," and less potentially harmful than marijuana. No one who has witnessed a loved one go through the harrowing hell of benzodiazepine withdrawal would believe such a thing, yet it is the official stance of federal cops tasked with overseeing American drug policy.
The rescheduling is good, but I worry that the few Red states where weed remains forbidden will double down on failing policies. I worry that marijuana will become another wedge issue, like abortion, used by conservative lawmakers to play to their base and harm their public.
The widespread effect of rescheduling marijuana will not be evenly distributed. Most Blue states are already enjoying the benefits of pot decriminalization. Thirty-eight states have some form of medical marijuana policy and 24 allow you to smoke recreationally. The DEA may, on occasion, raid a dispensary to show it's still invested in fighting the Assassin of Youth, but the feds mostly leave things up to the states.
The rescheduling will, hopefully, lower the frequency of DEA raids and allow marijuana to finally stop being an all-cash business. By now, the problems of the War on Drugs broadly and the criminalization of marijuana specifically are widespread and well known. Making it legal and safe for adults to smoke weed is overwhelmingly popular with the American public and most people don't want the cops wasting time busting people for smoking.
I'm a lifelong smoker. I never got along well with alcohol and a recently acquired hiatal hernia has made drinking impossible. I don't miss drinking, but then I've always preferred to unwind with a little smoke. The vice has made me a connoisseur of both cannabis and my country's vast and varied drug policies.
Every state's a little different. It's been years since I visited Colorado, but I remember the setup being simple and effective. There's a waiting room with clerks and guards. After you've sat there for a bit, you go to a separate room and pick what you want from underneath the glass.
Maryland, just after its recent decriminalization, was a stricter and more paranoid version of this. I sat in a cramped waiting room with armed guards for 30 minutes before being called back to another room. Nothing was on display in the back and I had to make my purchase based on descriptions I read from an iPad.
In New Mexico, you can walk into a store right off the street and buy whatever you want, like it's any other business. Some stores are even licensed to deliver the goods directly to your home or hotel room.
Things are different in the South, where I live. Down here, you can't just walk into a corner store and buy yourself a joint. Down here, you still have to know a guy, call the guy, hope he answers, wait outside the guy's house until he calls you inside, pay too much for too little, and pray he doesn't want to hang out afterwards.
If you don't want to hassle with the black market, there's a wealth of awful gray-market options. Thanks to a loop-hole in a 2018 farm bill meant to allow farmers to move vast amounts of THC-free hemp, southern cities with restrictive marijuana laws are packed with small stores selling Delta-8. It's a substance that's close enough to THC to get you high and legally opaque enough to keep the cops off your back. Mostly. The provenance and quality of these goods is in question but they will, in fact, get you sky high.
In South Carolina, where I live, these stores are on every street corner. There's five within a few minutes drive of my house. Some of these products, the most palatable, come in edible gummy form. But you can buy them in vape pens, as distillates, or other various compounds. The most ridiculous is the raw "flower" Delta-8. It looks like weed and it smells kind of like weed, but it's not.
Delta-8 flower is weed with extra steps. It's a hemp plant grown with a THC count low enough to pass restrictions then sprayed with synthetic Delta-8. South Carolina law enforcement swears this stuff is illegal and it does raid stores. But when one shuts down, three more spring up in its place. And that's what we have in the South instead of a regulated and taxed drug market for weed.
The last time I visited New York City the stores there had just begun to sell pot over the counter. I bought a little and stood outside my hotel at the end of a long work day. I hesitated and got The Fear, that feeling long-time illicit drug users know. "What if the cops see me?" I said to myself, unable to internalize that this part of America was very different from the one I lived in.
I heard coughing down the street and saw a middle-aged man in business casual dress smoking down a joint the size of an ogre's finger. He was totally unafraid to smoke on the streets of New York. I relaxed a bit, but a thought lingered: I would have to go home eventually. Home to a place where I couldn't sit on the porch of my own home and smoke with the easy confidence of this guy toking up on an anonymous New York City street.
Matthew Gault is a writer living South Carolina covering war and nuclear weapons. He's a former staff writer at Vice who has worked with Reuters, TIME, and The New York Times.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
