Global Ganja Report

Those stigmatized as “drug dealers” can be good people too seems to be the overarching message in A Weed Grows in Boston by Valerie Vande Panne. The slim volume is a reproduction of a news story that originally ran in 2009 in the Boston Phoenix, which received both an AltWeekly award and a New England Newspaper & Press Association award. The author is former news editor for High Times, yet she is amusingly shocked by how ordinary is “Mary Jones” (the pseudonym given to the subject).

Jones began home-growing to self-medicate for pain management after a work injury left her with reflex sympathetic dystrophy (RSD). She’d actually had anti-drug attitudes until she discovered (on a doctor’s recommendation) that cannabis eased her condition—after pharmaceuticals had failed. Later, she became a dealer to help put her two kids through college, but also gave medicinal cannabutter free of charge to people who couldn’t afford it.

In the paranoid atmosphere of those pre-legalization days, Vande Panne was actually taken to Jones’ house blindfolded. She wrote, in words that seem a little ingenuous today: “There are no pit bulls, no guns, no security cameras. No henchmen, no gangsta rap blaring. No heavily tattooed and pierced punks or hippies.”

Jones’ kids in college were not into getting high themselves, but were happy to see their mom finding relief without being zoned out on pills. For mother Jones, the only downside of cannabis was fear of getting caught. Which is rather an irony, given that the less efficacious and more debilitating pills were legal.

Vande Panne compared Jones to Nancy Botwin, the widowed mom-turned-dealer from the TV show Weeds, which depicts a more sensationalized fictional version of essentially the same story, of a “normal” person turned criminal.

A Weed Grows in Boston is most interesting as an historical snapshot—with a message that is happily at least somewhat less relevant 15 years later. Vande Panne does, however, include a brief postscript noting that cannabis has today only won a “quasi-legality” even in states like Massachusetts, given ongoing federal prohibition. She provides a link to masscann.org, a website focusing on cannabis issues in Massachusetts.

— Hannah Fletcher for Global Ganja Report 
 
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