Forty-four years after the fact, I finally will admit I committed an illegal act: I smoked pot once in college.
Nobody in authority ever caught me that night in Wendell Willkie Quad, though one of my dorm mates said I looked at the time as if I feared campus police would bust through the door at any moment. I never got high, never felt a thing. Meanwhile, my devoted-to-smoking neighbor declared I should try again because I could become a freaking genius if only I took up the habit. After all, compared with him I already knew a whole lot, like who was the vice president of the United States that year.
Naming Spiro Agnew then was easy; identifying the best way today to run an LBM operation in this era of loosening marijuana laws is genius-level stuff. As our special report shows, rarely will you see so many ever-evolving community norms, legal standards, and corporate policies swirl around an issue. Rare, too, are the dealer executives I’ve found who are aware that today’s THC-rich version of pot is as far advanced from the weak-teabag stuff they smoked as a Porsche 911 is from a Plymouth Duster.
And wait until you find yourself suddenly having to accept bags of cash as the multibillion-dollar marijuana industry blooms and the federal banking system remains barred from handling that money.
The big fear among dealers is that more marijuana use will lead to more accidents, higher insurance costs, and a jump in workers’ compensation rates. A secondary fear is that marijuana is a gateway drug leading to abuse of harder, more addictive stuff. Early evidence is that these things haven’t happened: Workers’ comp rates are steady or declining, and the evidence isn’t definitive yet whether pot use leads to more accidents or more addictions.
But perhaps those aren’t going to be the real impacts on employers. Rather than more accidents, you could see reduced productivity, increased absenteeism, and a general drop in your workers’ ability to concentrate. Then again, little research has been done on how marijuana affects those factors, so we don’t have much of a baseline to compare past and present with this potential future.
The hemp plant from which marijuana is derived has been part of America since 1619, and smoking pot has been part of our culture for more than a century. It could be that relaxed laws will merely legalize something that a subset of the American people have been doing surreptitiously for years and that other Americans will never embrace.
For this former college student who tried pot, the real discovery was that you can get a much better high reporting the news.
Learn more: See our special report on marijuana and LBM, as well as our sidebar story on getting paid in cash in pot-growing country.
