This last weekend was my first time in Aspen, Colorado. My flight took me from Portland to Denver, then there was a 90-minute layover, and then onto the prop plane that would jump us from Denver to Aspen.
Problem was that the weather in Aspen was unforgivably rainy and cloudy that day. We approached the Aspen runway, then pulled up, circled, approached again, pulled up, and then went back to Denver, for the pilot had no safe possible landing in Aspen. After getting off the plane and back on to it, we flew to Aspen again, approached the airstrip again, pulled up and circled again. I was beginning to contemplate where I was going to spend the night when we flew back to Denver again when the pilot finally got a clearance and we landed.
We were picked up by a shuttle from the Gant Hotel. Me and Madeline Martinez (new NORML Board Member and Executive Director of Oregon NORML and her husband shared the ride with a blond woman in the front seat and two brunette women in the back.
Now when we travel, we’re pretty low profile – no pot leaves or pins or NORML garb. So the small talk began between the three of us and the three women. The blond had flown in from New Jersey, the two brunettes from Denver. We asked if they were here for the NORML Conference. The blond replied it was her first conference. The two brunettes were just here for a vacation.
The chit-chat continued until one of the brunettes in the back asked me, “NORML? What’s that?” I replied, “It’s the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. We’re working to legalize pot.”
“Oh,” came the terse reply.
And from that moment, chit-chat time was abruptly over and the two women in the back wouldn’t even look us in the eye.
I often refer to our movement as a civil rights movement and that we cannabis consumers – “stoners” or “potheads” if you will – are the largest repressed minority in the country. That’s not to fully compare cannabis prohibition to African American “Jim Crow” or slavery or Native American genocide or Asian internment or gay bashing or any other heinous repression of a minority; by that yardstick, we have it pretty good.
Yet we do face discrimination for our belonging to a repressed minority – a minority of people with a certain carboxy-THC metabolite in our urine. Drug testing at many jobs may as well be a “No Irish Need Apply” sign in the storefront window. Imprisonment for using a plant is as flimsy a reason to intern someone as is their Asian ancestry. Barriers to higher education based on misdemeanor drug busts might as well be segregation for the kid who can only afford a community college. And last I checked, nobody can arrest you for simply being gay (at least, post Lawrence v. Texas). Discrimination is still discrimination; it isn’t judged by degrees.
So when those two, older, well-to-do women in the back of the van suddenly went silent, I felt that sting of prejudice from them. We were all laughing and conversing as equals, friendly strangers in the awkward closeness of a hotel shuttle van. But then the word marijuana is mentioned and the scene suddenly feels like Al Sharpton just walked into a Klan gathering.
It’s been a while since I felt that. In Potland, Oregon, you’re kind of weird if you don’t show an affinity for marijuana, even if you don’t use it yourself. Plus, I’m rarely invisible; as my wife says, I walk around like a neon sign for pot, with my Oregon NORML shirts, potleaf hemp hats, Chinese hemp character tattoos, shiny gold cannabis pins, and the fact my face is on local cable access TV talking about pot seven times a month. So for me, the mood never shifts from happy acquaintances to aloof strangers like in that Aspen van. If you don’t like pot, you and I rarely will even be around each other.
I imagine that racial minorities don’t get the opportunity to see such a stark turnaround in attitude – it’s not like you can hide dark skin or different features. I imagine gay folks know a bit what I’m talking about, like how he might have friends who suddenly act very different when they discover his sexuality. But it’s something every cannabis consumer eventually faces: coming out to someone who may not know about your true lifestyle.
Me, I’m out like Ellen. I find it a lot easier to deal with people knowing right up front who I am and what I believe. It’s a luxury, I understand, not everyone is in a financial, employment, or familial situation that allows it. And I could’ve stayed in a corporate world where I would’ve had to hide it, and made a lot of money in the process, but I just couldn’t do it – living a lie is just not in my DNA.
The final irony: those two women were in Aspen for the annual Wine & Cheese Festival. Had I turned and told her we were there to meet friends who enjoy wine, to sample many varieties of wine, and to celebrate the community of wine aficionados, we would’ve kept on chatting. But switch grapes for grass and somehow we’re beneath them.
