5.8/The Lived Worlds/Drugs

Marijuana: From Street Weed to Kind Bud, 1985–2001

The Charge the Search Invented

Underneath the acronym sat a cheap and disreputable drug. In 1989 marijuana was the cheapest intoxicant sold on a New York street and the lowest in social standing. It moved in nickel and dime bags — five and ten dollars — of low- to mid-grade Mexican and Colombian “brick weed,” pressed into seedy, harsh blocks for transport and bought from a neighborhood dealer, a campus connection, or one of the men who held up the lampposts along the western edge of Washington Square Park. The park kept a soundtrack of low pitches that the musician Moby, recalling the fountain in the early 1980s, transcribed as a sung catalogue: “smoke, smoke, mescaline, smoke, smoke, weed, smoke, dust, smoke.”³ By the late 1990s the sung list had contracted, under pressure of a decade’s policing, to a low “Smoke, smoke?” from a man holding up a lamppost and a wait for eye contact — but the fountain still sold, and the drug it sold still belonged, in the professional-class imagination, to other people.

Those other people were legible as a set. Marijuana was the shared soft drug of Rastafarian and hip-hop circles, of jam-band followers, of college students expected to put it down at graduation, of the counterculture a senior editor at a good magazine might have smoked with in 1971 and quit for good around 1981. It was the working person’s default high, cheaper and less trouble than a night’s drinking, and it was smoked indoors, in rent-stabilized apartments and artist lofts, where the smell of it in a stairwell was a routine feature of certain buildings and a marker of what kind of building it was. In the white middle-class mind the drug had already begun to acquire a reputation that set it apart from the harder ones — illegal, but gentle, natural, and harmless next to the cocaine and heroin that frightened the same people. In 1989 that reputation had bought it nothing. The bag was still five dollars, still full of seeds, still from the corner, and no one who ate lunch on an expense account admitted to buying one.

Kind Bud

What climbed first was the product. Through the 1980s the marijuana on a New York corner had been imported brick — brown, compressed, heavy with seed and stem. In the early 1990s a stronger and cleaner grade reached the city: sinsemilla, the unpollinated female flower grown without seed, and hydroponic strains raised indoors under lights, fragrant and green and several times the potency of the brick they displaced. They arrived through upstate growers and West Coast connections rather than the old import channels, and they cost more — often several times more — than a bag off the street.

The price opened a distinction inside the drug itself. Ethnographers studying the city’s retail marijuana markets in the period came to divide them in two: a commercial market in cheap, seedy, low-grade weed, and a designer market in premium domestic flower sold by weight to buyers who cared about the strain.⁴ An older or working-class user might still buy a five-dollar bag on a corner; a college-educated professional paid a premium for strong, fragrant “kind bud” — sometimes “chronic,” sometimes “KB” — and the premium was the entire point. The gap in price was not marginal. A corner bag held its old five or ten dollars; an eighth-ounce of premium flower ran to a different order of money, sold by weight to a buyer who asked what strain it was and expected an answer. A drug that had signified the margins now, in its expensive form, signified discernment: the buyer chose it by strain and grade and paid for the choosing. The product had grown a top shelf, and the top shelf did the sorting.

The Number You Called

The second thing that climbed was the manner of buying. Standing at the fountain to score was a transaction with a location, a face, and a risk, and the professional market wanted none of the three. The spread of the pager and then the cellular phone through the late 1980s and 1990s turned marijuana into a delivery business — dialed, dispatched, and carried to an apartment door, a restaurant, or a lobby on the model of a pizza — and by the end of the decade the designer trade ran largely this way, off the street and out of view.⁴ The mechanic was the same one that ran the era’s other errands: a customer dialed a pager, left a callback number, and waited a few minutes for a dispatcher to ring back and take the order. The unit changed with the channel. The street had sold by the five-dollar nickel and the ten-dollar dime, weighed by eye on a corner; the designer trade sold the fifty-dollar “cube,” a couple of grams by weight, delivered to the door.⁴ The buyer never went to the drug. The drug came to the buyer, on a schedule, the way a restaurant delivered.

