Week Forty Seven: Introducing The Edible Games

I Think I Love You

Incredibly loose timestamping runs as follows:

• Highs (eh? eh?) and lows (00:05:00)
• Trust, respect, and communication in shared projects (00:10:00)
• Butting heads on the bullshit of budgeting (00:32:00)
• We lose the edible game (00:50:00)
• We silently follow a fly around the room (01:04:00)

As I note in the conversation, The Edible Games will not be a frequently recurring series within the podcast. Which will come as no surprise after listening to the degradation of this conversation, or the stories of my remarkably low tolerance.

Important Background

Getting high on my podcast is a dramatic flaunting of privilege that demands a deeper look at three incontrovertible truths:

1. The criminalization of marijuana is and always has been a tool of racial injustice.
2. The new white-dominated industry springing up in states with legal cannabis is perpetuating, if not actively exacerbating, the disenfranchisement of Black people and other groups that have been (and continue to be) the target of the decades-long war on drugs.
3. To even begin to reconcile with our history of systemic racism in drug-related law enforcement, we must (1) quickly develop and enact explicitly anti-racist policies, including, at a minimum, expungement of marijuana related criminal records, and reinvestment of public and private proceeds back into communities most harmed by past enforcement; and (2) (as a necessary precondition for 1) federal legalization.

Read, Listen, Act

The ACLU does a pretty good job with the high level current conversation here (https://bit.ly/2Hhvlh4), and NPR gives a short (4 min listen) history of the explicitly racist origins of marijuana criminalization in the 30s here (https://n.pr/2EmezMG).

Read about the MORE Act (Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement) here (https://bit.ly/3ceus46), which would be the most significant federal legislative development on marijuana policy in 50 years — and is actually set to pass soon, after COVID relief gets sorted and we get past the presidential election.

You can write your Congressional representatives to get them to cosponsor. You can buy Black-owned cannabis, using resources like Cannaclusive's InclusiveBase here (https://bit.ly/2EiLGRv) or this state-based list of highlights from GreenEntrepreneur here (https://bit.ly/3hJaXlj). And you can follow the development of the MORE Act and get involved in how it manifests in your state.

Marijuana reform will not solve systemic racism. No single thing will. Systemic problems require networked solutions, of which this is an important node.

Acknowledgments

Thanks as always to our wonderful family and friends who have helped along the way. Specifically, our muse @floriandelomme for his generosity in allowing us the use of his Tulum sunset in our cover art; @anka1027 for her knowledge of all things podcasting; her renaissance husband @gnarliehewson for our highly rad intro and outro music; and, of course, @mollylophotography and @edwardslater, whose empathy and talent are on display in every photo of our wedding (and could be for yours—message them directly or visit their website).