Legal cannabis promised legitimacy. Instead, many of the people who carried the culture through prohibition are being priced, regulated, and pushed out of the industry they helped build.
I am beyond angry. A lot of us are. People who have lived this industry are not slightly disappointed. Many of us are livid because cannabis is becoming exactly what we feared in America: legal enough for the government to collect from, expensive enough to push small businesses out, and controlled enough to reward the people who showed up after the danger passed.
America made room for cannabis before it made room for the people who built it. That is the part that still pisses me off. The biggest slap in the face is not just the law. It is the cultural disconnect itself.
There is a real divide in cannabis now. On one side are the people who risked their lives and freedom for the plant. They understood what cannabis meant before clean packaging and investor decks showed up. On the other side is a new generation of legal cannabis users and companies that only know the plant after the door opened.
I do not blame people for coming through the legal door. That is the door now. But let’s be honest about what happened.
All this “weed for the people” and “weed for the culture” talk starts to sound insulting when it comes from people who stayed away from cannabis until there was a safe way to make money from it. They stayed away when the cost of cannabis could be your freedom, your children, or your life during a robbery or turf dispute. Then they showed up when the danger dropped, befriended innovators, extracted the knowledge, and pushed some of those same people out once the value was …
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Author: Alexander Medina / High Times
