I haven’t smoked weed since the second Bush administration, but I don’t need to be high to be paranoid. Did I turn the stove off? Is the government reading my texts? Is everyone stoned but me?
Yes, yes and, most definitely, yes.
My friend, the marketing executive? Blitzed while on Zoom. The little old lady who lives next door to me? She’s blazed every morning on her stoop. I watched a dude suck on a vape on the New York City subway just the other day. I’ve lived in this city forever. I’m used to my fellow citizens hitting crack pipes late at night, hunched over at the far end of the train. But this was the middle of the afternoon, and my guy was young and well groomed. He definitely looked like he worked in “crypto.” In his AirPods? A growth mindset pod, probably. He sucked on his vape pen casually, absentmindedly, his lips puckering like he was sipping Sprite from a Big Gulp through a straw.
The evidence isn’t merely anecdotal. For instance, Americans are smoking more weed than cigarettes. According to the 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 43.8 million Americans are using marijuana versus 36.1 million who are simply lighting up. The study found that most people prefer smoking their weed, followed by edibles, vaping, dabs and waxes. According to another finding in the scientific journal Addiction, daily marijuana use exploded by 269% from 2008 to 2022.
The normalization and subsequent legalization of marijuana has been rapid. The first recreational weed laws hit the books in 2012, and now almost half the states in the Union sell THC products (although some states, like Texas, are trying to claw back these laws; just last month, the Lone Star State made possession of certain formerly legal hemp-derived THC products a state felony in a politically toxic and, what I believe to be, futile attempt to put that genie back in its bottle).
Despite those attempts to recriminalize marijuana, and its THC cohorts, the drug itself has lost its reputation as a dangerous controlled substance. It’s boring now, as easy to buy as Mucinex DM. Everyone’s high, including your mom.
I have not been part of this party. I don’t smoke joints nor coffin nails. I quit cigs almost 10 years ago, the hardest thing I’ve ever done, including giving up booze, which I did 16 years ago. I am sober and no fun and smug about it. The only carcinogen I regularly consume is hot dogs, and I am trying to popularize hot dog work breaks.
It used to be that weed transformed normies into freaks, but thanks to capitalism, normies have transformed weed into just another consumer product.
One of the unfortunate side effects of Near Total Sobriety is a puritanical faith in my ability to spot fellow fuck-ups, but as it happens, this golden age of ganja has thrown my AA-dar off.
I know when someone’s drunk. I can spot that from a block away. Don’t ever lie to me if I ask “Are you wasted?” Because I have a mutant superpower, and it’s called “I know where the booze is.” (Your bloodstream.) I used to know when people were stoned, too. But legal marijuana has changed the game. The sheer variety of options means shopping for marijuana is like strolling the snack-food aisles of any supermarket: colorful packages offering all kinds of deliciousness. It used to be that weed transformed normies into freaks, but thanks to capitalism, normies have transformed weed into just another consumer product.
That isn’t a huge surprise to me. I’m constantly, politely, waving away offers to smoke. I naturally assume everyone is popping edibles of various potencies these days — grannies, neighbors, baristas. The stink of dank chronic regularly, and successfully, beats back New York City’s default stench: stale urine. It would not surprise me to learn the entire theater at my screening of The Odyssey was geeked on high-quality dope bought from a trendy weed shop that has more in common with a slick Apple Store than a smelly, old-school head shop run by some musty hippie in a tie-dye shirt.
I feel removed from this brave new world of totally legal, insanely powerful marijuana mostly because dope was always a pleasant little subculture populated mostly by spiral-dancing, cheese doodle-munching Love Gollums. But now? Are you telling me the mayor doesn’t toke up? C’mon. He’s cool as hell.
The internet being what it is (a giant disinformation nightmare machine), I want to state for the record that weed should be legal. Full stop. It has addictive properties — mileage may vary, genetics being what they are — and there are many people who struggle with marijuana addiction. Too much THC and your mind gets sucked into quicksand. But I’ve never seen a pothead angrily try to put his fist through a stranger’s face. I once watched a sweaty, stumbling drunk projectile vomit beer foam on a child at Yankee Stadium. A stoner would never.
