In September 2021, New York became the 15th American state to legalise the recreational use of marijuana. In October last year, and for reasons that were in no way related, unless maybe subliminally they were, I went to New York for a few days with my sister. Walking around Manhattan, having not been for a few years, we were struck by the clouds of weed smoke that hung over every corner, the workmen on their lunchbreaks openly blazing doobies (pretty sure that's still the hip terminology), and the sketchy shops selling edibles — cannabinoids in edible form, usually gummy sweets — that had sprung up on every other street. Well, we thought, when in Rome.
There is nothing my friends, who are mostly, like me, mothers in their early 40s, like to talk about more than the prospect of getting high. Not very high, or at least not very often — because we've got shit to do, like folding laundry, and picking individual grains of rice up off the kitchen floor, and scraping dog shit out of the soles of our children’s shoes — but we relish the idea that there could be a chemical escape from the ruts into which our brains and lives have settled. We love to fantasise about derailing ourselves, temporarily, from the numbing, exhausting routine we’re in; we are 100 per cent down with Daphne, the Stepfordian super-mom in the most recent series of The White Lotus, who peddles edibles like she’s in an infomercial (“Try having two kids under four! They help me relax!”).
Don’t get me wrong, we all love our husbands and our kids blah blah, but sometimes you just want to think about something else, or be someone else, or maybe — just for a minute — to reclaim some former, carefree self: a self who stays up late and wears impractical clothing and makes impulsive, selfish decisions. It’s not dignified; we know that. But also, when you’re a middle-aged woman and the magical powers of invisibility descend upon you (it’s incredible! No one will ever truly see you again!) you also, quite frankly, don’t give a fuck.
The first dispensary my sister and I found on a Google search for “best weed shops in NYC”, upon whose door we tentatively tapped, turned us away: medical purposes only, they said. In fact, under federal law it was still not legal to sell cannabis — the first round of licences to become a “conditional adult-use retail dispensary” had not yet been assigned — although from the number of unlicensed dispensaries in the city it was hard to tell. In a store across the street, with ganja-leaf signage and a “newly opened” banner, we had a confusing conversation with the proprietor, who seemed to know even less about what he was selling than we did. This one says THC-zero? he told us, brandishing a colourful packet of edibles. Zero THC? Don’t waste our time! If we wanted CBD-only bollocks we’d have gone to Boots!
We came away with a $40 bag of strawberry gummies and, as an afterthought, a little sachet of something called “fun cubes”. There were just two of them in the pack, which only cost $5, and they were called fun cubes! Cute, right? They’d be a good thing to get us warmed up. We had free tickets to an off-Broadway show— Little Shop of Horrors — and figured we’d give ourselves a little buzz before we went in. My sister took a bite of one gummy and handed me the other half. C’mon, I said, in for a penny. We ate the other one too. As the lights dimmed and the curtain rose, we looked at each other sadly. Oh well, nothing doing. Served us right for buying the cheap stuff.
An hour later, all sense of linear time had dissolved. Oh shit. Suddenly there were things happening on stage the import of which I could no longer retain from one minute to the next. Who were all these people with funny glasses and loud voices and, wait, was the plant EATING PEOPLE? As I watched whatever the hell musical-theatre fun-times were going down, it got freezing cold (it could, I concede, have just been me), and my legs started to shake uncontrollably. But the prospect of putting on my jumper, which was resting on my lap, had taken on the looming portent of doing an off-the-cuff keynote address at the UN. What if I accidentally lost control of my limbs and karate-elbowed my neighbour in the face? I couldn’t risk it.
By the interval I could barely move or speak. My sister wasn’t saying much either, though I could get the gist of her condition from the extensive droop of her eyelids. She asked to look at the programme, which was in my tote bag, but as I reached my hand in to retrieve it my tote had turned bottomless, like Mary Poppins’s carpet bag, and I had to give up. I floated the idea of standing up to go to the toilet. Ha! We laughed. What a thought! Why not climb the north face of Mount Eiger while we’re at it.
But once the show had ended, and I had experienced what can only be described as a near-ecstatic reverie during “Suddenly, Seymour” (I mean, I know I was on drugs, but is this the greatest showtune that’s ever been written?!), we knew we would have to face our fate and leave the building. Like two of the three blind mice, we stumbled out of the theatre, hand on shoulder, and out onto the street. OK. We just need to get back to our hotel a few blocks downtown and then we’d be fine. We could do this.
Three hours later, we’d walked around in a series of concentric hexagons — hard to do in a city with a grid layout — and were no closer to bed. The logistics of getting there were proving too challenging for our tiny, addled minds. We remembered there was something in New York called a taxi, and it was yellow, but we couldn’t fathom how on earth you summoned one. We tried the subway instead. Twice in fact: each time we descended a different station we were affronted by some kind of Stygian nightmare — was this really how people got around? — and had to beat a retreat to the surface, only to find ourselves in...
TIMES SQUARE. Was this a fucking joke? By now my brain was flipping through different states of consciousness so that it felt like every 30 seconds I was passing out of one dream state and into a new one; it was like something out of Christopher Nolan’s Inception, except instead of hot actors in sharp tailoring it was tired mums in Toast dresses and Tevas and no, Elmo, I do NOT want a photo.
We lurched on, round endless corners, through interminable tunnels of scaffolding hoarding, up and down cross streets whose numbers we couldn’t remember, past some freaky guy who turned round and — honest to god— was wearing a fucking PHANTOM OF THE OPERA MASK (we worked out afterwards that we had in fact just walked past the queue for Phantom of the Opera) until finally, by some miracle, our hotel came into view. Being careful not to make bloodshot-eye contact with the concierge, we hurried to our room, where we cancelled our dinner plans with friends (“v soz too stoned”) and remained for the next 18 hours, doing nothing but eating Werther’s Original flavoured popcorn — the popcorn of the gods!— and watching 154 back-to-back episodes of Below Deck Mediterranean.
It’s fair to say it wasn’t quite what I’d signed up for. I’d wanted to blow away the cobwebs of my responsible, routine-based adult life, not obliterate them with a flame-thrower. (A New York friend who’s more au fait with edible dosage told me afterwards that we’d had six times the suggested amount for casual users; in 2021 the New York Attorney General also issued an alert about “deceptive cannabis products sold in snack packaging”.) Still, a couple of days later, my brain did feel a little bit different. A little bit nudged out of its well-worn grooves. My mental load might not have been lifted, but it had certainly been shifted to one side.
When I got back to London and told my friends what had happened, they looked at me like drowning sailors to whom you’d just flashed a lifebuoy. We want to do that too! They said. It wasn’t that fun! I told them. It was, actually, at times, fairly unpleasant. Yes, they said, but it wasn’t folding laundry, or picking individual grains of rice up off the kitchen floor, or scraping dog shit out of the soles of your children’s shoes. On that technicality, I had to concede they had a point.
This piece appears in the Spring 2023 issue of Esquire, out now
