Beaton: Potheads in paradise | AspenTimes.com:
"...Yes, pot is now legal in Colorado.
Even here in Aspen we’re infested with nearly a dozen seedy pot stores.
I’ve wondered, is getting high on pot better than getting high on mountains?
To answer that question, I recently slipped into a Colorado pot shop.
I imagined I was cool.
All hell broke loose.
I thought maybe I’d walked in on a robbery.
But no, it was just reefer madness.
Everyone was shouting.
Toothless customers with long beards and smelly T-shirts scurried about the apocalyptic scene.
Many wore baseball caps backward in that manner that somehow reduces the wearer’s IQ.
...In the inner room was more shouting.
Glass display cases were filled with pot candy, pot cookies, pot brownies, pot gummy bears and pot paraphernalia.
On the other side of a glass case was another brown-toothed shouter, also wearing a dirty T-shirt, beard and IQ-reducer.
I realized that this get-up was their uniform of nonconformity.
“What can I get ya?”
“Pot. On which to smoke.”
The mere anticipation had already impaired my synapses, it seemed, or at least my syntax.
“Well, do ya want something to relax ya, so ya just, like, tune out?
Or do ya want something to give ya a buzz, so ya can, like, work?”
His hands made air quotes when he shouted “work.”
I’ve always preferred relaxing over working, so I choose the first type. The dealer suggested something he called “Ogre Kush.”
He shouted, “How much ya want?”
I shouted back so that I wouldn’t look like an amateur, “One gram!”
For an instant, the place fell silent as several customers glanced and smirked.
A nanosecond later, the cacophony resumed.
...As expected, pot consumption is up since it was legalized in Colorado, along with pot-related automobile accidents and emergency room treatment for toddlers who’ve ingested pot.
(Toddlers usually won’t drink alcohol because it tastes bad to them, but pot candy, pot cookies and pot brownies taste normal.)
Much of the consumption is by heavy users who get very high several times a week.
One in three pot users gets high daily.
Stoners tend to be uneducated and poor.
Maybe it’s their habit that impoverishes them.
At $32 a gram, the 454 grams in a pound would cost $14,498.
It’s almost the price of gold.
Pot legalizers have evidently decided to help the poor by taking away what little money they have and then sedating them.
And lobotomizing them.
A recent study by Northwestern University and
Harvard Medical School found that even moderate use of pot is correlated with brain abnormalities..."
