[Vision2020] Shuffleboard? Oh, Maybe Let’s Get High Instead

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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March 22, 2013
Shuffleboard? Oh, Maybe Let’s Get High Instead By ALYSON KRUEGER

For Cher Neufer, a 65-year-old retired teacher, socializing with friends
(all in their 60s) means using marijuana. Once a week they get together to
play Texas Hold ’Em poker “and pass around a doobie,” Ms. Neufer said.

When company stops by her home in Akron, Ohio, she offers a joint, and when
it’s someone’s birthday, a bong is prepared. She even hosts summer
campfires where the older folk listen to the Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin and
the Beatles; eat grilled steaks and hot dogs; and get high (not necessarily
in that order).

“It’s nice,” Ms. Neufer said. “It’s just a social thing. It’s like when
people get together, and they crack open their beers.”

Statistics suggest that more members of the older generations, like Ms.
Neufer, are using marijuana. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health
reported in 2011 that 6.3 percent of adults between the ages of 50 and 59
used the drug. That number has risen from 2.7 percent in 2002.

And anecdotal evidence points to much of this use being sociable rather
than medical.

When 70-year-old Robert Platshorn, a marijuana activist who was jailed for
three decades after dealing the drug, moved into a gated community in West
Palm Beach, Fla., three years ago, he said he “met people in my development
who were looking strange at me.” Now, he said, couples invite him to their
condominiums to get high together (Mr. Platshorn insisted he never accepts
these offers).

Moms for Marijuana International, a pro-marijuana group that brings people
together to socialize and learn about the positive aspects of the plant,
has received so many queries from older people over the past year that it
is creating chapters called Grannies for Grass in Illinois, Ohio and
Missouri.

“There are groups out there that have trivia night and they have
get-togethers,” said Vickie Hoffman, 46, a grandmother of three and a
former bartender who is organizing the Missouri chapter. “It is fun, and
it’s a group of great people.”

Mason Tvert, the communication director of the Marijuana Policy Project, a
group that works to change marijuana laws, said he started consuming
marijuana about two years ago with his grandparents, Helen and Leo Shuller,
who are 82 and 88. Now, when they get together, they “have a little bit off
the vaporizer,” he said, either before or after dinner, and enjoy the
effects.

The dinners aren’t “centered around using marijuana, like a little
invitation with a leaf on it,” Mr. Tvert hastened to point out. “There just
happens to be marijuana available.”

It makes sense that the baby boom generation and people a little younger
might be more casual and open about marijuana use; after all, they grew up
in the ’60s and ’70s, when getting high was the norm. According to Richard
J. Bonnie, the author of “Marijuana Conviction: A History of Marijuana
Prohibition in the United States,” in 1971 a national commission on
marijuana drug use even recommended decriminalizing the drug, something
that, for many people, was “recognized as a perfectly sensible proposal,”
he said.

Some pot smokers of decades ago simply never stopped indulging with their
friends. Indeed, Ms. Neufer, a self-proclaimed hippie (“I will be forever
in my heart, and in my mind,” she said), started smoking at 21 and has been
growing pot in her backyard and organizing drug-fueled sing-a-longs ever
since.

She pointed out that those who have moved on from corporate work might feel
more comfortable revealing and sharing their marijuana use.

“Most of us are either retiring or are retired,” Ms. Neufer said. “You
don’t have to worry about your job knowing, so it’s a little easier for us.
I don’t care if you use my name, I don’t care if they know!”

Though, she added, “I know a lot of professional people who still have
high-level jobs are still very nervous about it.” (In Ohio, possessing or
using small amounts of marijuana is a minor misdemeanor.)

It also helps, perhaps, that most are empty nesters, no longer concerned
with setting a good example for their children or having drugs within reach
of minors. Many grandparents “are at a stage in their life where it doesn’t
make a difference,” said Diane-Marie Williams, executive director of
administration of Moms for Marijuana International and a grandmother
herself. “They’ve raised their families, they’ve done their careers, and at
this point I think they are saying, ‘O.K., I’m not jeopardizing my
family.’ ”

Marijuana’s legal strides have also made it a lot easier for people to
publicize or at least not hide their drug use.

“It did so much good having Washington and Colorado legalize, having 18
states that have medical, and 14 more states that have decriminalized,” Mr.
Platshorn said. “That helps people come out of the closet.”

Mr. and Ms. Shuller, for example, made it clear that they use marijuana
only with their family when they are in states where it is decriminalized
or legal for medical reasons.

“That’s maybe something they would find troubling,” Mr. Tvert said about
his grandparents. “To break the law.”

And the drug’s therapeutic effects, which have been more accepted by the
medical world in recent years, offer further incentive.

Ms. Hoffman, who lives in Grubville, Mo. (population about 100), has Crohn’s
disease<http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/crohns-disease/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier>and
other medical problems. She said she barely has the energy to
socialize
without the drug.

“Me getting around is a little bit rough,” she said, but after using
marijuana, she feels healthier. “I can do more things. We play croquet. We
do things out in the yard, and if I don’t have it I can barely walk across
the floor. It’s a big pick-me-up.”

Ms. Shuller, who has
arthritis<http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/arthritis/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier>in
almost every part of her body, said she loves how pot relieves her
pain
without leaving her with the negative side effects of painkillers or
alcohol.

“I had never tried it before,” she said of her first time consuming the
drug two years ago, “and it didn’t bother me at all. It felt good, and it’s
certainly better than alcohol, which is draggy and sometimes leaves you
sick.”

So many older people value how the drug makes them feel, Ms. Williams said,
that they even cook with the cannabis, putting it on salads or in the tea
they drink before they go to bed. They also exchange recipes online through
the Moms for Marijuana International Web site.

Ms. Hoffman said, “All my friends are as educated on the subject as I am,
and if they aren’t, I keep trying to make them.”

Ms. Neufer added: “It’s like as you get older, it’s not something you do
all the time, but you still do it. It’s still something you like. It still
makes you feel good.”
-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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