The monetization of the legalization.

I'm reading a NYT article titled "Travel’s Back. And It’s High Season/While the pandemic had travelers cooped up, a growing number of states legalized cannabis. Love it or hate it, you will probably encounter it on your next trip" by the aptly named Julie Weed. (Excellent illustration by Russell Cobb, by the way.)

The article begins:

For Caitlyn Hunter’s 21st birthday trip to Las Vegas last month, her mother booked spots on a “Las Vegas Cannabis Tour,” a business started during the pandemic that guides tourists through marijuana dispensaries in that city. Ms. Hunter, of Houston, Texas, expected an educational afternoon where she, her mother and grandmother could smoke marijuana together, and her grandmother could learn about different marijuana strains that might help her with knee pain.

What they got instead, Ms. Hunter said, was a “crazy experience,” involving a guide in 4-inch pink stilettos cracking dirty jokes, a raucous van ride around the Las Vegas Strip (with a sober driver), the consumption of multiple cannabis products, a shopping bag full of decorative bongs to use as flower vases back home and, at one point, a grandmother unable to speak without bursting into uncontrollable laughter. In short, Ms. Hunter concluded, a perfect celebration.

I don't understand what's crazy. A mother, daughter, and grandmother got their hands held so they could get inebriated and buy bad souvenirs in Las Vegas. It's all subjective. They felt they were having a crazy time.

I guess these ladies are not from the set of people who have abstemiously excluded the word "crazy" from their vocabulary, as we were discussing 2 days ago. Looking for that post in my archive, I ran across a post from 2018 where I noted the problem "crazy":

By the way, some people think it's wrong to make an insult out of "crazy" and words that mean crazy, because there's collateral damage to persons with mental illness. But it's so common. It would be insanely inhibiting to self-censor that one, but I did used to have many long conversations with a person who insisted on my refraining from deploying "crazy" as an insult. I know what you're thinking: He sounds crazy.

Back to the NYT article. It begins with that Caitlyn Hunter birthday story, but you have to read quite far down to get to the cold facts: Those ladies paid $150 apiece — that's $450 — to get driven around and cracked dirty jokes at for 2-and-a-half hours. 

What else is there in the world of cannabis travel? According to the head of the Cannabis Travel Association International, there are "things like the cultivation tours at Huckleberry Hill Farm and Papa and Barkley Social, which offers a cannabis-themed spa, dispensary and consumption space," and "cannabis pairing," where you "get advice on the strain of marijuana that might best enhance a hike or specific meal." 

So... don't think of cannabis as the equivalent of alcohol generally, think wine specifically, and there's your monetization of the legalization. 

ADDED: In the comments at the NYT article, there's a lot of talk about involuntary encounters with cannabis while traveling: Smelling marijuana smoke in your hotel. Of course, the hotels ban smoking anything, but that smell is there — or is there a smell of something else that was used to mask the smell? One solution is to steer people toward edibles, but with edibles the effect is different and it's also delayed, as Maureen Dowd famously demonstrated.

I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me.

Crazy!