by Kris Vagner // k r isv @ ne wsr e v ie w.c o m
V
ic first tried cannabis as a college sophomore. That was in the 1970s, at a Doc and Merle Watson concert in Deep Gap, North Carolina, near where he grew up. He’s 63 now and lives in Reno. Looking back, he said the effects were comparable to that of the Buddhist meditation he now practices. “I just remember it being so liberating,” he said. “I was in the moment. I was joyful to be alive.” As a pot-smoking senior—or, more often, a pot-gummy-bear-munching senior—“Vic,” who asked that we not use his real name, is not an anomaly. A 2016 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the age demographics of users have changed quite a bit over the last 15 years. Since 2002, the number of teen marijuana users has decreased 10 percent, and people in the 35 to 44 bracket are now more likely to partake than their teenage kids are. Use among the 45 to 54 set has jumped almost 50 percent. As the Washington Post put it, “Among those ages 55 to 64, it’s jumped by a whopping 455 percent (no, that’s not a typo).” And one local dispensary rep said she routinely sees clients in their 80s. Vic and his friends proceeded to smoke pot on occasion beyond college, and in addition to the joyful, liberated feeling it provided, there were a couple of other things that colored their experiences. For one thing, they thought it seemed less harmful than alcohol, and they saw some hypocrisy in that. “Most people who I have experienced in my life who smoke pot and enjoy it are not aggressive at all,” Vic said. “Alcohol tends to have this curve, where it’s all joyful and everything, and then it starts to go down, and you feel heavy and angry, and that comes to the surface. … I’ve met a lot of mean drunks in my life, but I’ve never met a mean
pothead.” As a young adult, he lived near a military base. Close by, he said, there were bars where soldiers drank and contracted services from prostitutes. “There were shootings and stabbings galore,” he recalled. “I just couldn’t understand why anyone would choose that state of being, as opposed to something that was peaceful and kind and fun-loving.” Another thing about smoking pot was the reputation it could earn a young North Carolinian in the ’70s. “In my area, if you smoked pot and you were a hippie, you were anti-American and anti-Vietnam,” Vic said. “So you weren’t a good American if you opted to [partake.]” He kept his hair short, didn’t dress much like a hippie, and kept a low profile, but he saw some peers arrested and sent to jail. “A couple of guys were dealing out of their room, and they got busted,” he said. “And they didn’t have anything but, like, an ounce. An ounce is something like a sandwich bag, but you’re talking about handcuffs, police. … It would really anger me, because the people who made the decisions about my freedom to choose pot were right-wing, Christian alcoholics, the ones who were enforcing and making the laws.” Vic, who is gay, moved in 1980 to New York City, where he was pleased to discover a thriving gay culture and a happening party scene. He tried cocaine and LSD, and had positive experiences with both. “I never felt like I was an addict,” he said. “I felt like I was using recreational drugs, but I never missed work. I never borrowed money. I never called in sick. … And I never thought it denigrated who I was as an individual. My experiences about being whole and happy and connected were even elevated to a higher level on LSD and cocaine.”
A look inside the changing demographics of cannabis users in Nevada Vic said he abstained from drugs altogether during periods of time when others were in his care, including his 24 years as a high school science teacher. “I wanted to genuinely show the kids that you can be outgoing, loving, happy without anything at all,” he said. More recently, he abstained when he was a caretaker for his mother until her death in 2011. Vic moved to Reno in 2014, where, he said, “I wasn’t going to walk out on the street to ask for some pot.” He attended Burning Man, and there he asked a friend for some pot, which he found surprisingly potent. “I thought I saw God,” he laughed. “Then I started to get educated,” he said. “I have joint disease in both thumbs. I have a compressed spine in my lower L2s and L3s, and just general old-age joint issues.” Ibuprofen didn’t help, and he wanted to avoid opioids. From a friend, he learned about CBDs, the compounds in
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