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How to Introduce Cannabis to Your Gen X Parents

The old-timers, and the 1960s potheads, talk morosely about pot being too commercialized, the entire organic marijuana scene was of the Generation X's making and then came the Millennials and their app delivery services.

By Wendy WeedlerPublished 7 years ago 5 min read
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People do care about smoking good pot. And the people who can afford it will fork over as much as it costs. These days many of the 16 - 20 year old kids, first time users are learning from parents of second generation weed advocates. Their mommies and daddies remember their own halcyon days They empathize with the possibility of paranoia, parking lot pot parties and searching for a lighter that works.

The old-timers, and the 1960s potheads, talk morosely about pot being too commercialized, and cheer the entry of celebrity advocates like Willie Nelson whose Willie's Reserve reminds them of their original ideology.

The old-timers talk about home-grown in a lachrymose tone that gives them away. As if it were the household plague. The dirty kitchen. They were accustomed to buying dime bags of Mexican grass on street corners. The entire organic scene was of the Generation X's making. Then came the Millennials and their app delivery services.

Generation X Cannabis Enthusiast

Home-grown for this Generation X cannabis enthusiast, is right there at the bottom with cheap scotch. Forget all the hype that my peers from the 70s and 80s espouse about cultivating it right down there in the basement. It takes too long and you're always disappointed. The professional people in the business still produce the best grass. Cannabis sativa is not just the generic name for the omnipresent herb. Cannabis has been in style for some time now; high end designers (pardon the pun) are creating and marketing sleek paraphernalia and marijuana packaging. Recreational marijuana smoking has infiltrated every social stratum in this country. There's an upper- and middle and lower-class of marijuana users. It is a strange, often confusing capitalist-versus-Marxist dialectics. In the late 1960s and early 1970s men with long hair talking up the cannabis lifestyle were strange and disturbing to your classic blue collar American worker. In the 1980s and 1990s those same blue collar guys had long hair themselves and wouldn't even smoke cheap Jamaican pot.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, attending a Newport Jazz Festival (they didn't call it a rock festival yet), cheap weed flew fast and furiously. A joint came your way, you toked and passed it the other way. It was very communal. Now people keep it to themselves, a regular user tends to smoke in private or with close friends and family. It's too expensive to pass your vape to the stranger next to you.

These days, I lapse into fantasy and remember getting stoned in college with my buddies. It may be a cliché, but it was less complex and more meaningful back in the 1980s. Honestly I can't tell the difference between most strains of sativa, I guess I don't focus so much on what kind of high I am, and just enjoy the fact that I am high.

Protocols in Weed Class Structure

Since changing social climes have fostered all kinds of changed protocols in weed class structure, dealer hierarchies, social environs, and regional biases-it should come as no surprise that there are some brand-new notions of what is and what isn't acceptable on the family front. If your parents have passed the lifestyle onto you, perhaps you can help them.

Sure, your Dad would break the sink over your head if he caught you using methamphetamine. But catching you vaping, well, now maybe a slap on the wrist in even the most conservative household. But how do you offer weed or an edible to your mother? With trepidation? No. My opinion is just be honest. Hand an edible to mom or show her how to use your PAX. Or encourage her to try it with a friend. If she does, and she reports back that "'we laughed and got a little hungry-but otherwise didn't feel anything", only then do you break out your stash at the dining-room table, and tell her to try your stuff.

You tell mom gently that nobody bothers with pipes any more (I do occasionally for hash). They are just too damned inconvenient. Rolling machines are for dilettantes, (again I am still a fan). But nothing beats a PAX.

Smoking Pot With Mom

So mom wants to get educated. Point her to the right sites, send her links to the right articles, and get her a good app. Hit her with the media barrage. The old public relations ploy. Lay on the statistics and stories about how safe marijuana really is. And finally, for those of you who have PHD parents, the insidious motivation quotient argument will ultimately have to be quashed. Tell them that there is not one iota of conclusive evidence that proves we will all degenerate into no mind, Zero-gross-national-product imbeciles if we become a nation of potheads. In fact, it would probably even be a little healthy if we did. Just my opinion.

Naturally, all will not go as planned. You will have volleyed with the parents tirelessly to an even two sets each, and are quite possibly at deuce in the final game of the final set when you hear the imperious response of how it is still illegal. Stress the positive. Explain the legalization process. Don't stop now. And then when you have finally come to the end of the PR campaign, explain the joys of the lifestyle. Pot smokers, don't go sour. When have you ever seen two stoners in a bar room brawl? The recreational marijuana enthusiast has spawned the only remaining glimmer of the give-peace-a-chance ethos. In the long run, marijuana will make us all more taciturn, less antagonistic, less aggressive, and less belligerent—all those multisyllabic pejoratives we are so used to being.

That ought to do it. Remember the basic etiquette here. Build up your side. Don't launch the predictable polemic against the system. Tirades are frowned upon. Pot, after all, will some day be the savior (do not use the word 'opiate') of this inextricable dangerous world.

fact or fictionstrainsvintagehumanity
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About the Creator

Wendy Weedler

Lives in Washington D.C. Has been part of the legalization movement for decades.

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