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"FacebookPinterest\n\nhere&amp;#39;s an idea: Why not drop by your mom&amp;#39;s place some night after she gets home from her book club? Look her straight in the eye and ask: &amp;quot;Mother, have you been smoking pot?&amp;quot; She might get defensive and deny it, or she could play it cool and tell you she was &amp;quot;just experimenting with some friends.&amp;quot; Don&amp;#39;t believe her. Think about it: Ever notice how the inside of her Avalon always smells like chalupas and Febreze? And remember that time you found her asleep in the La-Z-Boy with the empty Entenmann&amp;#39;s box on her lap, coffee-cake crumbs down the front of her Lands&amp;#39; End fleece? And why do you think she bought the Winged Migration DVD? Face it. Your mom likes to get baked. But at least she&amp;#39;s not alone; her friends probably get high, too. So do her neighbors, her fellow Literacy Volunteers, her podiatrist, and the women in her low-impact aquatic-ercise class.\n\n That&amp;#39;s right. It&amp;#39;s 2010. Everybody is getting high, and nobody is bothering to hide it. By all accounts, this should be a golden age for stoners: Weed has never been stronger, more accessible, and less criminal\u2014particularly if you&amp;#39;re wealthy, white, and living in one of the thirteen states where it&amp;#39;s been approved for medicinal purposes. Everyone is pot-literate now, passing around insider lingo like hydroponic and one-hitter, shoptalking about vaporizers and debating their favorite strains of Kush. It&amp;#39;s on the cover of Fortune and inescapable on HBO. Even CNN&amp;#39;s resident codgers\u2014Jack Cafferty and Wolf Blitzer\u2014have joked about it on-air. You&amp;#39;d need to go back like eighteen years to find a sitting U.S. president who didn&amp;#39;t try it\u2014and we&amp;#39;re pretty sure Poppy Bush was ripped during that skydiving episode.\n\nWhat happened? I guess it began the moment medical-marijuana advocates began equating pot with something healthful and people started actually believing them. O behold the wonder weed! A gentle, restorative, 100-percent-organic, multipurpose remedy. Look, I&amp;#39;m grateful that pot now brings a measure of comfort to people who need it to treat nausea and headaches. I just wish that this progress hadn&amp;#39;t turned pot into the next blue-green algae. Pot is now thought to be nothing sexier, more dangerous, than a bottle of spirulina or a course of probiotics. Shit yeah! We won! Everyone&amp;#39;s getting high. But they&amp;#39;re getting high for the lamest reasons. Anxiety, lymphoma, indigestion, fibromyalgia. Where&amp;#39;s the fun in that? I&amp;#39;ve got some reasons for you: Star Trek, Ring Dings, Laser Floyd, Laffy Taffy.\n\nPerhaps the most logical (and possibly lamest) argument that&amp;#39;s been made for the legalization of pot is based on the tax revenue it could eventually create\u2014estimated to be hundreds of millions in California alone. It certainly makes sense, but that doesn&amp;#39;t make the goal feel any less fiduciary. And fiduciary equals lame. It&amp;#39;s pedestrian, materialistic, and way uptight. It&amp;#39;s not what the peculiar and inimitable pleasures of pot are all about. The point of smoking pot isn&amp;#39;t to replenish government coffers; it&amp;#39;s about enhancing everyday activities with a heightened sense of wonder and humor. Pot is meant to cure tension, ennui, hyperactivity, and lack of appetite. It makes crappy music sound good, bad movies more enjoyable, and an evening of television seem tolerable. It can settle your stomach like a warm Canada Dry, and it makes every Pop-Tart the best Pop-Tart that ever was. But using it to stave off statewide financial collapse? That&amp;#39;s like having sex because someone&amp;#39;s ovulating. Or drinking rum as an antihistamine. What happened to rolling a joint the size of a Duraflame and then laughing until you couldn&amp;#39;t stop coughing? What happened to partying?\n\n All this is to say that smoking pot was never meant to be useful. It wasn&amp;#39;t about self-improvement. For one, it was illegal. And so it carried a certain criminal cachet. Scoring a bag of weed felt like some kind of victory. A skirting of the authorities, a clearing of the obstacles. Because you were crafty and courageous and semiconnected, you had the ability to exchange your ten/forty/seventy-five dollars for an envelope/Ziploc/Lucite box of Cannabis sativa/Cannabis indica/crappy brown dirt weed. I&amp;#39;m not saying you had to be a badass to smoke it. (God no.) But it asked something of you: a measure of patience, an implied ease that ensured you would not freak anybody out. Acquiring pot would sometimes force you to make new friends; it could push you out of your cozy racial and socioeconomic comfort zones and require travel to new neighborhoods to meet sketchy people in anonymous rental cars and behind slots in the graffiti-covered doors at the backs of bodegas. Sometimes you&amp;#39;d have to speak Spanish. We&amp;#39;ve reached a point now where there&amp;#39;s nothing to it\u2014no sense of accomplishment, no risk, no grit, no glamour. It&amp;#39;s not even that inconvenient. Shouldn&amp;#39;t getting a bag of pot at least be inconvenient?