Edible Hudson Valley/Edible Westchester, Summer, 2019
To be clear, at this point, we were writing about hemp—the non-THC containing strain of cannabis from which CBD is derived. There were several reasons why we felt that it was important to devote an issue to weed in Edible. 1) We could see that cannabis agriculture was about to change the lives of many NYS farmers. 2) We were excited about weed as a regenerative crop that can literally remove pollutants from the soil. 3) We could smell that the legalization of recreational weed was imminent. 4) We knew that recreational weed was already hitting the underground food scene. 5) We were all for reparations made to the communities unequally prosecuted under Rockefeller Drug Laws. 6) After The Porn Issue of the previous summer, we wanted to top it. Look for the Weed Issue Volume II in Winter 2023.
Use The Weed Issue tag below to see some of the stories in this issue.
EDITOR'S NOTE, SUMMER 2019
Legacy Market
As we approach legalization, I’ve been hearing a lot of “Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead”—but I’m gonna be the jerk who points out right here that the wicked witch had style. That black dress! Those puffy sleeves! I mean, she wrote “Surrender Dorothy” in the sky! I don’t know about you, but there are some things I’m gonna miss when the green witch dies.
Words. Now that weed is putting on a suit and tie, happy words like “bong” have become passé. Bongs were bubbly and fun, but today’s “functional art” merely sounds expensive. I mean, “Budtenders.” I don’t even know what to do with this. Back in the day, we had “drug dealers” and the phrase seemed to do the trick. I can see where budtenders is going— “Weedologists?” “Smokistas?”—and it can only go south from there.
I realize that it no longer makes sense to call the paths that historically carried weed from grower to smoker the “illicit drug trade”: We’ve decriminalized the product and (fingers crossed!) may even set those imprisoned for it free. But “legacy market”? As opposed to the legal market? It sounds like a flea market stall that sells Franklin Mint coins. Sadly, “bootleg,” once a sexy evocation of Prohibition rumrunners, has been co-opted by the shlubby guys with parabolic mics at jam-band shows.
Smoke shops—what a buzzkill. Back in the day, we had “head shops” and these put the culture into counterculture. Oh! There were R. Crumb comix, band pins, and felted posters that glowed under black light bulbs. There were racks of posters, Page, Bowie, and black-and-white movie stills: W.C. Fields glowering over a poker hand and an alarmingly eyebrowless Jean Harlow, all platinum, satin, and cleavage. There was jewelry (silver and turquoise), patchouli, and those stonery poncho things that some wag named “drug rugs.” In their heyday, head shops were positively Goop-like in their totality of lifestyle merchandizing: You could find literature, art, music, fashion, and patchouli. All a smoke shop sells is tech.
Here’s what really worries me: I worry that 50 years of underground weed culture will be Urban Outfitted. You know—decontextualized, denatured, and shackled between quotation marks like The Smiths T-shirts purchased by mall kids who don’t know what any of it means, but suspect that it might be cool. OK. So, I no longer wear my Smiths T-shirts because a) they don’t fit and b) Morrissey lost his mind, but that doesn’t mean that I want to see some little Starbucks sucker proudly wearing one while grooving to the Jonas Brothers through his earbuds. To quote Paulie from “The Sopranos,” it’s a “rape of the culture”—specifically, my culture.
I’m just saying, before we go screaming into the future, let’s appreciate where we’ve been.
Julia Sexton, Editor in Chief @juliasexton
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