Inhaling spring across state lines

NORTHAMPTON, MASS. — For an unlikely cannabis tourist, the world stands on its head just a few blocks from the Interstate-91 exit in this lively, intellectual market town.

The ultimate destination today is the Emily Dickinson House, in nearby downtown Amherst, where we’re looking for evidence of ever-lasting life in the imaginative arrangements of words into universal feelings amid slices of 19th century time and place.

But when there is a cultural shift that has set up a literal border crisis between heavy-footed, repressed Connecticut and nimble, libertarian Massachusetts, it’s worth investigating, and possibly taking sides. Just don’t make me root for the Red Sox.

Here are four local police officers, making positive gestures, smiling — undoubtedly reveling in the silent calculations of their overtime pay, kah-ching! — and oh so gently directing traffic through lanes of orange cones.

It’s 8:30 on a Saturday morning and the smallish parking lot is already overflowing with cars slowly moving in and out of whitelined spaces.

To a child of the 1960’s this seemingly outlandish scene is breathtaking in its blue-uniformed simplicity. So, the police are us to the pot dealers!

I think back to a guy I never knew back in the mid-1970s, a 20-something friend of a former girlfriend who ended up in Lucasville, the nasty maximumsecurity prison in southern Ohio, because he had a pile of marijuana and was caught selling some of it.

Of course, at this point, legal cannabis is old-hat to the locals here, who have freely enjoyed this state’s voter-mandated retailcannabis since last fall. To an out-of-stater, who for the last quarter century has barely contemplated the notion of smoking weed, well, it’s eye-opening.

But hey, why not. Alcohol abuse is a true danger to public health. You can see it in the daily police reports of domestic violence and fatal car crashes.

Even during the supposed sober daylight, Connecticut highways are death traps, as every idiot drives recklessly and 25 mph over the limit, threatening the lives of us who dare to approximate the speed limit as part of a quaint, outdated social contract.

It’s sunny and warm as the fact-finding mission brings your columnist to NETA Northampton, a nondescript building that looks vaguely like a doctor’s office.

One after another, people emerge from a side door holding small white bags with tiny, shiny holographic tags that for lack of any other reason, indicate freshness.

A dude outside the mirrored front door scans my driver’s license, and I step into a 21st century that Connecticut lawmakers do not have the courage to confront, as they stand in timid judgment on the open secret of marijuana consumption.

Inside, it’s everything cannabis, with maybe a dozen clerks set up for consultation and sales.

A young woman — why is everyone smiling? — hands me a couple pages of available products, complete with THC levels and prices. Such a far cry from the guys back in the college dorm, where it was whatever was available.

The line is short. I am behind a pair of young women who are holding hands and talking softly about the differences between Black Triangle Kush (22.1 percent THC) and Blackwater OG (16.3 percent THC). Huh?

Friendly, tattooed, baseball-hatted bud-tenders —

a 21st Century title for the economic development types who ran for office on creating “jobs” — are taking their time with customers. I feel like a duck out of water.

For the last 25, 30 years I’ve ascribed to the words of poet Allen Ginsberg, who made impassioned arguments for the legalization of marijuana, charging that its persecution since the 1930s was a way to keep urban communities, then the anti-war generation, under the thumb of the paramilitary tools of the oppressive power elite.

Ginsberg also said the psychoactive effects of the drug can open doors that, after a while, one can easily walk through without ingesting it.

The moment of truth arrives and I walk up to a bud tender named Hunter. “I never thought I’d see the day,” I say sheepishly. He assures me that everything is fine, and I am free to take my time and ask as many questions as I wish.

On our way out of town, stopping every few blocks for the pedestrians who, thanks to this progressive state’s law, have taken back the streets, we drive slowly through a neighborhood, on our way to Amherst.

On the wide, shady porch of an older house, I see another pair of young women, maybe recent graduates of Smith College, enjoying their last few days together before graduation sends them reeling into separate futures. They are in relaxed conversation.

They’re handing a joint back and forth in the ritual of sharing, enjoying the freedom of living in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.