How Pot Legalization Affects Paranoia

Coloradans weigh whether the more liberal legal environment has freed pot users from one of marijuana’s worst side effects.

If you ask certain pot aficionados here, marijuana is “not a drug.” It certainly isn’t sold like one, now that pot legalization has swept through these spruce-dotted valleys like smoke through the neck of a gravity bong.

The tiny downtown area of this resort city, population 6,700, is home to six street-facing, bonafide pot shops. A gondola that ferries skiers up and down Aspen Mountain is referred to, lovingly, as the “ganjala.”

The pot-vending operation here is aggressively—almost desperately—respectable, like a teenager making conversation with his great-aunt. “Budtenders” talk of “educating consumers” even as they misuse words like “implement” and “stigma.”

A Harvard neurobiology lab this is not, in other words. But it’s civilized. Pot sellers’ golfball-sized green nuggets smell fresh and pungent, like hot peppermint tea. They’re neatly organized...

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