The first time I ever smoked pot I also had sex. I was in high school, she was older and asked if I was cool. I nodded. She showed me how to hit the bong then laid me down on the bed and showed me how to please her. Forever after, I’ve associated sex and weed. They go together like music and dancing. It’s the perfect substance for romance. Your body becomes hypersensitive and alert. Everything’s light, funny, wonderful and weird.
Indeed the cannabis plant has evolved with humanity. There are special receptors in our brains that respond to marijuana, it’s grown alongside us for millions of years. Faithful as a dog. Perhaps it was a caveman aphrodisiac and therefore they cultivated it. Or maybe it gave them strange dreams or eased pain. I believe it gave early man a way to curb the anxiety of the frightening and dangerous world. Something to ease his racing caveman mind so he could get along with the business of procreation.
The stigma of lazy stoner is going the way of the failed war on drugs. Now cannabis is a lifestyle vertical, same as fancy coffee or wine. There’s weed products to help with everything from arthritis to period cramps. Pot has entered the mainstream and will continue to as more states come to their senses (and their wallets). The other almighty green, money, will ultimately win the day over arguments about mass incarceration or medical benefits. Or the fact that the architects of the war on weed admitted that it was designed to make sure black activists and hippies were always seen as criminals. All anyone cares about is will it make them money. And it will.
But I’ll miss the days when it still made you an outlaw. When you got high for the first time and realized all those adults sold you a bunch of crap about it making you crazy and jumping off a roof — wonder what else they were lying about, you begin to wonder. Sex is probably amazing too. What happens when you combine the two? Nothing less than a pure fulfillment of the natural order, the most human way of being. Despite a decades long highly coordinated campaign of disinformation meant to leave us confused and afraid about it, the romance of weed has endured.
In a real way it is plant that encourages you to breed, to create life. It’s the opposite of death and fear, which was its burden for most of the last century. Weed is our last connection to the cult of the earth. It connects us to our earliest needs and desires. And of course, it has open ye ole doors of perception for countless artists of every stripe. It taps into a deep part of ourselves at the same time it connects us to something larger.
It’s now indisputable that weed makes sex better, but could it make us fall in love? Is there a day when weed becomes so specialized that one could make a strain good enough to spark romance after a few puffs? Or will the erotic appeal dissipate after it’s legal? Whatever the future brings, holding your lover in your arms while they toke a masterfully rolled joint and pass it as a soul song wails on the radio and there’s nowhere left to go except to bed. That will never end.
