The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Planting seeds of legal pot
“...Smoking marijuana is more fun than drinking beer.
But a friend of ours was captured and they gave him 30 years ...”
Phil Ochs “Outside of a Small
Circle of Friends” Sorry, but ever since Massachusetts opened their retail cannabis establishments, I’ve been smelling dope.
It’s everywhere, it seems. It’s wafting along the sidewalk, and there is no one around. Driving, I smell wisps of it from the State Capitol, down Interstate-91, onto the Wilbur Cross Parkway, then all the way home.
It’s not me, people. I’ve been there and done that, a long time ago. It’s you, enjoying that freedom to leave a smoky trail, for all to ponder the aroma. If it is the smell of freedom, time will shortly tell.
Yes, the heat is on, Connecticut. That $150-million a year in tax revenue is dangling out there, so tantalizing. For the state’s cannabis-community consumers, Northampton and Great Barrington are short jaunts for legal weed. Kinda. You still have to avoid the cops bringing it back over the border. But how stoned can you get before you’re caught?
If there were any specifics in his election campaign, Gov. Ned Lamont wanted full legalization of marijuana, so-called recreational cannabis, Connecticutgrown, sold in licensed retail establishments. Give the people what they want. Joe Accettullo,
37, from Hamden, agrees.
He’s been living the underground life, helping people score despite the prohibitions that date back to the late-1930s, when the American legal apparatus, starved from persecuting people five years or more after Prohibition, turned their attentions to the evil weed which, given water and very little attention, can grow and blossom anywhere. At least the valued female plants can. In the matriarchy of natural selection, males get in the way of robust, unpollenated flowers that signify the glory — and potency — of the harvest. Any right-thinking grower cuts them down.
A few decades later and President Richard Nixon conned the Silent Majority into believing the urban unrest and anti-war effort were the result of dopesmoking blacks and hippies, instead of prevailing “white supremacy” and barbaric American imperialism.
Gather around youngsters and let’s talk about the days before designer cannabis, when the Mexican and even domestic weed was laden with seeds that would turn joints into exploding cigars, while the traces of the herbicide paraquat likely seared a generation of lungs.
No wonder the people I know who’ve made the missions of mercy to Northampton, turning the I-91 corridor into the Highway of Hemp, are willing to pay more for cannabis that has been lab inspected and given its THC profile pedigree, than whatever their local dealers can scare up.
Accettullo was in the Capitol the other day, surfing the edge of a pro-marijuana news conference, symbolically on the outside looking in, although he knows more about the growing and marketing than most people. If the corporate cannabis types have their way — and if weed is fully legalized this year, they are likely to — then the underground, so-called black marketeers who have loyally served their customers at great risk to their personal freedom, are going to get pushed aside. No way the little guy, no matter how successful, has a few million bucks to put up for a mass-grow facility.
The Office of State Ethics reports 11 registered marijuana-related lobbyists, up from seven last year. Accettullo, a member of the New England Craft Cannabis Alliance is banking on what he calls a “connoisseur-grade product” that will somehow emerge in a niche market of its own. But he’s worried about getting forgotten.
“I feel like our voices are lost in the legalization debate,” he said, noting that big companies want to piggyback on the existing medical marijuana industry. “I don’t want to see a homogenized version of our product in Connecticut. Why end Prohibition and then have Budweiser come in?”
I couldn’t answer his questions. What I do know is that a bill as complicated as retail cannabis, with accompanying erasure of criminal records for those convicted of possession, is easier to kill then pass. If Lamont can’t get the legislation through this year, it can’t pass next year, in a General Assembly election season. Then, the state might as well run bus lines for buyers heading to Massachusetts and New York, like stoned ski clubs, bringing their tax revenue over the border.
Rep. Vincent Candelora, R-North Branford, a longtime marijuana opponent, sees what’s going on.
“I think the details aren’t forthcoming because part of the problem is that there will clearly be a struggle within this building on marijuana,” Candelora said. “You have a group that fundamentally believes in homegrown and then you have a whole bunch of lobbyists here wanting to protect that industry and make sure that a certain segment of the population makes money off it.”
Either way the aroma will continue to waft.