DC to Vote on Legalizing Weed Today
Residents of the District are getting excited about today's vote on legalizing medical marijuana. One man hopes to eventually open a café called "Wakey Bakey." To get the story, The Washington Post went looking for, and found, lots of weed.
Today the DC City Council will vote on whether to legalize marijuana for medical use in a city where 11% of people over the age of 26 smoke weed. The Post went out on the streets and found people rolling blunts in the open and passing joints, with one man saying "this is hitting nice," referring to one of about five or six joints he would smoke that day. So, what if you're an average person just trying to get score some buds to get high? In DC, whether you're a casual smoker or a dedicated stoner, it's easy:
Finding a marijuana dealer can be easy or hard, depending on how much risk a buyer can tolerate. A 26-year-old man, unemployed and just coming off probation for selling crack, said it took him all of about 15 minutes to find someone selling pot as he walked along Georgia Avenue NW on a recent afternoon.
But a businessman in his mid-40s who is married with children and lives in Northwest is too cautious to buy on the street. At parties, he tries to figure out who smokes and who might help him buy pot. If someone mentions, say, the pot-happy film "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," his ears perk up. "You listen for the cultural references," he said.
See? With some basic knowledge of pop culture — or a willingness to lurk the streets like a crackhead — you can easily score weed in the nation's capital these days. So easy, in fact, that you can even grab some at a local high school!
At Cardozo Senior High in Columbia Heights, teachers and students said that a group of students has turned a secluded stairwell into a smoking den. Sometimes the smell is so overwhelming that one teacher keeps her classroom door closed. "There are a lot of jokes about contact highs," the teacher said.
Ah, those guys. We all remember them from high school. But besides being great for stoners, a new law legalizing weed could bring in much needed cash to the city — California brings in $100 million annually in tax revenue from the sale of weed.