9 - 5 Career Holding Stoners

 
In light of California’s recently defeated Proposition 19, if passed, would have legalized the recreational use for individuals 21 and over to cultivate, possess and transport marijana for personal use, as well as allowing local California governments to tax the commercial production, distribution and sale of marijuana. But this did not happen.
 
What did happen was that it reminded me of an article I had read in last year’s November issue of Marie Claire. It reported that a large number of pot smokers were actually successful career women.
 
Citing from a NY Daily News article, quoted Joanna Coles, editor-in-chief of Marie Claire, from her appearance on the Today Show “We’re talking about highly functioning women. These are not people who are lying on park benches…They’re casual recreational users who find (marijuana) very effective.”
 
I still remember the time when stoners were individuals that meant 1990s movies like Friday and Half-Baked. Stigmatizing stoners as dumb, clueless types, that found themselves in ridiculous situations all for the sake of weed.
 
The state of California follows through with several measures to decriminalize the possession of marijuana, and recently, pending Prop 19, making the offense an infraction, equal to a traffic ticket; not a misdemeanor or a felony. Ballots like Prop 19, coupled with articles that report successful business women toking-it-up after a long day at work, all lead to a cultural shift in how marijuana usage is perceived.     
 
The image of a woman in a chignon bun, a gray pencil skirt, blazer with a doobie in her hand is the absolute antithesis to the Cheech and Chong model of marijuana behavior.
 
In fact, if you think about the statistics, the mortality rate from alcohol consumption in 2007 as indicated by the CDC was 37,605 and with barely no information about mortality rates from marijuana. On some of the more gung-ho marijuana websites, the stats say zero, but I’m a little weary to cite zero, just because I, myself, couldn’t find a reliable source. Regardless, nothing and zero are a lot less than 37,605 alcohol related deaths in the United States.  
 
So why did Prop 19 fail? Why didn’t the stiletto stoner brigade in California come marching to the support of their most beloved stress reliever?
 
There are several theories as listed from The Week’s article, one in which since making possession of marijuana simply an infraction, the belief is that it’s basically legal already.
 
But the one I’d like to focus on is the one that states that midterm voters tend to be older. And even though voters between the ages of 20 - 30 years of age supported Prop 19 by a wide margin, voters 65 and older were approximately against it 2 to 1.
 
So even though this article set out to ponder the shift in the cultural paradigm of marijuana use – believing that it will eventually be entirely legal and destigmatized – it also became about why we’re allowing voters 65 and older to determine what laws mandate our behaviors?
 
I guess that’s how you work through an idea…