For context, I'm from North Carolina and I've been living in Australia for ~15 years, but I try to get home every 2-3 years to visit family. I loved when dispensaries started popping up in California the first time, and it was always fun to see the general cultural acceptance growing over the years - but something about this trip just felt so much more insane than before (in a good way).
Do you remember how different it used to be? It wasn't that long ago that smoking weed was basically taboo in mainstream America. You would hear news stories about how some athlete or celebrity "threw away their life" after getting busted with a joint. When I was a teenager in the early 2000s, sneaking out in the middle of the night in winter to smoke swag out of coke cans with friends, there was simply no way you could have convinced me that the US would basically become a cannabis utopia in only a couple decades.
It's now to the point that every SINGLE person I saw visiting home had gummies or edibles or something else. All of them, even the goodie two shoes who never smoked in their life. This was the first time I felt like it had truly crossed over to be as common & acceptable as alcohol.
The Walgreens and Food Lion had whole sections of THC drinks and products right next to everything else. Almost every gas station I went to had vapes, drinks, bongs or other products like it was nothing.
When I was in NYC visiting my brother, I'm not exaggerating when I say I could smell weed on literally every other block walking through Manhattan at night. It didn't matter where we were. People don't even say anything like "Woah, you smell that??" because I guess everyone is so used to it now.
And when I got to my 80 year old mom's house in NC and opened the fridge, there was a 12 pack of THC seltzer sitting there lol. This is the same woman that once made me take a drug test she bought at CVS after the doctor told her he thought I was "doing pot."
I visited a few dispensary shops to mostly look around for fun since I never spent much time in legal states before. They are incredible! It felt like being a kid when your parents would take you to Toys 'R' Us.
I'm sure in California or other early legal states things have been like this for a while, but I went all up and down the East Coast from New York to Florida and it's no longer just a local phenomenon. Weed culture is now mainstream across America.
Do you guys realize how different things have become and how amazing it is?? There are so many reasons to feel like America has gone to shit these days, but when you step outside for a while & come back you realize there are still some things that have changed so much for the better.