Remembering Woodstock, Cornstock and 3.2 dope

Well, three weeks in and civilization hasn’t collapsed.

I guess I was right to think that Sonny got it wrong…

Growing up in the 1960s, beer, whiskey and cigarettes were as common as the corner tavern and municipal liquor store. But Caledonia, Minnesota, being about as far from Haight-Ashbury as a person could get, unless somebody had been to college or Vietnam, marijuana was still pretty much a mystery. In order to satisfy our growing youthful curiosity, under the direction of the public school system, with the cinematic cooperation of the U.S. government and Hollywood’s hippest, members of the high school AV Club wheeled out a 16 mm projector and we settled back in a darkened classroom. On screen, Sonny Bono, wearing groovy orange satin pajamas in an FBI-inspired version of a far-out crash pad intoned the dire hazards of the demon weed with a vocal tone and facial aspect more Cheech and Chong than J. Edgar Hoover.

We were amused, but not impressed; intrigued, but unconvinced.

Unfortunately, the film didn’t come with a sample kit, and, though there were rampant rumors of weed growing wild along ditches and fencerows, our Boy Scout botany merit badges hadn’t included the various species of Cannabis. With no ready source of supply and hesitant to risk the considerable inconvenience of arrest, prosecution, conviction and prison, we settled for illicit Old Style and Marlboros by the light of the moon…at least for a while.

Woodstock was an inspiration to a number of enterprising souls with access to a few hundred acres of open ground and a promoter’s phone number. By mid-summer word was out that thousands of fun-seekers would be converging on Wadena, Iowa, for a festival that might have been christened Corn-stock..but wasn’t. Having missed the original, my buddies and I eagerly settled for the wannna-be and motorcycled south. Heading out, we might have felt too cool for school, but when we found ourselves amidst a crowd of folks the likes of which we’d only seen on Walter Cronkite or in Time magazine, we quickly arrived at a consensus the Minnesota State Fair was still more our style. But as we were leaving, I spotted a potential souvenir by the side of the road, snatched it up, stuffed it into my jeans and took it back to Minnesota.

That’s how I came by a baggie, one-third filled with what police reports uniformly describe as “a green, leafy substance,” though I was quite certain I could apply a more precise identifier that that. Safe at home, I concealed my prize atop a rafter at the back of the garage, waited a week for the heat to die down, then ventured into Renner Drug to casually select a Missouri Meerschaum corncob pipe from the carboard display, adding a can of Prince Albert to give a legitimacy to the purchase.

Not long later, twenty rows into the neighbor’s cornfield, I was all fuzzy and mellow, with a sudden, irresistible desire for potato chips…

Being hipper than Bill Clinton, I did inhale. I certainly wasn’t the first and even more certainly not the last. The FBI never got wind of my violation of federal law, nor did the state police come crashing through my door. In that sense, I was lucky, but lots of folks were not so fortunate. For them, catching a relatively harmless buzz turned out to be a life altering experience – and not for the better. A felony conviction rarely has a positive impact on life and career prospects.

As a culture, we’re no strangers to weed. We’ve lived out lives with it lurking in the shadows, clogging our courts, filling our prisons with the unlucky, while the rest of us blissfully got high.

It seemed fitting that Minnesota, one of the last bastions of 3.2 beer, rather accidentally legalized the equivalent of 3.2 dope last summer. A year later, in the wake of overwhelming indifference, in a rare nod to social reality, the possession, sale and use of cannabis was legitimatized with the promise that folks who had ran afoul of the old law may have their convictions deleted.

Too bad Sonny isn’t around to see it.