I quit smoking weed years before hitting rock bottom from bog-standard alcoholism. Booze has always been my greatest love, and the source of all my life’s greatest self-inflicted miseries. But weed was making me stupid. I’d go to editorial meetings the day after blazing up, and my brain was a bowl of congealed room-temperature mac and cheese left on the kitchen counter. So I simply made up my mind that I wasn’t going to smoke, and I kept drinking for another three years. Kicking my weed habit was relatively painless, as famed Beat writer and notorious drug fiend William Burroughs promised in his iconic 1953 novel Junky. The national drug is alcohol, he points out, but “[w]eed does not harm the general health.”
I agree with Uncle Willie: a little puff-puff of devil’s lettuce — a moderate amount — never hurt anyone, and now everyone is puff-puffing/chew-chewing/gulp-gulping away. God bless. Lawyers. Therapists. Upstanding members of the community. They’re all stoned. I guarantee you all the pot-hating bible-thumpers in Texas are zonked off their nut, too, because the truth about all anti-drugs laws is that they don’t apply to the powerful men who write them.
The modern pothead is an average person. A muggle, in loathsome Millennialspeak.
An Elegy for Dad Bods in the Days of Looksmaxxing
In this era of robotic self-optimization, it seems our flabby fathers were onto somethingI was born during the ’80s, back when the war on drugs raged. I was instructed by commercials on TV to “just say no” to marijuana, a dangerous “gateway” drug that would immediately lead to heroin addiction. And I bought this propaganda until my very first toke the first week of college. I was passed a roach at a frat party, and I remember thinking, “What if I OD?” before sucking on that spliff, coughing up my kidneys and laughing for what felt like hours. That was the beginning of a long and illustrious career as a pothead before I unceremoniously retired from weed.
The first bona fide stoner I met lived up to expectations, a filthy Gen-X burnout in Richmond, Virginia; a skinny-as-a-rubber-band white dude with dreads and eyes like tiny radishes. He liked to talk about the band Rush. He was happily separating marijuana stems and seeds from the driest, cheapest bud money could buy at the time, the mid-’90s, and he sold me a joint for 10 bucks, my first drug deal. The weed got me buzzed enough that eating a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish in the street was a nearly orgasmic experience.
The first of many drug deals. I know modern weed is more potent than what I used to smoke, but illicitness is a singular high that can’t be produced in a lab.
Whenever I miss weed, which I do on occasion, not a bone-deep craving but more of a sentimental longing, I can’t help but remember the times I couldn’t score weed because my dealer wasn’t picking up, or answering his door, and I was forced to casually cruise the streets of New York’s East Village, and Tompkins Square Park, looking for some random dude my age whispering “Smoke? Smoke?” to passersby, and then hoping they weren’t a quota-hungry undercover cop.
The deal was simple: if he whispered “smoke,” I’d stop and nod, and we’d walk around a corner, or deeper into the park and find a nook, a dumpster or a tree to huddle next to.
I once asked for a dime bag, and the dealer said “20 dollars.” I replied, testily, “It’s a dime. Ten.” “That’s just what we call it, you bitch,” he said. “You bitch.” I paid the 20 dollars, and stuffed the assorted seeds and stems into a pipe. The resulting high was mediocre but welcome. Marijuana is like pizza that way. It’s always good even when it’s brown and crumbly. Of course, when it’s green and sticky like a Christmas tree, and it smells sweet and floral, it’s absolutely delicious.
I wasn’t much of a social smoker. A 2021 study out of Syracuse found that more than 40% of college cannabis users got high alone. That was me. I preferred to drink by myself, too. I’ve also struggled with depression my whole life. It doesn’t take a therapist to connect substance abuse, isolation and mental health. There are times I wish my brain was built differently, but that’s the human condition, I suppose. I’m sober. I’m alive. I’m having a pretty good time.
But I won’t touch the stuff now. Why would I? Just because it’s everywhere? I think about the drug the way I daydream about exes: “Wasn’t the sex great?” When you’re in that headspace, you never remember the fights and the lies and suffocating hopelessness of being trapped in a dead relationship. If I were to spark up now, or pop a lil’ gummy, I’d likely get nice and toasty and scroll through Criterion before falling asleep. Weed does, gently, make one vulnerable. It opens the mind, for sure. When you’re good and baked, it’s easy for little thoughts and temptations to tiptoe in.
If I were to toke up, I know for a fact that eventually, maybe not the next night or the night after that, but eventually, while high, I’d think, “I want to be higher.” Weed is cute. Being stoned is a fun way to lobotomize yourself. It’s nice and relaxing, but sooner or later I’ll want to get really good and fucked up. And then I’ll reach for a bottle of something brown because that’s where true oblivion lives, at least for me.
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