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F<\/span>orty-five years of smoking pot. D*mn. I never imagined back then that I would find myself here. \u201cHere\u201d being a 62-year-old balding and finally short-haired-again old geezer looking back at the old days. D*mn. How time (and life) flies.<\/p>\n And great googliemooglie! All the pot I have smoked over those years. It boggles my mind. I do think that after 45 years I\u2019m finally getting the hang of it. Back then it was all about the high. Now, bless the high, but I hurt in places I didn\u2019t know I had. Cannabis is my front line treatment for aches and pains.<\/p>\n We lived through a president\u2019s assassination and a presidential candidate\u2019s assassination. We witnessed the nation\u2019s leading civil rights activist\u2019s assassination. From my house I watched Watts burn in 1965. The hippies faced rioting cops in Chicago in 1968. Women began burning bras and 18-year-olds burned draft cards.<\/p>\n But while assassinations and riots and the Vietnam War all roiled on, people were discovering grass. Yes, \u201cgrass\u201d was common terminology. And it was creeping into the American fabric. Rock and roll saw to that. Rock and rollers brought the good herb to the notice of the common citizen and the young folks took the ball and ran with it.<\/p>\n Although cannabis prohibition<\/a> began in 1937 with the Marihuana Tax Act, President Richard Nixon gave us the Drug War<\/a> back in 1971 and it has been an underhanded, dirty war that still rages today, although the end is finally in sight.c<\/p>\n The Baby Boomer generation (often fondly referred to as \u201cthe worst generation\u201d) grooved our way through the\u00a0 \u201960s and \u201970s and hid from the discos in the \u201980s, by then we had families, bought homes and started businesses. Some of us even cut our hair, but we continued to smoke our herb.<\/p>\n While we recreated with cannabis the government was building an anti-cannabis juggernaut. Cops arrested us as part of that growing Drug War behemoth. Tens of millions of us have been arrested, harassed and generally labeled as lazy couch sitting layabouts in a non-stop campaign of anti-pot propaganda. Some of us, like Peter McWilliams and others, lost their lives.<\/p>\n A certain black president and a record medal winning Olympic swimmer<\/a> have since killed the \u201camotivation syndrome\u201d voices.<\/p>\n And somehow along the way we\u2019ve not just reconciled our use in spite of the cannabis bigotry so carefully nurtured by the prohibition bureaucracy, but we have also unleashed the power of cannabis medicine on a society desperate for safe and effective pain relief.<\/p>\n No generational group better knows cannabis than the Baby Boomers. We will testify (gladly!) about the beneficence of our ancient, wonderful friend cannabis.<\/p>\n The list of prominent geezers in the cannabis movement would be quite long so I\u2019ll skip naming them. You all know who you are and so do a lot of us others. We thank you, oh great old farts!<\/p>\n We are where we are in the cannabis movement (and it is one movement however segregated we think we might be into medical, industrial and recreational cliques) because those stoned dancing (using that term loosely) hippies are now anxiously waiting for that day when the sun rises and we are no longer criminals.<\/p>\n We will no longer have to keep repeating, \u201cFree the weed!\u201d because we will have finally freed the weed. In a sense, cannabis saved us and very literally we have saved it.<\/p>\n Had we not explored the plant cannabis, utilized it in multiple ways and forms, we would not be who we are as a generation. In many ways, cannabis defines us and we it. The calm and compassion of cannabis made us the generation that learned to love nature again. We embraced racial and cultural diversity. We argued for and utilized systems like mass transit, recycling and non-polluting energy alternatives.<\/p>\n And now we stand, saying, \u201cWe\u2019ve paid our dues. We\u2019ve traveled a long road and are now grandparents. We are your elders and we say that cannabis is our medicine! We have the science. We will testify to the medical efficacy, not as \u2018anecdotal\u2019 but as citizens of a once free nation we will declare under oath that indeed, our medical use of cannabis is fact.\u201d<\/p>\n The old \u201960s and \u201970s hippies, the dreamers and yes the stoners, have put up with vilification, persecution and outright bigotry. We\u2019ve managed to bear the brunt of the largest government in the world\u2019s decades long battle against what is simply and humbly a personal choice.<\/p>\n As a nearly century long campaign of deceitful propaganda against what is truly one of earth\u2019s most bountiful and useful species of plant winds to an end and cannabigotry is replaced with cannalove, remember that cannabis is about caring and about compassion.<\/p>\n As my favorite elder statesman of cannabis, Willie Nelson<\/a>, puts it:<\/p>\n \u201cI think people need to be educated to the fact that marijuana is not a drug. Marijuana is an herb and a flower. God put it here. If he put it here and he wants it to grow, what gives the government the right to say that God is wrong?\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Originally published in Issue 11<\/a> of Cannabis Now. <\/em>LEARN MORE<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n The post Baby Boomers: A Long History With Cannabis<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
A personal reflection on the legacy of Baby Boomers in cannabis culture and policy. Forty-five years of smoking pot. D*mn. I never imagined back then that I would find myself here. \u201cHere\u201d being a 62-year-old balding and finally short-haired-again old geezer looking back at the old days. D*mn. How timeContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":73,"featured_media":17753,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,99,679,149,85,680,53,56,97],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17752"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/73"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17752"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17754,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17752\/revisions\/17754"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Feminists](\"http:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/Equality-Parade-Baby-Boomers.jpg\")
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\nRead More: Baby Boomers: A Long History With Cannabis<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"