Growing Forward: Cannabis and the New Democracy

When she grows and is allowed to grow, her core is strong. When crowded, she will stretch up to the sun for light. When she has room, she branches left and right in all directions. Although the edge of her blade is the margin, there is no bloodshed. There is no life loss. In comes the grasshopper for a visit, holding the post. The green June bug emerges from the soil for a nourishing nibble. The bee inspects the blooming flower in their bee ways. At this margin, there is no life loss. Just the opposite, life lives. 

I grow cannabis. 

As a teacher, these are scary words to say. As a leader, they are even harder, especially in our world that hypocritically condemns some substances as poison and elevates others as miracles. Our moral code draws hard lines around good and bad, evil and pure, poison and beneficial. These moral codes design our behaviors and identities—how we show up, who we show up for, and who we struggle with. Too often, these lines are so hard that crossing them, even in our private lives, requires courage and bravery. Crossing them is not for the faint of heart. When we cross them, we can quickly realize that we are targets for ridicule or standing on the other side of the line alone. Deep down in our bodies, crossing some also welcomes our demise. When we choose not to cross them when we want to, we perform medal-winning mental gymnastics and contortions to hold the line and stay in place, even when it does not make natural sense. Creating our own mythologies and stories, we rationalize staying far from the edge and resigning to our position and stake in the ground. But this does not bring about change. Change comes when we cross the line. 

This is my story of how I did it. 

After receiving an initial gift of a plant from the farmer, I asked, "What do I do with it?” The farmer replied, ”Well, it is a weed. It needs sun and water, and God does the rest. It’s going to do what life does: live.” Both intrigued and curious, I took the plant home and followed the farmer’s instructions. I had made many previous attempts to grow cannabis plants but was met with epic failure. I was doubtful that this would be any different. I also faced another barrier: how would I explain the soil and pots crowding my backyard? At the time, it was (and still is) legal to grow cannabis in DC. However, legality does not always grant social permission or acceptance. The first story I told friends and neighbors was that I grew for my father and uncle. Both were experiencing the pain of old bodies breaking down and twisting around aging. The pain’s intensity drowned out daily conversations, and the fear of opioid addiction left them without many options. Helping loved ones manage their pain and reduce suffering seemed on-brand and noble. This story fits who I imagined myself to be. But it was, at its core, simply a respectable half-truth. I WAS growing for my father and uncle, but I was also growing for myself. This other half of my truth was harder to vocalize. It was my act of resistance and direct action to find the hard lines in my own story and assess whether I was willing to cross them privately. If I do not cross the lines privately, I do not cross them publicly. Finding my edge and facing the fears that sharpened it was necessary. It was critical to locate the honing steel—the stories, the lessons, and the curriculum—that sharpened my edges.

Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Goonies, the presidential physical and academic fitness tests, and breakdancing were not the only stars of the 1980s; for too many people of color, the War on Drugs took center stage. After-school specials on Reefer Madness were considered age-appropriate public service announcements, warning about the dangers of drugs and people who used them. Resisting peer pressure was a theme of our social and emotional learning if one could call it that, and it centered around not doing drugs. Commercials with fried eggs illustrated the impact of drugs on the brain. Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No campaign supposedly armed young people with language to decline drug invitations. In my school, entire units in health education were dedicated to instruction on stimulants, barbiturates, and what seemed like the most dangerous of them all—cannabis. Drugs were bad. Drugs were un-American. They were forbidden. They were scary. And I was very, very afraid. 

Our feelings about drugs are not really the point of this reflection—it's about how we make our decisions and choices. It’s about the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we tell others about what has been judged and sentenced as forbidden. It is about the narrative that informs our decisions and how those narratives grow. It’s about the narrative’s seeds—the small kernel of life and agency that a story can create, how it is nurtured, and how it's protected. Our actions and behaviors protect or change stories. But too often, for stories that are large enough and branch wide enough to shelter all of us, fear snips the sprout before it ever has a chance to grow. 

