Answering questions from the mail baggie.

We asked you to send in your canna-questions, and now it’s time to answer some reader mail! (The Higher Ground legal staff has asked me to remind readers that answers provided herein should be taken with a grain of hempseed; I am, after all, a marijuana columnist.)

With wildfires all over the state, I’m worried a nearby marijuana field may catch on fire and get me and my family stoned. Can burning weed farms get people high? Lance, Chelan
Does Smokey the Bear crap in the woods? Yes! Look, if you are standing right next to a giant burning pile of ganja and you inhale the smoke, you will be stoned to the bejesus. A town in Indonesia got seriously baked after police there burned a three-ton mound of confiscated marijuana in March. Dozens of residents of Tangerang (about 20 miles from Jakarta) complained of severe headaches and dizziness after inhaling smoke from the bud barbecue.

In the event, however, you’re not standing right next to giant bales of burning herb, it’s unlikely your family will catch a contact high from wildfires of marijuana plants. According to a study in Drug and Alcohol Dependence (great centerfold last month, btw!), secondhand smoke can get people feeling stoned, but it takes a huge amount of THC for that to happen.

“We evaluated the conditions under which you’d need to be to get intoxicated from secondhand smoke exposure,” noted Ryan Vandrey, an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, “and it needs to be very extreme.” In their study, researchers put a dozen students in a small Plexiglas chamber without ventilation and gave three-quarters of them joints to smoke. “Enough smoke from the room filtered out so that the nonsmokers stuck in the ‘hot box’ didn’t experience a buzz,” Vandrey said. “Outside, where there is a constant circulation of air, it’s hard to imagine that a person could breathe in enough marijuana smoke to feel the effects of the drug.” (Bummer—though I am enrolling next semester at John Hopkins!)

Ultimately, if you’re worried about that kind of fire getting the wife and kids high, you’re worrying about the wrong thing: Get the hell outta Dodge, man! Smoke inhalation of any kind is serious in mega-quantities, and fumes from burning gas, plastics, pesticides, household products, and clouds of soot and ash can also do serious damage to your lungs.

I read somewhere that they’re starting to make GMO marijuana! Is that true, and how can I make sure I’m not smoking Frankenbud from Monsanto! Erin, Wallingford
While rumors of genetically modified weed have been around for decades, at least for the moment it’s a paranoid fantasy. “Genetic modification or genetic engineering involves altering a substance’s DNA at the molecular level,” the website PolitiFact explains. “Producers of marijuana on the illicit market don’t have the ability to pull off those kinds of lab-based modifications.”

Modern-day Reefer Madness proponents like Patrick Kennedy are also feeding the Frankenbud fires, claiming that GMO pot is being used to hard-wire megadoses of THC into the plant. While many growers (both legal and black-market) are selecting and breeding the best plants and coming up with high-potency strains of cannabis, thus far Big Ag players like Monsanto and company have yet to get their hands on seeds (one of the very few advantages of marijuana not being legal at the federal level).

Of course, given that cannabis is a cash cow (estimated to be a $15 billion market by 2020), the corporate agro-bastards at Monsanto will jump in at some point. It’s part of the reason the independent-grower model in early-legalization states like Washington, Oregon, and Colorado is so important—local, non-corporate farmers have got a headstart and a fighting chance!

You constantly mention how much in taxes legal pot is bringing in for the state, but obviously it also means there’s a ton more weed out there. So now all our kids are going to be getting their hands on the stuff and smoking up nonstop. Great job, Stoner-Dickwad . Derrick, Des Moines
I’m not sure there’s a question in there, Derrick, but I’d like to refute the statement.

According to data from the Washington Institute for Public Policy, the use of cannabis by youngsters in our state has remained unchanged over the past decade. “Cannabis use and access among students in sixth through 12th grades have changed little from 2002 through the most recent survey in 2014.” The report went on to state that all the groups surveyed—sixth graders, eighth graders, 10th graders, 12th graders—demonstrated static use over time, with the oldest group actually reporting slight declines in lifetime use since 2002.

