We found ourselves freed slowly.
You need not have familiarity with Harry Anslinger’s evil anti-cannabis crusades to know why your weed use is bound to be an issue at this weekend’s Juneteenth barbecue. Just look back to D.A.R.E., a program from the Reagan Era that took notes from Aslinger’s decades-old playbook.
All over America, D.A.R.E. brought cops into schools with anti-pot propaganda, equating weed with heroin and other hard drugs but never offering any factual background for this fear-mongering correlation. “A bunch of 10-year-olds in an auditorium on a Friday afternoon, snitching on their parents,” was the vibe, recalls Los Angeles entrepreneur and founder of Kind Cannabis Consulting, Jenny Dills.
The weaponized incarceration machine is why some older Black people continue to think contact highs are way easier to catch than they are. From their perspective, weed got your cousin fired, divorced, arrested, and hooked on meth.
But back to Juneteenth, a holiday that slowly rose in popularity each year, culminating in Federal Holiday status in 2021; a holiday that celebrates the slow revelation that we were freed from slavery. This fact alone is so elegant and aesthetically canna-friendly that the existence of a weed schism feels out of place. But that’s slavery for ya.’ The fault lies not just with the prohibition holdovers. The problem is us. It’s tincture-loving, heavy dabbin’, twenty-nine-percent-THC-or-nothin us.
“A lot of us smoke,” observed Matthew Stockard, better known as Chef Matt, “and don’t even understand why.” Chef Matt is an American Culinary Federation-accredited chef and doesn’t smoke weed. His vision is all about edible cannabis, especially infused into savory cuisine.