Veterans And Seniors Are Ending The Drug War

Two different people over the age of 60 – one man, one woman – approached me in the past week wanting cannabis cultivation advice. It being fall, they were specifically soliciting harvest advice. Now, I happen not to be a cannabis farmer (I sure will cultivate hemp (once it’s legal), but I am a cannabis journalist, so I understand why they asked. I might have visited more cannabis and hemp farms in the past three years than any other journalist.

What stayed with me was not their questions, which surrounded the usual farmer concerns of flower curing and the threat of rain just prior to harvest, but their ages. Older Americans are one of the two key demographics that explain why, at long last, cannabis prohibition, America’s Longest War and her second Civil War, is finally nearly over.

Let’s start with that first group, seniors. Pollsters are finally accepting (though scratching their heads over the fact) that older Americans are the fastest growing segment of the population to support the Drug Peace era. The reason is pretty simple: in a pill-popping society, any plant that will, with negligible side-effects, reduce the number of capsules in the weekly pill box is welcome. As I put it in my recent book, Too High to Fail:

In (to put it mildly) right-leaning Orange County, California, I saw senior ladies—the largest demographic component of a cannabis collective therein called Wilbur OC—being schooled in modern delivery methods (such as the vaporizer and the lozenge) so as to soothe their aching glaucoma pressure and deliver the only treatment that makes their arthritis bearable.

Craig Raimondi, Wilbur OC’s tie-wearing manager, told me, “We see a lot of folks returning in desperation to the cannabis of their college days. They have positive memories of the plant, and feel comfortable giving it a shot when prescription medicines don’t provide relief for their symptoms. In the communities of people living with various ailments, word gets around that it’s effective.”

Wilbur OC and its sister collective in San Diego have 5,050 patient members, several dozen of whom annually take a field trip to the sustainably minded Mendocino County farm that is the source of 100 percent of the collectives’ medicine. This is known in the industry as a “closed loop” model, which has marketing value during federal cannabis prohibition because it shows that an outfit can be relied on not to divert cannabis to, say, a college dorm in Alabama (where, by the way, prices for California bud in 2011 were about three times higher—six thousand dollars per pound—than they were inside the Golden State).

The two collectives were so popular that their executive director and Mendocino farm manager, forty-seven-year-old Jim Hill, closed membership in 2010. The collective simply couldn’t produce any more medicine than Hill and his full-time botanist already did and Hill didn’t want to risk getting it from outside sources. Only members could receive cannabis........

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