The Changing, Prettier Face of Pot

The typical pot smoker is still young and male, but not for long.

For the past 35 years, Betsy Gowen has wanted to smoke pot. She hasn’t, because 35 years ago, her daughter was born. She became a secretary in upstate New York. She put on sparkly earrings and bought a nice clutch purse.

But she always remembered the spliffs of her youth. She remembered Pink Floyd and Simon and Garfunkel shows, the Who and Jethro Tull, and heading upstate to Woodstock with a friend.

All of that came flooding back to her on a recent Friday night. She had flown out to see her daughter, who lives in Denver now. And, with her daughter, she smoked a strain called Green Crack. And she laughed, and talked happily about life, love and everything. “The big bang really happened,” she said. “Did you see that? It was proved.”

And the part of her that loves weed can exist with the pant-suit-wearing, responsible, motherly part of her. “I am a professional and I go to fine restaurants and I travel all over the world,” she said, “and I enjoy smoking pot.”

The stigma is lessening, the client pool is slowly expanding, and all kinds of companies that might have shied away from marijuana are embracing it. Hapa sushi restaurant offers a marijuana “pairing menu,” suggesting which rolls go with which joints … try pakalolo shrimp with Pakistani kush, miso salmon with sour OG. Spirit Airlines, offering a $10 discount on flights to Denver, says in an ad, “The no smoking sign is off (in Colorado).” The Rib House’s slogan is “Munchies for true stoners.”

Might this be the beginning of a remarkable change, not just in the way you get marijuana, but what marijuana means? For 80 years, the narrative about pot has been negative. It led to harder drugs, went the story, and it made you lazy and dumb. Anyone who ever smoked it knew that was far from the whole story.

Today in Colorado, the world’s testing ground for alternative ideas about the plant, a vast array of ganjapreneurs are doing their best to define marijuana anew, from something fringe and dangerous into something mainstream and safe. They are interested in mothers replacing a glass of wine in the evening with a small puff from an O-pen vape. They are interested in grandmothers, stuck in the retirement home with painful arthritis, improving their aching knees by rubbing on some Mary Jane’s medicinal salve. They are interested in reaching the alcoholic and convincing him that Green Crack, despite its name, is much less destructive to his body.
Whatever definition they come up with, Cole and Smyth and Cowley—and a great many other marijuana pioneers—intend to market marijuana according to some new definition, in order to set the record straight, and to sell it to as many people as possible, in order to get rich.

For 80 years, this plant was referred to as a “weed.”

But the psychoactive part of the plant is a flower.

In this new world, in these women’s view, the flower part will be emphasized, rather than the weed part. The flower will be appreciated like a work of art. The flower will be given as a gift to dinner party hostesses. The flower will be arrayed as the centerpiece at the tables of upscale weddings. The flower will be displayed in bouquets.