Cannabusiness Goes to Pot

My one and ­only run-in with the police occurred on a hot summer night in Portland, Oregon, a month or so before my junior year of high school. My friend and I, both seventeen years old, had—like more than 44 percent of Americans in our age group—­recently been introduced to cannabis, a staple of the city’s youth scene. For us, at least, the drug’s allure was as much aesthetic as experiential: The transgressive nature of the act of smoking weed—a heady feeling of liberation from the limits of parentally enforced mores—was a far greater rush than the drug’s actual psychoactive effects. But that freedom came with its own consequences. One night, in the park by my friend’s house, we were caught by an unamused policeman; half an hour or so later, two chastened, sheepish teenagers were delivered home in the back of a cop car to their even-less-amused parents. Almost immediately thereafter, my interest in weed evaporated. The drug never appealed to me again. Within a year, I had forsworn it completely. By the time I was in college, I was going out of my way to avoid situations where pot was present at all.

This, I would come to realize much later, is the function of public order: not that it prevents deviance in all cases, but that it disciplines those who do deviate, nudging them back onto the straight and narrow. The law, and the mores and norms that uphold it, enforces the boundaries of the social contract. But it also teaches those who err. The sense of being external to the law—of stepping, albeit in a relatively brief and inconsequential way, outside the bounds of the political ­community—provided me with a glimpse of what life would be like in the law’s absence. In my adolescent way, I had seen that I had a personal stake in the social order—that its rules and regulations were not simply coercive but protective, and that they both enabled my personal freedom and imposed an obligation to exercise it responsibly.

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