BY ALESSANDRA INZINA

Twenty-twenty sucked. There’s no way around it.

Kobe Bryant died, an airborne virus made your weekly grocery trip a life-threatening endeavor,
the economy collapsed and the U.S. president wouldn’t stop screaming nonsense into his void
of mindless hordes. And, lately, time moves slowly.

COVID-19 has left Americans playing a waiting game. Waiting for the economy to bounce back, waiting for the vaccine to begin rolling out, waiting for the virus to dissipate so we can resume our jobs, activities and public-outings that once filled our schedules.

While we wait, a staggering 42 percent of the labor force now works at home and another 33 percent doesn’t work at all, according to the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. A majority of Americans have an uncomfortable amount of time to kill when just months earlier, we begged for
more of it.

How does the country touted around the world for its career-focused, never-stop-to-smell-the-roses, hustle-and-bustle attitude, adjust to this period of stagnation? Well, we smoke.

People want a break, and it seems we’re turning to weed to get it.

Easing COVID-19 stress

President Donald Trump once suggested that accredited epidemiologists look into injecting Lysol to kill the coronavirus and clean the lungs. They gave a hard pass, and some picked up a joint instead.
Weed has absolutely no effect on curing COVID-19, and smokers and tobacco users are more at risk for contracting COVID-19, according to the World Health Organization. Despite this, people have turned to the psychoactive plant for relief from stress.

“Vice” industries, such as liquor stores, usually do exceptionally well in times of crisis and instability. People want help in coping with the absurdity around them.

According to a study done by American Marijuana, during the pandemic, 29 percent of smokers have begun smoking more weed than they usually would.

Smoking can cause damage to a person’s otherwise healthy lungs, a valuable resource with
the star of the pandemic being a lung-attacking virus. So, 28 percent of users switched to other means of consumption, such as oils and edibles. Seventy-two percent said screw it, and decided to keep smoking anyway.

People are smoking for relief, it seems. In that same American Marijuana study, 35 percent of participants tried to switch to other anxiety relief supplements, but 76 percent said weed worked better for them.

Coral and Tarah Hines, co-founders of Buena Botanicals, are familiar with using cannabis to relieve stress and pain. Their mother suffers from an array of medical problems that cause her pain. She was struggling to manage all the side effects of her medications when her daughters brought her a sample of CBD.

“She was saying how great it was; how it made her feel much better,” Coral says. “And we were thinking, like oh look… if it’s helping her, then how many other people in our community can really benefit from this plant?”

Coral and Tarah started Buena Botanicals in March of 2019 and have recently seen their business take off due in part to the emotional needs of 2020.

“I think people are looking for more natural alternatives to manage whatever they have going on in their lives,” Coral says.

Buena Botanicals sells full-spectrum CBD, a non-intoxicating cannabinoid found in the hemp plant, and has also seen education on the healing properties of their products rise.

“They’re [people] starting to become more aware about how cannabis can help them in their daily lives – with stress, or anxiety, or depression, or whatever they have going on day-to-day,” Coral says.
Besides the recent spike in demand, the CBD industry has grown exponentially in recent years. Business News Daily set the industry’s growth rate at an annual average of 49 percent, reaching approximately $20 billion in sales by 2024.

“CBD is a great industry,” Coral says. “It’s definitely growing, it’s going to grow even more.”

Legalization on the rise

In the 2020 election, five more states passed provisions to legalize marijuana; adding up to 15 states total with legalized recreational weed.

Even conservative states have jumped on the train, with Mississippi, Montana, South Dakota and Arizona all voting to lift some restrictions on the drug.

Professor Robert Solomon, co-chair for the University of California, Irvine Center for the Study of Cannabis, believes that the work to legalize weed at the state level is over, and now the battle goes to the federal level.

Cannabis, even if legal in the states, is still illegal under federal law due to that unfortunate bit of legislation called the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which placed weed next to heroin in terms of addictiveness.

“I think the FDA will increasingly move to approve drugs that include cannabis, and we will put this last 50 years of the war on drugs behind us,” Solomon says. “Another failure behind us.”
Solomon has noticed that ex-military people, a usually conservative group, are finding that cannabis helps them manage pain and symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder.

“Thirty years ago, a friend’s wife was dying of cancer and he couldn’t buy legal weed. He said, ‘Do you have a way I can get my wife some cannabis to smoke because of her cancer treatment.’ We did, and it worked,”

he says.

Solomon also recognized another group easily turned to support cannabis: family members of cancer survivors, something he’s experienced first-hand.

Weed gets rid of nausea better than any drug on the market, Solomon shares.
Besides the potential health benefits, legalizing cannabis makes room for a number of clinical testing, studies and research to be conducted into the plant.

As of right now, no one knows for sure the long-term effects cannabis smoking can have on adolescent brains, fetuses, people with mental illnesses or developmental delays. The War on Drugs halted all potential studies with its strict criminalization of weed.

The federal government does grow its own infamous patch of weed run by the University of Mississippi and it is the only weed FDA-approved for clinical testing. The weed is so woefully bad, it’s unfit for the tests scientists want to run.

“Feds grow lousy weed,” Solomon says.

Legalizing the drug on a federal level would allow the U.S. to catch up to countries like Canada and Israel, which already have started running studies on weed, he shares.

Legalization could also pave the way for the thousands behind bars for minor cannabis infractions to have their records scrubbed.

“We have put too many people, largely young African American men, in jail,” Solomon says. “It’d be hard to identify a greater failure in American history than the War on Drugs.”

Every 25 seconds, a person in America is arrested for drug possession, a number which has tripled since 1980. Black Americans are nearly six times more likely to be arrested on drug-related offenses, according to the Center for American Progress.

Incarceration has shown little to no impact on drug misuse rates.

However, drug policies are changing. As of 2016, 26 states plus D.C. have removed the threat of jail-time for those possessing small amounts of cannabis. Thirty-five states plus D.C. have legalized medicinal cannabis use, and 15 states plus D.C., have legalized weed altogether, according to the Drug Policy Alliance.

Some politicians oppose those changes, like the governor of South Dakota, Rep. Kristi Noem, who infamously said, “I’ve never met anyone who got smarter smoking pot.”

“I’ve never met anyone who got smarter by being governor of South Dakota,” Solomon retorts.
Noem does not seem to represent her constituents, who just legalized medicinal and recreational marijuana on election day. South Dakota is the first state to legalize both facets of cannabis simultaneously.

With the states rapidly moving to lift restrictions, a massive shift in the cannabis industry will take place.

Solomon predicts that the legal plant will have an increase in taxes, cannabis will be able to be shipped through the mail, there will be an influx of foreign and local investment, changes in law enforcement, more synthetic cannabis production and an increase in entrepreneurial opportunities within the industry.

Americans have taken to the polls election season after election season, to show their representatives where exactly they stand on the topic of cannabis legalization.

And what they want, polls would suggest, is to put the War on Drugs in the ever-growing trash-heap of American history.