The emblem of the new model was Michael Cesar, who called himself the Pope of Pot. From a meatpacking-district storefront he named the Church of Realized Fantasies, Cesar ran a marijuana-delivery service reachable at 1-800-WANT-POT: five bicycle messengers, two employees taking phone orders, a promised delivery inside the hour, a business he claimed grossed forty thousand dollars a day at its peak, with product delivered free to AIDS patients as what he insisted was the sacrament of his church.⁵ The police raided the operation in November 1990; Cesar was convicted, paroled in February 1993, and arrested again that August.⁶ His own service did not survive the busts, but the form he had built did. A person with money and a telephone no longer went anywhere to buy the drug or was seen buying it; the drug came to the door.

The dealer, in this market, was often a friend of the house. In creative fields the person who delivered might also be a musician, a DJ, or a junior colleague, and the line between the sale and the friendship blurred until buying became a kind of socializing — a visit, a shared joint, gossip carried in along with the bag. The transaction lost its last resemblance to the corner. It arrived the way anything arrived to the comfortable: quietly, on request, without a trip to the edge of anything.

The Gloss

The third thing that climbed cost nothing to manufacture and mattered most: the gloss. Across the decade a run of public moments moved marijuana from the margins of respectable conversation toward its center. In March 1992 Bill Clinton, then a candidate for president, was asked on a New York television program whether he had ever used it, and answered that as a student in England he had “experimented with marijuana a time or two” but “didn’t inhale.”⁷ The evasion was itself the event. A man could now concede past marijuana use on the road to the White House, provided he narrated it as a thing he had failed to enjoy. The next year Cypress Hill released “Hits from the Bong” on Black Sunday, an album that entered the national chart at number one, carrying casual and unembarrassed marijuana reference into the pop mainstream.⁸ In November 1996 California voters passed Proposition 215, the first state law to permit marijuana as medicine, attaching to the drug a vocabulary of treatment and compassion the law had never before extended to it.⁹

None of this altered a milligram of the drug’s chemistry or a line of its legal standing. What it altered was association. By the late 1990s marijuana in the professional imagination was the safe drug — illegal but natural, gentle, clean next to the powders that had scared the same class a decade earlier — and with safety came altitude. The weed that in 1989 had belonged to the corner and the dorm was, by 1999, a writer’s drug, an architect’s drug, an actress’s drug, a thing passed among analysts at Goldman Sachs. When a major studio released the stoner comedy How High at the end of 2001, the drug’s arrival in the mainstream was no longer an argument anyone had to make.¹⁰ It had climbed the whole height of the city without changing itself at all.

In Public View

The climb had a floor beneath it that most of the people climbing never saw. The drug’s legal status did not soften as its reputation did. Marijuana remained a Schedule I substance under federal law throughout the period, and in New York it sat under a statute passed in 1977 that had reduced private possession of small amounts to a violation — a hundred-dollar fine, not a crime — while preserving a single exception: marijuana burning or “in public view” stayed a criminal misdemeanor, whatever the amount.²

That exception was the instrument already at work in the opening’s fifty-one thousand arrests. It also sorted the arrested by more than the search itself. In 2000, Black New Yorkers were under a quarter of the city’s population but more than half of those arrests, and Hispanic New Yorkers a further third of the arrests; the surveys of who actually smoked showed use running even across race, and in some measures higher among whites.¹

So the same act carried two meanings, sorted by the body performing it. A joint passed after dinner in a downtown apartment was ambient, unremarked, a transgression that had lost the power even to interest the room. The identical joint in the pocket of a young man stopped on a street in Brownsville or the South Bronx was a misdemeanor arrest, a night in a cell, a mark on a record that followed him into every job application afterward. The drug rose for one set of people while the law came down on another, and the rise and the descent were not two stories. They were one drug, seen from opposite ends of the city.