Last summer, in an effort to cut down my drinking after a particularly boozy vacation, I bought a case of cannabis soda online. The soda — called Lo Boy, by the brand Cann — was blood-orange-and-cardamom flavored; each can contained one milligram of THC and 15 milligrams of CBD. I’d drink one in lieu of a glass of wine while cooking dinner. On an empty stomach, it would give me the mildest feeling of euphoria — the equivalent of, say, a half a glass of wine — which faded after about 10 minutes.
This suited my needs perfectly. I am in my 30s, and I can no longer handle a high dose of any recreational substance. The last time I tried a five-milligram THC gummy, I had the archetypal paranoid experience, and could calm down only by writing a detailed description in my iPhone’s Notes app of how terrible I felt as a warning to my future self. (Sample sentence: “There is a lag in my understanding of everything I am seeing and hearing, and in the space of this lag I feel an incredible amount of anxiety that understanding will never come.”) A Lo Boy’s low dose worked for me, and the sodas were sufficient to help me scale back on drinking — which, as I keep reading, is very, very bad for you.
After the case was gone, I continued to be served ads for Cann on Instagram. Soon I was seeing ads for similar brands as well. (The algorithm seemed to think I was really sucking these things down.) There was Cycling Frog, with its twee mascot of a frog on a velocipede. There was Mary & Jane, whose ad for a product named Sunny asked: “What’s the microdose product that you and your book club have been taking?!” There was Rose Los Angeles, advertising a lychee-martini gummy with “Italian nipple lemon,” endorsed by the comedian Kate Berlant and modeled after a drink at a Los Angeles restaurant called Jar. The products came in flavors like blackcurrant, watermelon marjoram and yuzu.
I was struck by the aesthetics of the branding: clean, bougie and firmly millennial. The Cann look, for instance, features elegantly bright colors; if you didn’t know better, you’d think it was an I.P.A. from a trendy microbrewery. Another brand advertised a gummy called Out of Office, which seemed to bank on customers being white-collar and deskbound: “Unwind like you’re on Vacay,” its website advised. Many ads stressed the wellness attributes of cannabis. Cycling Frog promised a “healthier buzz.” One brand was literally called Erth Wellness. Another, called Molly J., offered a picture of a box of gummies surrounded by bowls of almonds, blackberries, a handful of strawberries, a loose pear. The inside of the box — a gentle aquamarine — read “Chill is a state of mind.”
These are the same virtues a certain strain of pothead has been advocating forever: that marijuana relaxes you, that’s it’s healthier than alcohol, that it soothes any number of ailments, that it comes from the earth. This argument may have received a yuppie makeover and a slick design update. But many of the selling points are the same as they were back when cannabis was just regular old weed, delivered to your door in a crinkled baggie by a shifty guy on a bike.
As of this year, 24 states have legalized recreational marijuana, raising a fascinating new question: What does it look like to sell cannabis like any other product? As brands try to reach the maximum number of customers — including professionals who have, perhaps, aged out of mixing with dealers — their answer has, so far, resembled selling vitamins at an Apple Store. The dispensary near where I live in the Hudson Valley is bright, spare and immaculate. The staff members wear lanyards and are happy to answer questions. There exists not a trace of the head shop of yore: no novelty bongs, no Bic lighters adorned with pot leaves, no weird unlicensed drawings of Stewie from “Family Guy” smoking a blunt. All that stuff has moved to vape shops, which generally do not (or should not) sell weed but have nevertheless inherited the shelves of blown-glass pipes.
New York Times
