Every night, I go to bed with a stoned husband. And I’m happy about it — grateful, in fact, for the fragrant multi-speared leaf that has brought manifold goodness to our lives.
Did I mention we are old? My husband is 72 and I am 64. He is CEO of a prosperous family-run business. I am a recently retired college lecturer and administrator. We are not exactly conventional; we were both Peace Corps volunteers decades ago and my husband lived in an urban commune in Washington, D.C., in the 1970s.
We married in late middle age and commute between San Pedro and Flint, Mich., where we own two homes. But basically we are a couple living quietly in a two-bedroom apartment on a crowded hillside.
My husband’s greatest luxury is a late-model black Cadillac, hardly a hipster ride. Every morning we get up and read the paper, sip a cup of tea and go out to breakfast, and every afternoon we stroll Point Fermin Park. We watch “Jeopardy” and “Wheel of Fortune.” My occasional cappuccino is about as bohemian as we get.
Except every afternoon my husband chews a chocolate tablet of cannibidiol — CBD, a non-psychoactive form of cannabis. Before going to bed, he takes several puffs of his favorite strain of indica from a water pipe his son gave him for Christmas.
A bit of background: 14 years ago my husband and I reconnected 25 years after a youthful fling, in a romantic late-middle-age surprise. I loved his well-seasoned self even more than the brash fellow I’d admired long ago.
But life had not left him unscathed. He has type 2 diabetes. He has essential tremors, non-Parkinson’s shakes, which embarrass him when trying to eat soup or enjoy a cup of Joe in public.
He has spondylosis and old football injuries — which along with the diabetes are creating severe neuropathy, especially in his right leg. He has arthritis in many joints, and an enlarged prostate. Counting off all these diminishments, as he just did, he laughs ruefully from his La-Z-Boy.
What’s remarkable about my husband, considering all this, is he often goes to bed happy and wakes up cheerful. He’s an optimistic person, but we both additionally and powerfully credit cannabis.
The CBD decreases his tremors and seems to palliate the neuropathy in his legs. The nightly puffs keep him from getting up more than once — he almost always reports a blissful sleep. An occasional dose of sativa soothes side effects from his medications and piques his appetite. And he is present for me, focused and loving.
I can’t consider this subject without remembering my first marriage. Alcohol was our nemesis. We met at a bar, had our first kiss when drunk, staged dinner parties awash in booze. That husband’s nightly routine featured loud Led Zeppelin and Jack Daniels into the early morning. He was a fiercely talented man, but often came to bed drunk, unapproachable and rank.
Our nightlife suffered: once he toppled off a barstool not once but twice, and I needed help getting him home. When he drank he got argumentative and dumb and would try to pick up women, each episode more humiliating than the last. This, I often ask, is a legal drug?
When my current husband told me he didn’t drink, I was relieved. And while a crisp gin gimlet from Musso & Frank is my potable of choice, I would never begrudge my husband his pot. On the contrary: I want him to keep it up.
The difference for me is stark: in my first marriage, booze drove us apart; in this marriage, cannabis helps to bring us together.
We are big Jerry Brown supporters, but we rolled our eyes recently when we heard him say on “Meet the Press,” “How many people can get stoned and still have a great state or a great nation? … I think we need to stay alert, if not 24 hours a day, more than some of the potheads might be able to put together.”
It was a grossly inaccurate stereotype — the “stupid pothead” is an insulting generalization. My husband built a multimillion-dollar international business. He does some of his best work after a solid indica sleep.
My husband says when he goes to his favorite dispensary in San Pedro, where he has become very fond of the dedicated cannabistas, he sees as many geezer customers as the tattooed young. It is senseless not to move toward full legalization. We are among the ardent old who think it’s time to acknowledge the evidence.
Jan Worth is a San Pedro resident who’s a retired college administrator and teacher at the University of Michigan-Flint. She’s also a poet and author of the novel “Night Blind,” based on a Peace Corps tragedy of long ago.
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My Turn: Medicinal pot relieves husband's ailments, full legalization makes sense
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