We all have our fears that form our edges. While most discourse about cannabis, the War on Drugs, and systems of oppression also rightfully include mass incarceration, racism, and other normed irrationalities, what is rarely discussed is how a plant got such a bad rap. Hegemony is the dominance of one set of stories over others, usually without the consent or participation of the listener. Hegemonic stories are often such a part of the narrative and fabric that critical questions are not asked without cost. The story of Harry Anslinger— the first commissioner on the Federal Board of Narcotics– is told in the chapters of dust and dirt that underpinned the gait of his feet, the spines of the trees that bent and broke in the Allegheny wind, and the mountains that watched rust, steel, and rail reshape and define his hometown of Altoona, PA. Understanding the story of cannabis prohibition and its disproportionate impact on communities of color requires examination and a close read of the stories that defined it and defined the man who led the charge. 

Anslinger was born in 1892 to Swedish immigrants. In the first chapter of his life, seventeen days after Harry Anslinger’s birth, 1145 miles south, Homer Plessy was arrested for sitting in the whites-only car in New Orleans. In 1892, in Fong Yue Ting vs. The United States of America, the court decided that it was constitutional for Chinese residents to show a residency certificate on demand or face arrest and detainment. This ruling extended the Chinese Exclusion Act for another ten years. While the country's west coast closed the door to Chinese immigrants, Ellis Island welcomed European immigrants who could optically assimilate. The volume of our nation’s betrayal of its citizens continued when Harry was just four years old and the Supreme Court of the United States wrote the 75-year chapters on Jim Crow and segregation with the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision. Miscegenation laws were a part of the legal code in 30 out of 48 states, including Pennsylvania, prohibiting marriage between Black people, people of mixed race, and white people. And, as noble and skilled Black southerners fled white terror in the South only to be met with race riots in the Northern states, the white fear of job loss possessed the US federal government to expel more than 2 million people of Mexican descent, most of them citizens and most of them children between 1910 and 1930. This chapter on how a nation betrays its citizens was written into Anslinger's identity from birth.

The bond between humans and the quiet wisdom of plants is as ancient as our first breath. Whether nurturing or sheltering the physical body or enhancing spiritual practice, plants are deeply integrated and rooted in our being, health, and our wholeness. Healing practices are deeply cultural, with elders transmitting ancient wisdom and traditions on plant use, cultivation, and preparation. The Iroquois heralded corn, beans, and squash as the Three Sisters because they sustained physical and spiritual life. The Aztecs elevated tobacco as a sacred plant because of its psychoactive properties, but also cultivated poinsettia, agave, ulli, and dahlia. Vedic scriptures include descriptions of cannabis, tulsi, and neem, among many sacred plants. The Tonkawa, the Mescalero, and the Lipan Apache stood as the original stewards of the peyote, their practices blossoming in the lands north of present-day Mexico. Standing on ancient traditions, our relationship with plants is as indigenous to our survival and health as our need for air and water. Because this relationship is so intimately woven into our species, efforts to isolate, separate, and demonize plants is a futile effort to divide that which is indivisible in many ways. However, understanding how a plant, as natural and indigenous to the human experience and heralded sacred by many, became manipulated as an agent of oppression requires an understanding of oppression itself and how it grows in the soil. 

With the fear of a changing America, cannabis prohibition was a tool to maintain the social order of white supremacy for decades. But how it happened directs us to the use of language, implicit and explicit associations, and the dominant narrative of the time. First, let’s look at discourse. While there is no semantic and linguistic relationship between cannabis and its colloquial nomenclature of “marijuana,” it was forced through xenophobic association. Without an anglicized name, the plant sounded foreign and dangerous. Second, it was associated with people who were viewed as non-white outsiders. Anslinger is credited with making this association in his role as a public servant and policymaker:

“There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”

While the harmful impact of the statement is evident, we can also infer that even with miscegenation laws in place, this substance would encourage white women to be in relationships with Blacks. The prevalence of interracial dating today makes this statement seem hatefully outrageous, but understanding the intent of miscegenation laws and the threat of cannabis gives us another view into the structure of oppression. Herbert Hoover appointed Ansligner to his post as Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. While Hoover is remembered as a devoted public servant whose engineering and scientific training guided his policy decisions and sense-making, he was also the president who expelled Black Republicans from leadership positions in the Southern branch of the Grand Old Party and openly welcomed Southern whites. From the perspective of a Black citizen, the party of Reconstruction, which established citizenship, equal protection under the law, and the right to vote, became the party of domestic exile in 1928.

