The ongoing effort to legalize weed has a very real and unfortunate casualty: weed’s coolness. When weed is legal, guess what? Movies like Dazed and Confused won’t seem quite as awesome because, once weed becomes just another tool in the establishment’s arsenal of things that perpetuate the status quo, getting stoned won’t be the casual act of rebellion or transgression that makes stoner movies a genre. Would Randall Floyd’s belt buckle pipe seem at all cool if the adults in the Dallas suburbs were getting stoned and watching Johnny Carson?
As testament to weed’s increasing normality and diminishing hipness, one needs to look no further than the Beverly Hills Cannabis Club, which, according to a report from the BBC, is looking to lend a respectable, “high society” face to effort to legalize marijuana in California. A Gallup poll cited in the report further shows that weed is moving steadily into the mainstream: 58 percent of Americans polled today support the US easing restrictions on marijuana, compared to 12 percent back in 1996.
The Beverly Hills Cannabis Club isn’t some sort of insidious cabal of wealthy women trying to ruin everyone’s fun — everybody should be able to get stoned, stigma-free. What the Club does prove, however, is that Baby Boomers won’t rest until they’ve successfully repackaged and commodified everything that made their acts of social disobedience unique.
[BBC]
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