[420 Girl]

Ah, the bliss of suburban Philadelphia in summer.

On a recent balmy, breezy Wednesday night, Amanda*, a pretty, youthful-looking mom in her early 40s who lives in a roomy stone house in Ardmore, put her daughter to bed and went outside to her patio to enjoy the warm evening with her husband, Mark. There, overlooking their swimming pool and beds of lilies and hydrangeas, she and Mark, who’s a successful money manager, had another glass of their favorite La Crema chardonnay. Then Amanda and Mark did something that was less Main Line and more Phish concert: They fired up a fattie, and got high like teenagers.

A couple of years ago, Amanda, who attends lunches in Chanel and Burberry and spends weekends shopping in New York, would have stuck with just the chardonnay to unwind after the homework, the cooking, the dishes and the dog-walking, but more recently, she and Mark have been toking up several times a month.

Mark gets the pot from his brother (who has a mysterious source somewhere in the wilds of New Jersey), and Amanda and Mark smoke outside mainly because they want to keep the smell from waking up their daughter (though she’s so young, Amanda says, she wouldn’t actually know what the smell was). If their neighbors, with whom Mark and Amanda are friendly, sniff the smoke drifting over into their yard, the couple figures they’ll likely be more jealous than disapproving. Who knows? Given the current Bob Marley-ish climate in our once-conservative suburbs, the couple next door would probably poke their heads through the hedge and ask to join in the fun.

“About half the people I know on the Main Line smoke pot,” Amanda estimates. “It’s so much more prevalent than people think. I’m not talking daily use,” she clarifies, “but recreationally, or at a party. People aren’t open about it, exactly, but at a party, they’ll go off into a room and smoke it.”

Amanda is politically conservative, and one of the most responsible and precise people I’ve met, so her occasional pot-smoking at first seems completely out of left field. But there’s a regular boom of stoners over 35 in Philly and the suburbs these days, and the people toking up might be that attractive couple at the next table at Savona, with the baseball-playing kids and the high-stakes careers.

Pot, it seems, is having a moment. Around Philly, the heady smell of marijuana is floating out from Rittenhouse Square terraces, from suburban townhouse windows, from the living rooms of Chester County farmhouses. Bankers smoke it on Saturdays on the way to a round of golf at the club. Narberth moms smoke after yoga class. Kids driving you crazy? Dad’s going to take the dog for a walk in the woods behind the house, and no, you can’t come with him. Seemingly easier to obtain than a reservation at Amis, pot is the new status hobby in the suburbs.

“It’s not looked at as a big deal,” says Bridget, a mom of two in Bryn Mawr. “At cocktail parties, people smoke pot. It’s therapeutic, a way to relax. And a lot of people think it’s less damaging to their bodies than drinking.”

Still, you have to wonder: How did the same people you see photographed for local society columns become the Cheeches and Chongs of Chestnut Hill (if Cheech shopped at Neiman Marcus and attended gallery openings)? Is a generation desperately trying to hang onto its receding youth pairing bong hits with Botox in an effort to look and feel 17 once more?

Then again, attitudes have changed drastically toward the once-taboo drug. It’s as if we’ve reached a turning point in our view of pot, which is regarded these days by many as a perfectly valid lifestyle choice, rather than a passé and slacker-ish habit. The question looms, though — with our formative years in the ’70s and ’80s spent getting yelled at by our parents to do our homework and not smoke pot, is lighting up as an adult the ultimate, if somewhat silly, act of rebellion before we hurtle headlong into old age?

IN 2010, marijuana is suddenly everywhere in pop culture. And today, it’s largely portrayed as a lighthearted, almost upscale pursuit, connoting boho chic and an appealing rakishness, like wearing Lululemon workout clothes or driving a Prius. Smack in the middle of Bryn Mawr, a cute-looking spot called Omar’s Hookah Cafe has opened. Granted, you can’t buy or use pot there, but still, it’s a hookah bar in Bryn Mawr. Think of the current climate as less Woodstock and more Anthropologie, less Haight-Ashbury and more dinner-party-in-Haverford.