Massive immigration created new diversity in America's public body in the 1920s, and miscegenation laws were in place to protect white purity and superiority. Hoover thought that America’s greatness and technological advancements were solely due to its intellectual inheritance from its European ancestors and believed that race mixing would threaten American superiority. George Garcia, author of Herbert Hoover and the Issue of Race notes: 

Hoover feared that this superior potential might be lost through racial mixing and "mongrelization." Writing to his close friend, Mark Requa of California, in 1924, he argued strongly in favor of Japanese exclusion, primarily on racial grounds. Since the "biological fact" made "mixture of bloods disadvantageous," he maintained, and since no population could "be included by immigration into another without contemplation of eventual mixture, "it was essential that further immigration from Japan be stopped.'"

Despite Hoover’s training as an engineer and as a disciplined scientist, he, too, willingly succumbed to oppression’s will. His leadership post did not grant him oppression immunity. In this America, while cosmetic nods to progressivism, freedom, liberalism, and care for all were episodic talking points, a louder, separatist and racist narrative of the time wrote the dominant story—cannabis makes white women cross the line, and crossing the line biologically threatens white supremacy because we will not have pure blood. We lose our edge. 

Cannabis became enemy number one. 

Whether we like it or not, we are rooted in the stories of our time and the land that holds it. Our gait is the muse of the earth beneath us, agitating all organic and inorganic matter in the rhythms of our daily existence. Unfortunately, the plumes are the living present for way too many families, including Black families and Latinx families both stateside and beyond. As I reflect on my childhood and the stories I received about cannabis—its uses and benefits—the silent stories were often the loudest—louder than the chapter in the health textbook, louder than the after-school special, and even louder than Nancy Reagan’s public announcements. It was something that no one talked about, which made it even more taboo. When the pain of the past steals the talk from the tongue, the dominant narratives persist without resistance. When the pain of the past places fear on the tongue, we assume our roles in the current story without question or challenge. We perform our roles with ignorant consequence. As our country's classrooms and communities evolve and the demographics of our communities shift, the lethal desire to protect white bodies at the expense of others will not dissipate. No removal of language, abolition of equity, or denial of inclusion can erase the historical context that continues to shape our present or dismantle the deeply entrenched mythologies that persist today. But there is hope and we can move forward. We think educators themselves hold the insight to write this new story. 

As automation takes center stage and artificial intelligence dominates our education discourses, displacing the equity and inclusion discourse, we must not think that wired technologies alone can solve our root-bound problems—those problems that are so tangled and twisted in us that they prevent growth. Root-bound plants are saved by placing them in bigger pots. Root-bound plants are saved with human hands in the dirt, delicately removing them, adding new nutrient-dense living soil, creating more space to grow, and supporting the plant to sustain itself after the trauma of being constricted. An educated person can see past stories and determine which ones are no longer needed because they prevent growth. They can see the roots. An educated person develops the literacy and confidence to write new chapters. They design and build new pots. The ability to write a new, bigger story defines a high quality education.

All people share the same anatomy. We all want to feel good. This is not moral. This is human. Life is hard. Often, our decisions are driven by our pleasure-seeking tendencies rather than what is ultimately best for us. But wisdom tells us that seeking pleasure at the expense of others is costly. The American story becomes macabre when one person's high, comfort, and pleasure come at the expense of others. Supremacy, especially white supremacy, is a hell of a drug. Our systems of oppression, our relationships with each other and the earth, have been designed. They can be redesigned. However, redesigning them without acknowledging that they make some people feel good is naive and misguided. A supremacist orientation seduces and soothes the basement of human consciousness—a person’s sense of survival—both physical and identity—centering victimization as core to the plot and storyline. This is the relentless after-school special that goes for broke as it separates and splits human relationships—dividing that which is indivisible. 

Growing cannabis in the mid-Atlantic welcomed the return of my humanity. Cultivating outdoors, from seed to harvest to consumption in this climate, is a 10 to 12-month process of monitoring, pruning, repotting, paying attention to the weather, and noticing. The harvest is labor intensive—cutting the branches, trimming the leaves, and curing the flower. Each step requires patience and mindfulness. The plant's aromatic death releases perfumes of vanilla and berry. It becomes a living reminder of the cycle of life and my place in it. 