\n\nOkay, so pot&amp;#39;s never been rare. It&amp;#39;s hardly the snow leopard of North American drug use. But now it&amp;#39;s more like a suburban deer population: disappointingly ubiquitous. There are more medical-marijuana dispensaries in greater Los Angeles than Starbucks. It&amp;#39;s not like you can just pick up a family pack of Sour Diesel at Costco, but that&amp;#39;s not exactly a stretch. You can even get it on Twitter somehow.\n\nIt used to be that if you had a choice at all, it was between regular and high-test. If the regular wasn&amp;#39;t strong enough, you just kept smoking until it was. Now you have to choose between strains, substrains, name brands. Northern Lights. Easy Rider. Quick: Do you want the Purple Haze or the White Rhino? Do you want a head high or a body high? (And you thought the sensation you were after was not being able to tell the difference.) Maybe we are simply witnessing pot&amp;#39;s inevitable free-market march toward maturity, as it assumes its proper place in the self-indulgence industry. Twenty-five years ago, there were two types of Oreos and three kinds of milk. Now we can count about fifteen kinds of milk and more than two dozen different Oreos. Organic skim Lactaid to go with your chocolate Double Stuf? Choice inevitably leads to preference, which leads to connoisseurship, snobbery, and ultimately tedious levels of bourgeois fetishism.\n\nAnd when you&amp;#39;re paying $600 an ounce, you&amp;#39;re not just going to talk and talk and talk about your purchase; you&amp;#39;re also going to house it appropriately. People treat pot like Cuban cigars or Piedmont truffles. Yes, burnouts have been obsessed with the practice and trappings of getting high for a long time. But the new pot nerds are a different breed. They&amp;#39;re bent on squeezing every last bit of carefree, stoned-out-of-your-gourd satisfaction out of getting high. Do you remember how the simple pleasure you derived from drinking beer drained away the first time someone showed up with a few bottles of St. Sixtus Westvleteren ale and a handful of interesting facts about the Belgian monks who brewed it? Wait until you suffer through a twenty-minute monologue on the virtues of Humboldt Super Skunk.\n\nIt was probably the pot nerds who helped marijuana infiltrate that durable safe haven of middle-class lameness known as the dinner party\u2014the adult convention of inviting two or three couples over to eat and talk about their shared commuting woes and the virtues of On Demand television. &amp;quot;Really? What channel is that? Rob, write this down.&amp;quot; And at some point in the evening you will gather on the back deck to pass a joint around and talk about how stoned you are. And that&amp;#39;s almost more crushing than the conversations about mandatory third- grade testing and the life span of a decent hot-water heater. There&amp;#39;s something about the mildness of that particular transgression that serves as just another reminder of the safety and predictability of adulthood. You know what never happens at dinner parties? Wife swapping. You know what does? Joint smoking.\n\nMaybe we should all have quit smoking pot before we had things like dinner parties and backyards. Maybe the problem is that pot isn&amp;#39;t just for college kids anymore. Pot was supposed to be a youthful indiscretion, something you outgrew by middle age to limit the shame and the short-term-memory loss. Everyone knew someone in college whose dad or uncle or philosophy adviser smoked regularly, burning through his golden years in a consistent pungent haze. And although you may have admired someone like that\u2014you certainly talked about him enough\u2014you didn&amp;#39;t aspire to be him.\n\nLeave it to the baby boomers to invent a lifestyle in which they could keep toking. Not the greatest generation, just the most indulgent. And let me tell you, &amp;quot;Want to blow some chronic?&amp;quot; is not something you want to hear from a guy wearing bifocals.\n\nI guess I&amp;#39;m kind of an exclusionist. A decade ago, whether or not a person got high told you something about him and his approach to life. It carried some weight. Though I&amp;#39;m a little ashamed to admit to having such shallow and sophomoric standards, I stood by them. It wasn&amp;#39;t the pot itself but the association. You could usually see pot use as a testament to something\u2014not exactly coolness, but a willingness to partake in certain pleasures our government was too stiff to embrace. And also, smoking pot meant you didn&amp;#39;t take yourself too seriously, which is always a reliable and efficient way to judge someone. And now that&amp;#39;s gone. Just ask your mom.\n\nmark healy is gq&amp;#39;s director of editorial projects."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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