"With the pandemic, there’s not that same sharing of cannabis the way there used to be. There’s the phrase 'puff, puff, pass,' and now it’s 'puff, puff, don’t pass.'"

Said Lauren Gockley, "a classically trained chocolatier... director of edibles at Coda Signature, whose product line includes truffles and 'fruit notes' (fancy weed gummies)," quoted in "You Know What Else Sold Well During the Pandemic? Weed Edibles/Pandemic anxiety and mounting concerns about vaping have helped shift sales of cannabis products" (NYT).

“People didn’t know how long this was going to last. ‘Is cannabis going to be unavailable for months?’ So people bought flowers,” [said Alex Levine, an owner and joint C.E.O. of Green Dragon]. “Flower is always the best value. It’s like buying the raw ingredients, if you will. It’s always cheaper to buy the flour and stuff to make cookies than buying the prepared cookies.”

How did they know when he was saying "flower" and when he was saying "flour"?

Tee Franklin, a comic book writer and novelist in New Jersey, makes edibles at home and often uses cannabis oil in her cooking. “Oh, baby, I make everything,” she said. “Every single thing you can think of, I have made within reason.”

That includes “an entire soul food dinner,” which she cooked for herself and her 80-year-old mother: ribs with homemade cannabis-infused barbecue sauce, mac and cheese made with cannabis butter, and baked beans and collard greens cooked with cannabis sugar....

Yikes!

Ms. Franklin...uses a walker, but she said she can move better and stand for longer because of the relief cannabis provides her. “I’m not as slow,” she said. “I’m not the Flash, but I got a little pep in my step, and that’s all from marijuana. It helps with depression, anxiety, stress... There is no way on God’s green Earth that I would be able to deal with the coronavirus and the protests of George Floyd and just me being a Black woman, period, there’s no way.... Dispensaries are an essential business... It’s a drug-dealing business that is owned majority by white. But the Black people who were doing the same thing are locked up. The brown folks, same thing, they’re locked up. That’s the only thing about this whole weed business that I am not of fan of... That’s the only thing. Everything else, I am for it. I’m for it.”

Okaaaay. Elsewhere in the NYT, I'm seeing "The Best Drinks in Life Are Frozen/Slushy, boozy cocktails are perfect year-round." Slushy, boozy... that's what's presented as breezily nice for the New York Times readers... when they're not chomping marijuana edibles.

(The prepared slush... sits nicely in your freezer for a few days, covered, should your socially distanced gathering be limited to one guest.)

Yes, these articles are addressing people who are indulging in substances alone. It's a sad business, boosting spirits of people who have nowhere to go by making the ingestion of substances seem like some sort of party when it's only one person.

ADDED: "It’s a childhood memory. It was exciting to get Popsicles and ice cream for a treat as a kid. As an adult you can have that same frozen feeling — in a cocktail." That is just sad. Lost childhood PLUS the desire for "that... frozen feeling."