Pa. bill would legalize marijuana as therapeutic option
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A medical-marijuana user smokes a water pipe in Portland, Maine, where the state on Friday awarded six of eight licenses to dispensaries.
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They're lighting up joints in Bryn Mawr and Squirrel Hill after putting the kids to bed.
At Abay, an ultra-hip eatery in East Liberty, pro-medical marijuana activists are recruiting and organizing new members over martinis.
And in Harrisburg, some legislators are pushing for passage of a bill that would make Pennsylvania the 15th state to legalize medical marijuana -- if New York and Maryland don't beat them to it.
Pot is hot.
Long known as America's most widely used illicit drug, marijuana is no longer just a habit for aging baby boomers reliving the '60s. Fragile multiple sclerosis sufferers and chemo patients swear by it. In the movies, positive images abound: In "It's Complicated," Santa Barbara matron Meryl Streep gets stoned to hilarious effect, while on television's "Nurse Jackie," Edie Falco helps a chemo patient fashion a bong for his joint.
While U.S. marijuana use has shown a consistent decline since the mid-1990s, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, that trend has stalled, with prevalence rates the same in 2009 as they were five years ago.
And back in the real world, affluent forty-somethings are lighting up after work, giving new meaning to "Happy Hour."
Just ask Lisa (not her real name).
"Let me shut the door," she said during a telephone interview from her Downtown office where she works for a financial institution. A self-described "urban professional and mom" and wife of a successful lawyer, she likes to sit in her sleek, granite-and-maple kitchen in Squirrel Hill on Friday nights and de-stress with a joint.
"I do it once a week," Lisa said. "It's a nice release from the week's tensions, and I can feel my body calming down -- and it's less calories than wine," she added with a laugh.
Even as the drug war continues to rage along our nation's borders and the Drug Enforcement Administration's website declares marijuana to be "dangerous," even as Congress refuses to repeal its declaration that smoked marijuana is without "current medical benefit," recreational use of marijuana has continued unabated in this country.
Now, California -- the first state to allow medical marijuana use -- will vote in November on a ballot initiative legalizing all pot use.
A new RAND Corp. study released last week found, however, that while legalizing marijuana could increase consumption, it would also cut the drug's price by as much as 80 percent -- making it unlikely that the cash-strapped state will realize projections for $1 billion in revenue.
First Published July 11, 2010 12:00 am
