Creative Writing: The Devil’s Lettuce

The Devil’s Lettuce

It’s 4:18 in the afternoon.

Heather Ford is walking to Forbes Field with a pre-rolled joint, ready to “hit 4:20” – the stoner witching hour. She sits at the top of the dusty bleachers with her back to the Cathedral of Learning, joint in one hand and lighter in the other. She stares at her watch and waits.

All across the east coast, countless other stoners are partaking in this longstanding reefer ritual. The high school kids hiding in the basement, passing around a blunt. The college roommates taking massive bong rips near an open window so their landlord doesn’t bitch about the smell. The middle-aged parents sharing a joint before the kids come home from their piano lessons. And the aging hippie smoking a pipe on his front lawn because, frankly, he’s just too old to give a fuck.

It’s 4:20 in the afternoon.

Ford puts one end of the joint in her mouth and lights the other. She takes a long drag, holds it in her lungs for a few seconds, and slowly exhales a cloud of smoke. She takes a second drag and lets out another cloud that the wind carries into the outfield. The results are instantaneous.

It’s the Friday before finals week and Ford is on the verge of losing her mind. She has a long and hectic weekend ahead of her, complete with ten-page term papers, boring study-guides, and enough practice calculus problems to ensure that she won’t be getting much sleep over the next couple of days. The struggle is real.

It’s hard to believe, but this six-foot tall, strong, and confident young woman has a low tolerance for stress. An hour ago, in her last lecture of the semester, Ford was making a list of what she needed to do over the weekend. Looking over the list, she felt anxious and overwhelmed, but after t...

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...lly unbiased studies such as these will give the American public the information we need to make the right decisions; decisions influenced by irrefutable facts rather than propaganda and scare tactics.

From the dawn of time, our species has exhibited the desire to be under the influence of something or other. Whether it’s marijuana, or alcohol, or some exotic, trippy cactus that grows in the Mojave Desert, people are always going to find a way to alter their state of mind. That’s why prohibition is and always will be destined to fail. You simply cannot make a natural human desire illegal. Until the laws begin to mirror public opinion, prohibition will stay on the books and everyday it does, it produces more and more victims. When you criminalize things that aren’t real crimes, you still get criminals. Someone like Heather Ford should not have a criminal record.