The theme to most contemporary portrayals of marijuana: Pot is naughty, harmless fun! On a recent episode of Parenthood, a father confiscated his teenager’s weed, and later ended up smoking it with his brother outside the teen’s school auditorium. In last year’s It’s Complicated, Meryl Streep’s character, an accomplished bakery/cafe owner in her 50s, gets gloriously high with Steve Martin (playing an architect), has a blast dancing at a party, and then makes chocolate croissants — rolling her own pastry dough from scratch, no Doritos in this movie — to sate a case of munchies. (On a side note, I don’t smoke pot, but does anyone really stay high for four hours after smoking a single joint, as Meryl does in that movie?) And it’s this age group that a government study recently singled out as the folks who got high in record numbers in the past year, with some 4.3 million people over 50 copping to illegal drug use. And what’s more, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released earlier this year, fully 81 percent of Americans say they’re in favor of legalizing marijuana, at least for medical use.

With the taboo once attached to pot dissipating as quickly as smoke from one of Omar’s hookahs, non-teenage Philly marijuana fans are increasingly less shy about sharing their joie de bong hit. “I was recently at a meeting with a client,” says Doug, a consultant who lives outside Chestnut Hill, “and after we were done with the meeting, he fired up his bong and offered it to me.” Doug’s business partner, Steve, who’s in his 30s, says he went to a “big fancy party on the Main Line recently where I met all these 40ish women who invited me to smoke.” Steve didn’t join in the fun, but one imagines the night devolving into a hashish-laced cougarfest, à la the orgy scene in Zoolander. With celebrities openly smoking pot and the ’70s now idealized as a golden era of pre-yuppiedom, pot was seemingly bound to make a comeback.

Not only is weed acceptable these days; it’s carefully accessorized. “Everyone has their classic little Murano pipes, hand-blown in Italy,” notes Bridget, the Bryn Mawr mom, of her friends who are into marijuana. “I’ve been to a girls’ night out where we smoked pot in the limo on the way to a concert. We just put the barrier up and the windows down, and the driver didn’t say anything.” Perhaps that’s the way to endure the endless construction on the Blue Route and Shore traffic this summer.

And soon, marijuana will be legally available just across the river in New Jersey, at least for easing the pain associated with diseases such as cancer, HIV/AIDS, seizure disorder and multiple sclerosis. Former governor Jon Corzine signed the bill into law in January, and with a doctor’s recommendation, residents will shortly be able to purchase pot at licensed outlets, assuming their request is approved by the state. Jersey is one of 14 states with such laws, the most famous being California, where marijuana has been approved for medical use since 1996. There, attitudes about pot are so liberal that a developer recently announced that the historic downtown-L.A. hotel the Normandie would reopen as a “po-tel,” a pot-friendly hotel. At pot dispensaries on the West Coast, such stonerish-sounding varietals of bud as Platinum Headband, Strawberry Kush and L.A. Confidential are on offer, lined up like coffee options at Starbucks.

But then again, that’s California. You’d expect such a live-and-let-live vibe in that magnificently sunny state, but here in proper Philadelphia?

Chris Goldstein, a writer and radio host who’s a board member of PhillyNORML (the local branch of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws), says the very secrecy in which people veil their smoking is the Catch-22-ish reason why pot hasn’t been decriminalized yet. “While there is an uptick in people using it, and a growing connoisseur market that will pay more for good marijuana, they also have the most to lose by standing up for it,” he notes. “There are some suburban soccer-mom groups and parents’ groups emerging to support medical marijuana and call for decriminalization, but there are millions of people using it every day, and the most remarkable thing is the job they do hiding it.” (And only some people are getting caught. One recent analysis showed that though white women and African-American women in Philadelphia are believed to smoke marijuana at near-equal levels, black women are much more likely to be arrested. Only 90 white women in Philly were arrested for having small quantities of pot in 2008, while 345 African-American women were arrested that same year for the same crime.)

