Grandma has always been very fit - she wasn’t home when we called her on her 75th birthday because she’d decided to learn downhill skiing, for example. Grandpa is much less active, but that’s just kind of how he is. He had a very bad stroke about two years ago that robbed him of a lot of his vitality and, well, his attitude. To borrow a phrase from somebody, that man was pure fuckery….he has always been a button-pusher, very good at just pissing people off.

Like a lot of people, both of them were adamantly against smoking pot, and I’m sure that it was extra difficult to deal with, knowing that that side of my family is entirely deeply 7th Day Adventist. My uncle managed to convince them that taking concentrated THC in pill form wasn’t the same thing, and so now they mix it in with their “special” ice cream and sit down for a bowl of it together about twice a week.

The results have been nothing short of miraculous, to be honest. Grandma remembers my name, for one thing, and that’s no small matter considering that she’s called me by my uncle’s name for nearly all of my life and due to a falling out in the family, I’ve seen her maybe four times in the last fifteen years. Her mind has gotten back a lot of its sharpness, and she’s as spry as she ever was - she goes on long walks again and is no longer afraid of forgetting where she is, where she was going, or how to get back. Grandpa has, well, mellowed I guess is the best way to put it. I can be in the same room with the guy for longer than an hour now and not want to throttle him - he doesn’t make a lot of the very nasty, biting, hurtful remarks he used to and is generally easier to get along with for everybody.

You were asking about my memories of growing up in southern Oregon and the big growing operations there… southwestern Oregon is very mountainous, and marijuana grows well on south-facing hillsides. My dad just retired a couple of years ago from working with the forestry industry - when it’s your job to go around and inspect legitimate logging operations and actually explore what they’re doing, the roads they’re constructing, ensure the health of streambeds and appropriate forest boundaries, you get a sort of sense of things being not quite right. He located a lot of concealed growing operations in the area we lived in, and since he was a volunteer deputy for the Sheriff’s Department, was an invaluable resource for them to find these things and shut them down. I remember him coming back one time and just kind of walking in, sitting down, and looking at my sister and I playing, and not saying anything. It wasn’t until several years later that he told me that he had come very close that day to getting his head taken off by a tripwire hooked to a sawed-off 12 gauge shotgun booby trap.

I know that they had people from the FBI and the DEA out in our little town a lot in the mid 80’s, particularly after the Reagan administration annouced their “war on drugs”. There were a couple of incidents that I wonder about now, things like seeing National Guard guys coming along for the firepower. I wonder how they got around the laws on posse comitatus, not that I mind particularly having extra bodies with M16’s along. lol

Don’t harsh the thread, man.

Anwyn, twist up another fattie and don’t bogart it this time 9)

I’m very much on the fence with medical marijuana. Part of that is that I work for the same people that issue the cards saying it’s okay to grow pot, part of it is that I have two grandparents whose slide into the depths of Alzheimers has been arrested by marijuana use, and part of it is that like every other person in the USA that’s come to adulthood in the last 30 years, I was indoctrinated at a young age to think that marijuana = bad.

A big part of the rationale I was always presented with for why marijuana is bad is that it’s a “gateway” drug. I don’t believe that’s necessarily true, any more than use of alcohol inevitably leads to alcoholism, divorce, domestic violence, or into the things that are truly bad like methamphetamine or heroin. Pot has bad effects, yes, but it isn’t a chemical concoction dreamed up by somebody, and so it does have some mitigating “good” things about it.

I hasten to add that the area of Oregon I grew up in was and is one of the largest growing areas on the West Coast. My dad never took us on hikes anywhere local out in the woods without taking a sidearm along, and I understood at a young age that if he said we weren’t going any further into one area, there was a good reason and disobeying him in any way would lead to dire consequences, regardless of outcome. Pot was a huge problem there - the growers would booby-trap their plantations, and there were cops and forest workers that died all the time. It was bad.

Anyway - I see some benefit to marijuana as a medical resource, but I’m not naive enough to think that it has no potential for abuse.

My sister passed on btw, she lasted about 15 years, but that sever of an injury will eventually kill you for a host of reasons. To be fair, had I been in her shoes (or more accurately, wheel chair), I probably would’ve taken up dope smoking as well. Wasn’t like she had a “full” life ahead of her, and what little she had sucked pretty bad. No happy ending I’m afraid.

Later.