"My son was born in 2002. I didn’t have an office job, so I was around a lot to get high and enjoy the cartoons."

"I opened a packet of Reefer’s peanut butter cups at his preschool fund-raiser and stunk up the place. But pot wasn’t just an occasional funny thing for me to do on weekends. I got stoned the day my son came home from the hospital and stayed that way, with few breaks, for a decade and a half.... In March of 2017, my mother died. The hour before she passed, I was outside the hospital, getting a shipment of medical gummies from a friend. I was high when I watched her die, I was high at her funeral, and I was high every day for the next eight months. To say I was 'self-medicating' to deal with grief would be too kind. My addicted self took grief as a no-limits license to get stoned...."

From "I'm Just a Middle-Aged House Dad Addicted to Pot/Cannabis should be legal, just as alcohol should be legal. But marijuana addiction exists, and it almost wrecked my life" by Neal Pollack (NYT). Despite the use of the present tense in the headline, Pollack quit ("cold turkey") and has stayed sober.

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"We need to legalize this plant, this life-saving plant.... It's medicine, natural medicine, and the old 2 parties want to throw you in jail for using it. Vote Libertarian...."

From the Marijuana Harvest Festival on the UW Library Mall today. The video ends abruptly when one of the men on the stage calls out to me, "Ann!" I put the lens cap on the camera.

Actually, the camera continues to run, so I had audio of my reacting to getting run into by a man in an electric wheelchair, who came up behind me, ran into my foot, and kept his motor running with his wheel ramming into my foot as if to say, move your foot, I'm coming through.

Transcription from the audio: "Oh! Oh! Oh! Hey! Hey! Don't run into me. That's a crime. Don't run into people with a motor vehicle. That's wrong! That's wrong! You could be arrested for that! You need to be careful! There are children! There are animals! Don't do that! Don't do that!"

I really cared about impressing him that he could not drive like that on the pavement. He was acting like someone that other people let get away with whatever he wants to do, which I also think is wrong and, frankly, dehumanizing. Either he's capable of driving a motor vehicle or he isn't.

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We went down to the University of Wisconsin Library Mall because we saw the announcement from our local socialists: "We must show the ruling class we are not going anywhere."

"If Kavanaugh is approved tomorrow it will only be the beginning of sustained mass movement that will come for more than the rapists and misogynists they put and hold in power. Down with Trump, down with Kavanaugh, down with the GOP, down with the patriarchy and down with capitalism!"



There are a lot of people milling around downtown Madison. It's a Farmers' Market day on the square. It's a big football Saturday, and the game's not until this evening. And there was the big annual Marijuana Harvest Festival right on Library Mall.

And this is what the Socialist flooding of the street looked like.



It's not as if anyone was gravitating toward the Democratic Party. People cut a wide swath around this table:



That's the Socialist crowd in the background. A few feet away the mall was teeming:



The Libertarians were there, hoping to divert the marijuana-oriented passers-by:



It wasn't hard to see what they had to offer:

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