Of course, Initiative 502 passed in 2012 and retail sales didn’t start until July 2014, so those numbers may change. However, eighth graders who were asked about their use of pot in the past month (as well as lifetime use) reported that they’d not only smoked less since legalization, but that it was harder to get. Unlike black-market dealers (who’ve been around for decades), our new crop of legal recreational cannabis stores actually checks IDs.

Last but not least, Derrick, I can tell you who is getting their hands on more reefer—full-grown adults. Since it became legal here, self-reported use is up 17 percent between 2012 and 2014. So yes, great job stoner-dickwads, indeed!

It’s good to be white.

For example, as a white guy, I’m statistically more likely to be selling drugs than an African-American man. (I’ve always been too scared of going to jail to actually sell pot, but I’m using this to make my point.) If I were black, however, it would be three times more likely that I’d be arrested for dealing. It gets even better for whitey. Though five times as many of us use drugs, African-Americans are sent to prison 10 times as often for the same crimes. And once ya get to jail? On average, African-Americans serve as much time in prisons for drug offenses (58 months) as white folks do for violent ones (62 months).

While we may have legalized weed out West, these stats—and the ongoing federal War on Drugs—feed into a vicious loop that gives officers the pretense of probable cause to search, detain, and arrest African-Americans in droves. It is a short line from our national drug policy to police abuses. And by now we’ve all seen the dozens of cell-phone videos illustrating exactly how this often turns out for (eventually deceased) black men and women—who are after all under the law innocent until proven guilty.

While it might be good to be white, it doesn’t exactly feel good; seems like we should be further down the line on the apparently not-so-self-evident “All Men Are Created Equal” thing. Recently I’ve been trying to put myself in the shoes of young African-American men in Baltimore and Atlanta and Ferguson. Can I relate? At what point have I been targeted or profiled or discriminated against?

I’m Jewish. Does that count? Over the years I’ve heard offensive stereotypes and jokes. (“Jew ‘em down” is my least favorite.) But while that’s painful, it’s simply not the same. I have no fear of being pulled over for the way I look; I don’t worry that some armed jackass playing Neighborhood Watchman will follow me for no other reason than the color of my skin. I have no problem getting my foot in the door in business meetings, obtaining loans, or hailing cabs in any city in the world. And because I don’t have those life concerns, I may not actually “get it.”

My upbringing didn’t help either. I grew up on Mercer Island, where we called the only black kid in our entire elementary school “Chocolate.” (I apologize, Hayden.) Eventually basketball icon Bill Russell and his family moved to the island, and our black population tripled. Without people of color to relate to, there was very little chance in my youth to experience diversity, much less economic or cultural differences or division.

It took a steady diet of Toni Morrison, classes at Berkeley, and the recent slew of well-documented abuses to understand that the color of a person’s skin can clearly change their circumstances. I’m now fully aware that blacks are more likely to be pulled over by police, stopped as pedestrians (and frisked), and “randomly” searched at airports. The national unemployment rate for African-Americans is double that of whites. Black kids, according to the Department of Education, are more likely to be punished in schools, as well as get rookie teachers, which—go figure—affects their drop-out and graduation rates. But far more problematic than these are the institutional barriers that still exist.

In Missouri, the Justice Department’s own report following the shooting of Michael Brown found that “nearly every aspect of Ferguson’s law-enforcement system” negatively affected and severely impacted African-Americans.

Nationwide, while blacks are only about 13 percent of the population, they make up 37 percent of drug-related arrests and almost half of the prison population (one million of the 2.2 million incarcerated individuals). Overall, they’re incarcerated at six times the rate of whites.

The ongoing police brutality against unarmed black men, women, and children has clearly triggered the anger that accompanies such injustice, resulting in ongoing protests and riots throughout the country. There’s a point at which truly marginalized groups get backed into such a corner that an equally valid option to putting up with the jerry-rigged system is raising hell and overturning the apple cart. Intellectually, I get it; I’ve reached a boiling point over slow-moving traffic and lousy bar service. But I also understand that, for true change to occur, those in power must somehow seek to share that power.

