Log 4

In an effort to be a little bit more deliberate about making sure that I maintain a connection between marijuana use and the millennial generation, I did a basic search of the web. I’m pretty sure it was literally just “marijuana and millennials” (something I’d searched before, but had yet to found anything compelling). I stumbled upon an article written by BU’s Christopher Salas-Wright titled, “Marijuana use among young people in an era of policy change: what does recent evidence tell us?” This is the first time i’ve really read something that challenges my own perspective and I say this based on Salas-Wright’s discussion on “cannabis use disorder,” which is the first time I have ever heard of this. So, I obviously wanted to know a little bit more about this. Upon looking it up, the general consensus was the same throughout different sources, cannabis use disorder is pretty common and goes untreated a lot of the time. Some of the numbers I saw told me that 2,5, or 9% of people met the diagnostic criteria for CUD. Based on both the subjectivity of the “symptoms” and the inconsistency of the numbers, I was not convinced of the legitimacy of CUD. When or not it is legit does not totally matter to me, right now it is more about gathering as much information and making sense of that information. CUD offers, as Salas-Wright touched upon and others too while I was researching, us with a “reason” to oppose marijuana use. It’s obvious that there would be people in support and opposition of the decriminalization of weed and just the substance in general, but it’s important to see what it is that makes people feel for/against marijuana.

Also, this week, I noticed a flyer hanging on the walls of the bathroom in the union. They read:”In 2003 black men were reportedly 12 times more likely to recieve prison sentences for drug offenses even though surverys have shown white and black people in the US use and sell drugs at the same rate.” It was advertising a conversation on campus that was the week prior, but I still appreciated seeing this statistic on the bathroom stall. It is important to me to unpack what something like this means and how it exists and what it means for the millenials and their use of marijuana. The book The New Jim Crow will help unpack some of this for me.

Of course, April 20, a “holiday” to many weed smokers, fell over the course of this week, and as a result my social media timelines were saturated with a variety of posts about promotion of the “holiday” and advertisements and advocacy for cannabis. I look forward to reviewing that material and seeing if there are any particularly compelling sources after.