Letter from America
My local high school reeks of skunk, thanks to legalised cannabis
Strawberry Hill – the neighbourhood next to us in Cambridge, Massachusetts – is less affluent and more racially diverse than ours.
Two of its residents have earned college degrees in marketing, and want to give something back to Strawberry Hill — by opening a cannabis dispensary next to Star Market, the giant supermarket in whose Olympic-sized car park families of both neighbourhoods cross trolleys.
Star Market is the closest thing we have to an agora or an old New England common. Schoolchildren buy their lunches there, and teenagers and old-timers loiter in the afternoons.
Families don’t want to walk their kids into the supermarket past goggle-eyed stoners. We already hear stories of hospitalisation and hard drug use among the 15-year-olds whom we remember as cheerful little third graders. The corridors of the high school are thick with the cat’s-pee smell of ‘skunk’. At night, the Star Market car park is an ideal location for the ‘diversion to minors’ of legally purchased product.
When I raised some objections on our neighbourhood list-serve (a private email system), one of the neighbours, an elderly white male, denounced me as a racist. I felt hated by the people I live among. My mixed-race wife was very upset. Only one person, a Scottish immigrant, defended me on the list-serve. An American native mailed me privately. ‘Who was that asshole?’ he mused.
A community meeting was set for four in the afternoon, when most of the parents were at work or on the school run. Hardly anyone turned up. Most of those who did were stoned.
The cannabis entrepreneurs were true Americans, passionate about their work. They stacked the room with their old friends, all firm advocates for getting totally toasted, day in, day out. They came with a slide show and information about tinctures and edibles. They even came with a former police officer who described the Fort Knox-like security arrangements – double doors, basement vaults, 15 security cameras – that should dissuade other entrepreneurs from robbing their stash.
The meeting exposed all the hostilities of class and race. I remembered happier days at the other Strawberry Hill, Horace Walpole’s refuge at Twickenham. I then realised that Walpole shared the entrepreneurs’ exacting standards of connoisseurship, and probably would have shared their commitment to hiring LGBTQ sommeliers, too. He might even have derived some gothic amusement from their willingness to hire some real experts – ex-cons convicted for nonviolent crimes.
The American system of democratic law-making has worked too well in this case. Our planning board has written the zoning laws, which keep cannabis shops a mere 300 feet away from schools. Before that, in 2017, the people of Massachusetts voted in favour of legalisation by 53.7 per cent to 46.3 per cent. Lower-income suburbs such as Quincy and Brockton were barely in favour, but more affluent Cambridge was strongly in favour, 71.5 per cent to 29.5 per cent.
So liberal democracy at its most liberal now presents the voters of Cambridge with a rare dilemma. The wealthy of America are used to passing the social costs of their liberalism to the poor.
For once, however, 71.5 per cent of Cambridge will be confronted with the consequences of their votes and attitudes. The psychotic chickens are coming home to roost.
Our wealthy and mostly white neighbourhood is already home to teenagers stoked to the gills, and parents too embarrassed by their liberalism and their furtive pot habits to object.
Even an entrepreneur who doesn’t get high on his own supply would see that our children represent a great business opportunity. They have their parents’ money to burn. And money – drug money and tax money – is what this is about. The state adds 18 per cent in tax to every sale.
Strangely, no one complains that this poll tax will be disproportionately onerous for the poor. Perhaps someone will go to court, claiming that cannabis is like food, and should be excused sales tax. If, that is, they can be bothered to get up off the couch.
In October it will be 50 years since Jack Kerouac, who learnt to bingedrink just up Route 3 at Lowell, drank himself to death. Our children have never heard of Kerouac, but the counterculture is now the official culture of an infantilised nation, and lifestyle choice is indistinguishable from libertarian capitalism. Over the teacups, a psychoanalyst friend tells me that her patients, all of them rich, young tech wizards, find narcotic and polyamorous indulgence unsatisfying, but don’t know how to form adult social relationships – or where to start in adult life.
For us, though, who’ve built a family home next to Strawberry Hill, this feels like the end.