How to do we make a seismic shift happen without all hell breaking loose? I don’t know. I’m in over my head. But here’s a start: I’d like my tax dollars to be directed to communities that have been decimated by mass unemployment and social neglect. And I’d like the government to explore new efforts and ideas to aid the poor and the vulnerable—many of which may fail. And that’s OK. As a white person, I can relate to plenty of social experiments that have been colossal flops: Apple’s Newton, for example, and Microsoft’s Zune. Enron and MCI. Jazzercize. The Delorean. Solyndra. MySpace. And the War on Drugs.

Priorities must change. And any argument about government getting out of the way is yet another attempt to keep the status quo—and racism—alive and well. Indifference or passive support of the current dynamic is unacceptable. If you need a more self-centered reason to change the system than the common good, consider this: We’ll be the minority soon enough.

Both use and approval are down.

Houston, we have a problem (with marijuana). No, it’s not that youngsters are getting stoned on the wacky weed and crashing cars or dropping out of school. It’s that they’re starting to dislike the stuff.

A report released last week in The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse shows that not only has cannabis use decreased among teens, but disapproval of marijuana is up. (They could have said that approval was down, but the media is so opposed to putting a positive spin on drug use, even academic news is twisted.) Taking data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the survey is stunning for both its duration, from 2002 to 2013, and breadth, with 500,000 kids across the nation polled. Responses were aggregated from 105,903 younger adolescents (ages 12–14); 110,949 older adolescents (15–17); and 221,976 young adults (18–25).

“The proportion of adolescents aged 12–14 reporting ‘strong disapproval’ of marijuana use initiation increased significantly from 74.4–78.9%,” the report states. “Concurrently, a significant decrease in past 12-month marijuana use . . . was observed among younger adolescents.” Not only did the percentage of kids 12–14 who smoked pot go down (from 6 percent in 2002 to 4.5 percent in 2013), but the 15- to 17-year-olds who in my day were out behind the boiler room getting baked between classes also dropped significantly, from 26 percent in 2002 to 22 percent in 2013.

“With decriminalization, medicalization, and in some places recreational use, and adults no longer viewing marijuana use as an immoral act, we were concerned how it would affect teen use and attitudes,” noted one of the report’s authors, professor Christopher Salas-Wright from the University of Texas at Austin (figures). “But, especially at the middle-school age, youth became more disapproving, not more permissive. And certainly this data tells us we don’t see a dramatic spike at the national level in terms of marijuana use.”

The stats from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health looked at teen use and opinions all across the country. But what about specifically in the states where weed is legal? Surely there, kids love the ganja and use more of it! In fact, no. A study published last month in The Lancet Psychiatry (great centerfold, by the way) tells the same tale. Researchers looked at data from over a million teens in the 23 states that have had medical-marijuana laws on the books from 1991 to 2014, and once again the teenyboppers were nonplussed: “Our findings provide the strongest evidence to date that marijuana use by teenagers does not increase after a state legalizes medical marijuana,“ stated the study’s author, Deborah Hasin, a professor at Columbia University Medical Center.

Now clearly I have no interest in youngsters using marijuana. It’s not great for the developing brain and, like booze, should probably be delayed until at least 21. (Come to think of it, so should cell-phone use and driving!) But given my desire to see cannabis legalized federally, we’re eventually going to need these young people to vote for initiative measures when they arise in new states. Luckily, as teen rates have gone down, adult usage has increased: The number of grown-up cannabis users rose from 26 million in 2003 to 33 million in 2013—a whopping 37 percent. (High five?)

As for kids, decreasing interest in weed is probably one of those deals where what’s cool one day is uncool the next. Facebook was once the rage, and before you can say SnapChat, it’s for parents and Grandma. Same could be true with ganja: “We know American adults are starting to view this as a non-moral issue. We’ve seen the country’s adults changing, and we’re trying to get at what young people think and do,” said Salas-Wright. While states like Washington and Colorado have legalized weed, he noted, these laws “have not resulted in more use or greater approval of marijuana use among younger adolescents.”

The pendulum will swing back and forth, and hopefully smart measures will be put in place along the way to legalize, tax, and regulate marijuana for adult use across the land. It is kind of funny, though: Turns out it’s not Reefer Madness and anti-drug campaigns that are turning kids off to cannabis—it’s legalization.