In the winter months, after the harvest, the soil preparation begins. Each step of mindful labor transforms the relationship between what I eat, what I discard, and how it returns to the earth to feed the plant, creating joy and relief for my friends and family. A sacred relationship of interbeing emerges where labor, care, awareness, and time have transformed how my body metabolizes this plant's benefits. To abuse the plant is to abuse myself. To exploit the plant is to exploit myself. I worked hard for this high. Working hard for the high is transformative. Working hard for the high changes the relationship.

The daily practice of restoration enhances the capacity for interbeing—a term introduced by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, and it describes the interconnectedness of all things. It reflects that nothing exists independently; everything is interrelated and co-dependent. For instance, a tree depends on the soil, water, and sunlight, while those elements depend on other factors. Interbeing suggests that our well-being, actions, and existence are inseparably linked to others and the world around us. Interbeing suggests also that humans are intertwined and linked together. The suffering of one impacts all. Interbeing roots our awareness and acknowledgment and our impact mediates our humanity.

The Golden Rule—treat others as you want to be treated– frequently punctuates classroom rules as if every body held the knowledge and it was instinctually practiced. It is often a casual and perfunctory conclusion to a conversation whose tone and tenor resonate far beyond the classroom and school walls. It is not the Rule that is the problem, it is our understanding of it. Just as our schools and classrooms have walls and boundaries that provide structure and organization, we, too, have rules that give our relationships structure and organization. It just so happens that the assumptions embedded in our relationships directly conflict with our ability to treat others with reciprocity. Our thinking and actions are misaligned. But perhaps true reconciliation and healing is not doing more of the same with more intensity, but discerning that more of the same with more intensity will afford incremental change at best. True healing could lie in the humble recognition that our species cannot learn in isolation, but in relationship. It is not academic alone; and it has significant consequences for the academic. Humans are not just atomized separate individuals who are entitled to do their own thing without regard for others. Humans are persons who exist in a tightly connected relational field. When Einstein said that we can't solve a problem with the consciousness that created it, maybe this is what that means. Our social, economic, and environmental erosion may be rooted in this individual, root-bound, Newtonian version of the world. And our science no longer works. We can no longer solve problems just by removing people or, in this case, cannabis plants that just don't fit into our world view. We need a more expanded worldview that is large enough for new relationships between people and the natural world. This is the world view of interbeing that transforms an eye of elite disgust into humble wonder, not because of the exotic but because when we see others we see ourselves on the relational level.

A bigger pot has enough space to hold all of this. 

All books share the same anatomy to hold our stories. Every book has its cover pages, spine, front and back covers, top and bottom edges. The joint connects the cover to the spine and gives the story inside the structural support, making it easy to read and identify. Each day, we get a chance to write a new story. Each school year, schools of educators get to write a new story. Each election cycle, our nation gets to write a new story. Each of these stories becomes our story. 

Perhaps in the next story, we roll the joint together. (See what I did there.) Perhaps we write a story where we are no longer silent or afraid—because we all deserve to get a little higher. But maybe this time, we will struggle together for our high. We work hard for it. Maybe this is what this moment is asking of us. Struggle together, not one at the expense of the other. Get our hands dirty and struggle together because it makes us more human, connected, and feel good. In this struggle, we see the lines, borders, and boundaries and cross them proudly. In this struggle, we locate the stories that direct the behavior of our private lives and courageously interrogate them. We should not just see them in others but build the capacity and compassion to see them in ourselves. And that is high that heals us without numbing, ignoring, pushing away, or looking away. With this high, we stretch to the skies, and our bodies become safe harbors for others. And without a margin between us, then, there is no life loss. All life lives. 

1. Contreras, R. (2018, January 29). 'Marijuana' or 'cannabis'? The racially charged debate over a plant. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/29/marijuana-name-cannabis-racism

2 Garcia, G. F., (1979) “Herbert Hoover and the Issue of Race”, The Annals of Iowa 44(7), 507-515. doi: https://doi.org/10.17077/0003-4827.8609