Currently, marijuana is enjoying a long-deserved renaissance in the United States. For 10,000 years, cannabis has been utilized as a sacrament and medicine by numerous cultures that have cultivated the plant, consumed it and used it as an alternative to alcohol and pharmaceutical drugs. In the big scheme of things, the “War on Marijuana” is really just a blip in history—a hundred long years in the United States, where prohibition has fueled arrests, incarceration, and ruined lives.
In his new book which came out in April, How to Smoke Pot (Properly): A Highbrow Guide to Getting High, VICE weed columnist David Bienenstock explores serious issues like the potential of medical marijuana to treat a variety of maladies, and less serious issues like how to roll a joint in the wind, while also covering everything in between.
The book also gives a primer on how to get a job in the weed industry, covers the pros and cons of dabbing, and is a logical step forward from Jack Herer’s The Emperor Wears No Clothes.
“We’ve reached the moment where society has kind of started to accept the truth about this plant,” Bienenstock tells The Fix. “It’s just taking time for these changes to roll out, but we can never forget the many, many, many people still in prison for this. Many people in the United States and around the world are still living under this suppressive system, but at the same time I think we can all take a lot of hope from the changes that are happening.”
Finally, we’re starting to see the acknowledgement that a huge mistake has been perpetrated on a hoodwinked society—where a plant was vilified and generations of kids were made out to be outlaws, addicts and delinquents for smoking the herb. And now Wall Street and Big Business are here to legitimize marijuana, but proponents like Bienenstock say that marijuana was always legitimate, it was the prohibition of the plant that was illegitimate.
“What gets me angry is when people want to skip to the part where we say, hey, well, marijuana was legitimate. It was the War on Marijuana that was illegitimate,” Bienenstock says. “We can’t let all of these institutions of society off the hook for the damage that they did to individuals and to communities. We need to hold them accountable so that this doesn’t happen again and so we can look at the rest of society through the prism of the War on Marijuana and the War on Drugs and take a hard look at these institutions and say, my God, if they’re willing to put people in cages for growing a plant that’s a tremendously beneficial medicine, what else are they doing to us?”