Today I started my day with a nice bong rip. I don’t always begin my days in such a fashion, but the sun was shining and I had a long bus ride to work so I wanted to have a pleasant journey. About halfway through my ride, two young men (17-20ish, I’d say-they all look like babies after you hit a certain age) hopped on the bus and sat down just behind me.

These boys were most definitely cannabis fans, it was blatantly obvious. Blood-shot eyes, pot-leaf images festooned all over their clothing and backpacks, one even wore a hat that said “faded” on it. As if that wasn’t enough, they were talking (very loudly) about the sheer amount of weed they had smoked just this morning.

I found myself strangely offended by these two chaps. Fundamentally, of course, I don’t think they were being cruel or insensitive and (clearly) I do not take issue with consuming cannabis. These kids were talking about how much weed they’d smoked, then went on to have an in-depth discussion about which of their friends were responsible for the various graffitti we passed along the way. The guy with the “faded” hat pointed out one such “tag” and said, “This here was done by that little white boy from down south.” Mr. Faded is, himself, a diminutive Caucasian with delusions of ebonicized street cred. When he exited the bus, I noticed he was walking like he just got off a horse because he was sagging his sweatpants down to his knees and they would have fallen off if he walked like any other bipedal mammal.

What bothered me is that this type of pot smoker, albeit influenced by their youthful ignorance, becomes the mascot of the prohibitionist, the poster-child for why marijuana should be illegal. These boys and I created an interesting contrast. We both smoked weed prior to boarding the bus and that’s about the extent of similarity. I smoked, took my shower and had breakfast. I kissed my wife and son goodbye and headed off to work. These kids got high and went off to pretend they were thugs while bragging about how much grass they smoked.

As a disclaimer, I may live in Seattle now, but I lived in California during the haydays of the Blood/Crip gangland emergence. I have seen real bangers and it bothered me that these little wannabes think sagging your sweats, spray-painting signs, and smoking weed makes you a thug.

These are the fools that make Kevin Sabet and Patrick Kennedy salivate. They are perfect exemplars of why legal weed is a bad idea. Furthermore, these people are the loudest and proudest potheads around. I don’t want to hear on a public bus how fucked up you were last night, I don’t want the uninformed out there to see your white-boy dreads and hear your “ode to my bong” poems and think that this behavior is a direct result of smoking weed.

I think professional stoners, those who get high but still positively contribute to their world, tend to be more discreet. That may be because those of us who smoked before it was legal have a Pavlovian response geared toward discretion, but I think it has more to do with not making getting high the only thing that matters. Honestly, I’d be just as put off if I was listening to these kids rave on about how much booze they had.

As a father, I don’t want my boys to follow the path of these two mental giants. If they decide when they are of age that cannabis is right for them, I’ll support that choice as long as they don’t forget that they still need to be functioning, responsible people.

We’ve been so focused on spreading word that cannabis is not dangerous and has a plethora of medical application (a cause that matters significantly) that we’ve lost sight of another front on which we need to put our best foot forward: combating the stigma that cannabis makes you a dumbass.

Weed will not make you a dumbass. I think if you’re a dumbass already and you get high, your natural proclivity toward idiocy increases. Bill Cosby, in one of his stand-up specials, was talking about cocaine and he impersonated someone who liked coke saying “it heightens your personality.” To which, Bill (as himself again) responds, “yes, but what if you’re an asshole?”

I’m reminded of some Outkast lyrics:

“Pull up your pants, ladies and gents. Please, act like you got some sense.”

I understand that I’m just bitching a bit and that a small snapshot of these two kids on a bus is hardly enough to paint them into a box and claim I know who they are. But, based of the information they provided to me (and anyone else within 20 feet) I do not believe my assessment is too far off point. I know Alcohol has been around for a long time and there are plenty of people who can use it without going all troglodyte. The same, I suppose, is true of cannabis. I just wish there were more constructive pot-enthusiasts willing to declare as such. Cannabis legalization is still in its infancy, let’s not let the morons in our ranks be the only ones with the loudspeaker.

Love cannabis, be intelligent.