Part 1 of 3                   

By Ami Chen Mills

Dope has the dopiest advocates--not dopey in a dumb way, but dopey as in dope avatars, human incarnations of the plant itself--folks who run around wearing dreadlocks and loose-fitting purple or green hemp clothing weighted with clusters of pro-pot buttons. They smell like patchouli and dispense poorly copied fliers suggesting that marijuana, or hemp, can save the world.

One of the seminal works advocating hemp, The Emperor Wears No Clothes, can hardly inspire confidence in mainstream Americans. One look at the book conjures an image of author Jack Herer sitting on his floor in a cloud of smoke with a pile of magazines, a pair of scissors and a glue stick. It's a fine work--don't get me wrong--but a book that asks you to "use a magnifying glass" to read its fine print is asking too much from middle America.

There's nothing wrong with embodying the spirit of weed. But why do hemp activists always have to be so, well, hempish? Where are all the clean-cut, briefcase-toting dope smokers?

        Raising the Lid on Pot

Before the 1960s, marijuana use for intoxication in the U.S. was largely confined to the hep world of jazz and urban underclass neighborhoods. White men in the form of beatniks caught on and turned on in the late 1940s as part of a general effort to "get kicks" and forswear the rigidity of postwar, Atomic Era America.

But the beats were small in number and it would not be until the 1960s that the boomers, as hippies, would make the bong a permanent fixture in college dorms. Even Newt Gingrich admits to having puffed out in his university years. President Bill Clinton at least held a joint to his lips at one time, and U.S. nominees for the Supreme Court have admitted they, too, smoked dope.

         Seeking Professional Pot Smokers     

Despite the self-conscious silence, evidence indicates many middle-aged adults do continue to smoke dope. In the latest National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, 72 million people--roughly 30 percent of the U.S. population--reported having once tried marijuana. Some 18 million smoked in the last year, and 5 million were "regular" smokers, age 35 or older.

While college-age kids continue to smoke most and most often, the baby boomers have had an elephant-in-a-snake effect on marijuana-use numbers. "Every year we do the survey, we get an older population of users, as the baby boomers move through the age groups," survey director Joe Gfroerer says.

Where are these invisible dopers? I placed an ad in this paper to see if smokers might respond, guessing that no one would. The ad, seeking "professional" pot smokers for anonymous interviews, ran for four weeks, until my voice-mailbox was jammed with lengthy messages.

I got calls from people who work in law enforcement, elementary school teachers, professors, physicians, geologists, artists, dentists, publicists, systems administrators, nurses, stock-option traders, business owners, scientists, engineers and computer programmers. They claimed to know lawyers, police officers and congressional representatives who smoke. (I also got calls from people who apparently thought "professional" meant professional at pot smoking.) Annual salaries ranged from zero to well over $100,000. I received 77 calls, eight email messages, five letters and one poem.

        Something for Nothing

Ours is a society that is uncomfortable with the notion that something can be gotten for nothing--that a self-indulgent pleasure can be had without penance. According to Hoover Institution fellow McNamara--whose doctoral dissertation at Harvard traced the origins of the drug war--marijuana is viewed by much of the public as "sinful" or "evil." "It goes back to our puritanical roots in England. I have heard one promoter of the drug war--which began as a religious war--say that if you do drugs [like marijuana] you'll lose your soul," he says. Yet the same society tolerates an alcohol-consumption level nearly tenfold that of marijuana, a fact that McNamara bemoans as "sheer hypocrisy. ... Millions and millions of Americans drink alcohol, including myself, and we get high, we get, er, 'pleasant.' "

    Return to pot News              To part 2

        Ami Chen Mills

An award-winning free-lance writer, Chen Mills has published work in the San Francisco Examiner, Mojo Wire, Glamour and Inc. magazine addressing mental health and the wholistic treatment method called "health realization."