As for her own teenagers, Bridget says that while she’d be worried about them getting into trouble at school for having pot, she doesn’t think it’s such a big deal for teens to experiment with it. “I wouldn’t really care,” she says about her kids having ganja, “but I’d pretend I did, to make an impression on them.” Since it’s illegal, she says, she counsels them (hopefully convincingly) to avoid pot.

Ironically, it’s the more proper-seeming couples who are at the vanguard of the New Pot Culture — driven to numb themselves, one guesses, by the pressures of managing the complications of a productive adult life.

Amanda, the stylish Ardmore mom, was never much of a pot-smoker in high school or college; her renewed appreciation for pot started on a kid-free vacation in — where else? — Jamaica, a hub of high-grade stuff. “We smelled it from all directions,” she reports. Her husband made a few discreet inquiries on the beach and came back with the goods, which turned out to be “amazing pot!” she says. “I don’t know what was in it.” They sat on the balcony of the five-star resort, puffing away after dinner, and Amanda found that not only did it make them as carefree as teenagers; it also gave them both the sexual stamina of 18-year-olds.

Jumbo mortgages, aging parents, the white-knuckle experiences of teaching your kids how to drive and helping them prep for SATs — all of these might send you to your shrink, but more immediately, to smoke a bowl. The fact that it’s illegal makes it all the more deliciously verboten. If you’re smoking pot, you’re officially not old and boring — right?

NOT EVERYONE on the Main Line and in Chestnut Hill, however, thinks pot is so chic and fun. Like any substance, pot can quickly transition from occasional indulgence to daily habit, and one friend tells me she’s observed her 30- and 40-something friends getting too Woody Harrelson for her taste: “When I hear that my friends are smoking pot before they pick up their kids at school, I don’t think that’s okay.”

Another person who doesn’t think pot is okay is Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams. Though recent buzz (no pun intended) would have you believe Williams is pushing to lighten punishment for potheads, Williams states, “We are not decriminalizing marijuana — any effort like that would be one for the legislature to undertake. The penalty available for these minimal-amount offenses remains exactly the same.”

What Williams is proposing, explains his communications director, Tasha Jamerson, is to expedite the court proceedings of people arrested with small quantities of pot: “You’d be arrested, obviously, but if you’re not violent, if it’s a first-time offense, you would get a summary offense, and you’d be able to go to a treatment center or pay a fine.” The D.A. is trying to lighten the load on Philly’s overburdened courts, Jamerson says, and speeding up and streamlining the process would save the city time and money.

Though bills to legalize medical marijuana are pending in both the Pennsylvania House and Senate, neither is expected to pass anytime soon. But State Senator Daylin Leach, who proposed the bill in the state Senate, makes a moving argument for medical marijuana use. “This issue is important to me because my mother-in-law, Alice Mirak, died of breast cancer a number of years ago,” Leach says. “It was an extremely difficult thing to watch. Among her sufferings was wasting away due to an inability to eat. Marijuana can help with that, but she wouldn’t try it because it was illegal.” Leach doesn’t think the bill is on the verge of passage, but sees medical legalization as inevitable eventually: “Anybody’s family member can get sick, and when that happens, all anybody wants, no matter what their ideology, is the best possible medicine,” he says.

Ironically, Doug, the Chestnut Hiller, who’s been smoking pot for most of his life, is now the one among his friends who’s avoiding joints when friends pull them out. Doug says he grew up in a bohemian ’70s home where both his parents were regular ganja smokers. “I remember my dad being so high, I was scared to drive with him,” he recalls. His parents were lenient about letting Doug and his friends get high at their house — “My dad was fine with us staying up all night and barbecuing steaks at midnight,” he remembers. In high school, Doug was a star athlete and “in love with cannabis,” as he puts it, and he kept smoking all through the 1990s. But more recently, as a parent and husband, he’s just not that into pot. (The fact that he sometimes finds himself inspired to buy ******* after he smokes pot — and then stays out all night at bars — has a lot to do with it.) Still, Doug says, though he’s currently pot-free, he doesn’t think smoking it is all that different from popping, say, a Xanax. “We live in a world of prescription-pill overload,” he observes, “so it’s not that I think pot is any worse than that.”

