Amnesia Haze

America is no stranger to anxiety, stress, and depression, but recent shifts in societal thinking are looking at new avenues to reduce stress and anxiety.  In so many words, America is overwhelmed with anxiety, stress, maybe depression and there is no end in sight.  Which begs the question, why?  Where does all this anxiety, stress, and depression start, and why is it overwhelming all age-groups, especially those under 30, now, in 2020?  Is it really social media and the pressures to look great all time? Does living a life based on little hearts and “likes” make us mask our real lives, pains, and struggles. Maybe, and maybe not.

A recent study examined the relationship between legal cannabis stores – or as we know them “dispensaries” – and opioid deaths. While this is not a new finding, since we’ve known that legal cannabis does have an impact on opioid related deaths – in that it reduces them; this particular study looked at “the number of dispensaries” within a particular county and how that influenced opioid deaths.

A counterculture cannot be birthed unless an already established “culture” rests dominant in society. While cannabis may be thousands of years old – the concept of “stoner” originates from the early 1900s. First used to describe people intoxicated by alcohol – as portrayed in Ray Charles’ “Let’s Go Get Stoned” but somewhere in the 1950s & 1960s, the term shifted to cannabis users.