F E AT U R E S
Weed World
Legal on paper, but not yet in practice. BY JADEN JARMEL-SCHNEIDER
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he weed truck has arrived in Morningside Heights. Sometimes it’s on 116th, but mostly it lingers on the corner of 109th. Flanked by Covid testing vans, this one has green Goosebumps-style lettering and advertises solutions of a different type: CBD and THC marijuana products, just about one year legal in New York. A middle-aged man in dark monochrome athleisure stands outside the truck, beckoning at passersby. Through the glass of the concession window, a cadre of younger men engages in the kind of effortless hang you might expect at a smoke sesh. I never get the impression that they are high—no smoky haze, no smell, no red eyes— but I can’t help but wonder if they have been planted there to give off precisely that impression. Buy our pot; then you can be chill, just like us. Several times now, I’ve seen the athleisurely man in friendly dialogue with older residents of the neighborhood. Their genial tones belie the tension between them as the older, mostly white, neighbors launch questions about legality and permits. What is it our neighbors are afraid of? Perhaps the truck represents the encroachment of a youthful drug on their Manhattan enclave. Perhaps they continue to, as America has, feel a racialized unease around weed. Perhaps the truck, in its unabashed existence, flaunts the degeneracy of marijuana, the image of a criminal drug in a white neighborhood. In March 2021, New York became the 19th state to fully legalize weed when it passed the Marijuana Regulation & Taxation Act. The law authorizes marijuana possession, processing, and distribution with multi-tiered regulation and licensing programming, and the corresponding shift in enforcement was swift. According to the NYPD’s public data, when comparing the three months leading up to legalization and the three months following, there was a 95% decrease in the number of marijuana-related arrests. Nearly a year later, on Jan. 5, 2022, after his swear-in as Manhattan’s first Black district attorney, Alvin Bragg sent a memo to his new staff. It was a fresh start for an office that has historically been tough on low-level marijuana offenses. He
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wrote about growing up in Harlem in the 1980s with loved ones in jail and shootings in front of his home. He wrote about justice and fairness, harm and safety. After outlining his prosecutorial philosophy, he introduced a series of Day One initiatives. Under “Policy & Procedures,” Bragg declared that “the Office will not prosecute … Marijuana misdemeanors.” Even with marijuana legalized, a cultural discrepancy remains. Weed is all the rage—studies back it up (13,000 since the beginning of last year, Google estimates) and economists have favorably analyzed its tax revenue benefits. In the past decade, marijuana has been touted as the cure for everything from Multiple Sclerosis to public debt. Even celebrities have decided that publicizing their smoking habits would be good optics. In a famous 92nd Street Y interview with Andy Cohen, Martha Stewart told the crowd matter-of-factly, “Of course I know how to roll a joint.” Jane Fonda, who became a CBD brand ambassador last year, cited marijuana as her go-to pain med. But as marijuana continues to go mainstream, the undercurrent of a century-long campaign to smear its name leaves weed in a confused cultural space. On the surface, legalizing weed ushered the drug into cultural normality. A carousel of pro-legalization narratives emerged: Everyone smokes, anyways; the state could be pulling in billions on weed sales currently siphoned by the black market; it’s not that unhealthy, it’s not even addictive. But focusing on legalization’s promises elides what being weed-friendly actually looks like on the ground. This is an aesthetic question, a question of what happens when the hidden becomes visible: Food trucks dispensing hashish to college students on a busy corner of Broadway while the NYPD continued to arrest people for possession and criminal sale in the year after legalization, 82% of whom were Black or Hispanic. ··· Close to campus is a small smoke shop, adorned from floor to ceiling with every piece of weed paraphernalia in the books: Lauryn Hill grinders,
THE BLUE AND WHITE