Health-wise, marijuana is far less potentially harmful than ****** or *******, and generally more benign than cigarette smoking, since most people smoke much less marijuana than they do tobacco. Still, smoking pot may weaken your immune system, increase your chances for pulmonary illnesses, contribute to depression, and impair memory and judgment. But among the New Pot Culture, these health risks seem to be completely ignored.

“Some people get caught up in OxyContin, which is a lot more damaging,” Bridget from Bryn Mawr argues. Bridget, who’s a Republican, is surprisingly liberal about marijuana laws, just like Amanda. “To be honest, I don’t see a reason for not making it legal,” she says. “If they put rules and regulations on it like they do for alcohol, the government could make a lot of money. And it would be safer, because it would be controlled.”

And it’s not such a stretch to imagine marijuana someday being purveyed at the amazing new Whole Foods in Plymouth Meeting. There could be self-serve bins labeled by growing region (“Lush, citrus-y overtones; from Colombia’s Guajira Peninsula, an ideal terroir due to hot sunny days and cool nights. … ”) and a smoke-on-site facility similar to the store’s charming PLCB wine boîte. Sure, it would remove the excitement of illegality, but Amanda, for one, says she’s smoking pot less to be a rebel than to relax. “I’ve always had a guilty conscience, which is why I waited until I was 39 years old before I tried it!” she laughs. “But I could never smoke it all the time. It saps all motivation.”

So true. And while pot-smokers in general are a pleasant group — seemingly stress-free, mellow, and able to enjoy 3-D showings of Avatar to the fullest — for those of us who don’t smoke, stoner adults can quickly become more annoying than our stoner buddies who bong-hit their way through college. One friend forbade her 42-year-old (prep-school-educated, wealthy) boyfriend to continue his daily marijuana smoking, because living with a bred-in-Bryn-Mawr guy who emulated the lifestyle of Willie Nelson crossed with Peter Tosh began to shred her nerves. “I already have enough kids,” she told me.

NOT FAR FROM Chestnut Hill is an adorable neighborhood of townhouses where Doug’s longtime dealer, Ursula, lives. Labradoodles are being walked, SUVs and BMWs are parked in driveways, planters are filled with buoyant yellow pansies. It’s hard to imagine this charming place as a drug den, but indeed, Doug says, Ursula has a coterie of regular Friday-afternoon customers whom she text-messages when her shipment arrives.

“It’s like clockwork,” says a source who has occasionally bought pot from the young mom. In Weeds-like fashion, Ursula vends her wares to neighborhood moms who walk over while their kids are at school — and the demand is enough that she’s usually sold out by suppertime.

“She has the most incredible pot ever,” Doug tells me, but then adds that Ursula’s life as a dealer isn’t as easy or cozy as it seems. She once was involved in a deal that went wrong and ended up losing nearly $100,000. She has a toddler now, and is trying to find non-drug-related work. In short, she’d like to get out of her business, but it’s so easy and lucrative that she hasn’t been able to. All of this sounds more depressing than glamorous, which always seems to be the case when you dig deeper into any illegal-drug scenario.

Maybe when pot is finally legalized, which is beginning to seem inevitable, it will actually become harder to get in the suburbs of Philly. It happened with booze at the end of Prohibition, and it would be a fitting Reefer Madness irony: The best way to dampen a generation’s appetite for weed might be to make it completely respectable.

*Names and some identifying characteristics have been changed throughout.


NewsHawk: Ganjarden: 420 MAGAZINE
Source: Philadelphia Magazine
Author: Amy Korman
Contact: Philadelphia Magazine
Copyright: 2010 Metrocorp, Inc.
Website: High Times on the Main Line


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