Getting mommy to dispense the drugs

• lprent
• 9 years ago
• Categories: drugs, Economy, tax
• Tags: cannabis, consumer society, helen kelly, The Economist

Many years ago, I read John Brunner’s “Stand on Zanzibar”. It had an interesting mixture

…to create a sprawling narrative that presents a complex and multi-faceted view of the story’s future world. Such information-rich chapters were often constructed from many short paragraphs, sentences, or fragments thereof — pulled from sources such as slogans, snatches of conversation, advertising text, songs, extracts from newspapers and books, and other cultural detritus. The result is reminiscent of the concept of information overload.

I often feel that I am living through that as I fight my way through the backlog on my cellphone. Never more so than when I read the analysis of a crazy world in The Economist.

From the pages of the Economist a few weeks ago, we had “Mother of all highs” which details an analysis about the progress in marketing legal cannabis as the nascent industry in the US starts to target mothers in their efforts to penetrate the real market…

AT A soirée on the outskirts of Denver, Colorado, one woman greets her fellow guests with a delicate bowl of vanilla sea-salt caramels, each one laced with marijuana. “It’s quite subtle,” she insists. “I just keep a few in my bag for when I’m feeling stressed out.” Over light chat about family and work, the group quickly cleaned up the bowl.

It is a scene Americans will be accustomed to by about 2025, according to Jazmin Hupp, head of Denver’s Women Grow society. “Once moms are on board, that’s it,” she explains, taking a drag on a hot pink e-cigarette filled with cannabis oil. Her battle cry explains the recent surge in products such as vegan weed bonbons, cannabis kale crisps, cannabis spiced almonds and “high tea”.

Cannabis is now legal for recreational use in four states and the District of Columbia, and for medical use in another 21.

Mothers do not fit neatly into the story of cannabis, which has as its protagonists Mexican drug lords, layabouts and rappers—all of them male. Even now, the leading figures in the legalisation movement are businessmen. Perhaps this is unsurprising. A drunk teenage son is one thing, but stoned as well?

Even so, those hoping to take the drug mainstream know they have to get mothers on their side. One way to do so is to emphasise the health benefits of the weed.

Yep. Stoned mothers is the way to go… And really when you think about. It really has to be. You can just imagine a classic social get together with tupperware and doped out mothers. It can’t help but to improve the sales!

Winning over mothers has long been a ploy to turbocharge sales, according to Maria Bailey and Bonnie Ulman, co-authors of “Trillion Dollar Moms”. Mothers control $1.6 trillion of direct consumer spending and influence the buying habits of their entire household. In politics, it was the soccer moms, newspapers declared in 1996, that returned Bill Clinton to the White House. And mothers tend to make a family’s medical decisions. If matriarchs can be persuaded that marijuana boosts rather than imperils health, cannabis caramels may one day be found stuck to the teeth of a grateful nation.

This is all quite obvious, and really I can’t think of any reason why non-programmers can’t get stoned on THC. There are more than enough instances around where people have found that it is effective for pain relief and a lot less of a problem than opiates.

In my family, we have strange effects from medical morphine. My father kept seeing green spiders crawling around the room after his knees were cyborged. My grandfather had a hell of a time kicking the morphine habit he picked up after having ulcers in his bone marrow. But the dope smokers in the family have never had any such problems.

Lets legalize the drug and start to tax it – HEAVILY.

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For the record, I have tried weed when I was 20. It interfered with my being able to program effectively for days afterwards. I preferred the abrupt educational hangovers of alcohol. My only real interest in products derived from cannabis is that they should be legal, available AND are taxed at least as heavily as alcohol. In particular for people suffering like our author Helen Kelly is..

“I’ve tried [cannabis oil]. I’m not promoting it as a curative, but as a pain relief it’s incredibly effective for me and it doesn’t make me feel sick, which morphine does.”