Editor’s note: Don Peterson is a contractor and a self-described unpaid lobbyist for the natural world. He is a longtime resident of Lowell.
[I]n 1970 I was 20 years old and living in San Francisco. My older brother had just gotten back from Mexico with 120 pounds of cello-wrapped marijuana, and was transporting it across town in an Oldsmobile with the back window broken out of it. Neither of us would even smoke that crap, it was so rank, but he was able to move it and went back for another load. Eventually he got caught. He served five years in a Mexican prison, suffered a nervous breakdown, and has not had a tranquil life since, despite everyone’s best efforts.
I moved to New England and ended up married to a nice Irish Catholic girl. With her, whiskey was OK, but no more marijuana for me! So for a long time I resorted to my alcoholic drug of choice, until gradually I began to overuse. I ended up in the 12-step program, after a long nightmare of abuse.
Now I’m 65 years old. I don’t drink alcohol, and I don’t want to. I would smoke marijuana if offered. I make this confession because I want to lay claim to a certain understanding of the drug, and of the drug culture, and of substance abuse in general. All of which are involved in the decision to legalize marijuana here in Vermont.
When I first came here, homegrown marijuana, frankly, was not worth smoking, but then the farm boys discovered Afghanistan seeds. Soon they were growing short bushy plants that looked like Christmas trees. If there is anything a farm boy knows, it’s how to select seed. The Reagan drug war began, the helicopters came, and the growing moved indoors, never to be seen again.
Since then, the dope has progressively gotten stronger and stronger, because that’s what farmers always do — they improve their crop. In consequence, the kids around here are smoking the dope we were warned about in the 1960s. That’s the psychosis inducing pot those “Middle Eastern fanatics” were supposed to smoke before going into battle against the Christians. Anybody who has had a conversation with someone like Roger Pion will know what I’m talking about. We’re comparing hard cider to Everclear. Just wait until corporate resources get involved. The corporate justification for raising the price will be even greater potency.
The costs feel understated, the revenue overstated and there’s a big rush to get it done.
My parents were young in the post-Prohibition era of the 1930s. For a picture of how that period played out, watch a “Nick and Nora” movie. Both my parents thought drinking was cool when they were young. Both of them struggled with abuse issues later, finally becoming teetotalers afraid to drink. Legalizing marijuana will have a similar effect on our times. There will be a surge of experimentation. Mostly that will be fine. But there will be some people who can’t currently access marijuana who will not be fine. Because we have refused to study marijuana use, we can’t predict how many people that will be.
So before I sign on to turning Vermont into a marijuana tourist destination I want the following questions answered in public:
• How will you deal with the small percentage of tourists who will come here, find work as roofers and ski lift attendants, decide not to leave, and then turn into abusers who need care? How much will that cost?
• Where will you house the wards of the state that will be created? The Northeast Kingdom is already housing more than our fair share of crazies so look somewhere else for once.
• How does legalizing marijuana consumption but keeping the growing of it illegal reduce the police attention, the game warden attention, the Homeland Security attention now being supported by taxpayers? Aren’t you just creating a class of military equipped “revenuers” to crash around looking for grow rooms to tax?
• How does this effort save anybody any money? Because I don’t think this is a money maker for the citizens of Vermont. A few well-connected licensees will make a killing. The rest of us will have to pay to create the bureaucratic scaffolding required to regulate, tax and enforce this agenda.
• What confidence should I have that the current administration can successfully implement such a groundbreaking social program, given their track record with renewable energy or single payer health? That’s a rhetorical question actually.
So this is an old story: The costs feel understated, the revenue overstated and there’s a big rush to get it done. I don’t feel at all good about this, and I feel qualified to know. Just once, I like to see some other state in New England on the point of the spear, and not Vermont.
