Trump's presidency has been more bonkers than the most erratic fortune-tellers of 2016 could've predicted. He put in a bid to buy Greenland. He dissed the Mexican president for not paying for his wall. He stared directly into the sun during a solar eclipse. He does casual war crimes and human rights abuses, many of them just for kicks.
But one pants-shitting fear for Trump's first term hasn't happened:
Trump no touch-o the weed.
He didn't crush the kush. Left marijuana alone.
And he could have! The Orange One runs the Justice Department. He could napalm every grow, disbar every pot doc and raid every dispensary, sending stoners scurrying like the rats in Ratatoulle.
And it once seemed like he would. In 2016, after the unthinkable happened and America elected its first reality-star dipspittle president, I was one of thousands of pot-loving Americans sure Trump's finger was on the "nuke the nugs" button. Sure, Trump said he'd leave state-legal weed alone — but he's crazy and erratic, and also said he might go after pot. He chose Jeff Sessions as his top cop, a man who said "good people don't smoke marijuana," said weed leads to violence, and said he was proud of his efforts to "create a hostility to drug use." Sessions's deputy, Rod Rosenstein, hinted trouble was a-brewin', the department might change tack from Obama, and conservative media soiled their drawers, hoping their heroic Drug Wariors would fly new sorties bombing hippies and old stoned ladies.
I thought I was headed back to being a criminal. Back to smuggling my weed into concerts crammed deep inside my … sock. Back to becoming a medical patient by seeing a pot doc about my knee … or was it my elbow? And I'm not saying that, afraid of a crackdown, I stocked up on my beloved chill pills and cannatonic, my weed lotion and marijuana bath salts. I'm not saying I was so afraid it was my last chance to blaze legally that I re-re-watched "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" so high I thought I was watching the real weather report — but I'm not saying I didn't.
But all that worrying amounted to nothing more than gray ash in a cashed bowl. Trump has not machette'd the weed industry. Trump hasn't loosed his justice department on pot shops like sick, sober dogs. Trump has barely mentioned marijuana in the past couple years. The industry grows like a weed. Banking legislation snakes through congress. More states legalize adult-use every quarter. Fewer Americans are being jailed for pot. Not a single peaceful personal-using cartoon-watching pothead has been busted.
I was wrong. On weed, Trump hasn't been that bad.
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