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Tokeville:

On the frontiers of federalism and dope

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

It was northern California in the warm, early spring, and we had been at war in Iraq for years, and the bright protest marches—which had begun in self-congratulation at City Hall and ended in heirloom produce and unpasteurized chèvre at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market—had faded from memory, and a great many people who might in another era have cared about illegal foreign wars or grave threats to civil liberties had been outraged into apathy by the unrelenting malevolent ineptitude of their government and had again become preoccupied with their live-work loft spaces and the vesting schedules of options and how best to “monetize eyeballs.” And whereas their forebears, in a bygone time, might have been found in Golden Gate Park scoring grass from which seeds and twigs had to be charily picked, our contemporaries were pleased to take the state of California up on its gracious proposition of Compassionate Use and relieve their chronic white-collar neck pain with top-shelf industrial-grade medical marijuana, purchased semi-legally and with post office–like convenience in the shabby boutiques increasingly blacking out shop windows all over town. What seemed clear was that the federal government had at some point become a distant and obdurate entity, and yet California, in its generous cannabinoidal dispensation, had achieved an almost alarming level of sensitivity to its subjects’ sense of well-being. So I decided to leave San Francisco for the mountains, or rather the nearer-by hills, where the people were growing this state-sanctioned marijuana and were apparently making a lot of money doing so, and I thought I’d stay around a while and try not to make any enemies.

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SEE ALSO: Control; Marijuana; Postmasters; Therapeutic use; Washington

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