I was 24 when I smoked weed for the first time. It was April 20, 2001, at 4:20 in the afternoon. I’m not kidding—trip on that. Or, take a bong rip to that (if that’s your thing). While that doesn’t make me an expert weed smoker, it does give you some insight into my history with it: 24, on 4/20, at 4:20.
It was amazing: it’s like the music I was listening to (Daft Punk’s “Digital Love”—give me a break, it was the year 2001 and I was 24) grew feathers, acquired a fourth dimension, and invited me inside my own head, which was, somehow, shaped like a song. The disembodied robotic voice of the French band floated like a clarion call above the rambunctious, slick harmonies of the beat, the song literally stretched in time, and I felt like I was at the bottom of a sonorous canyon created by a cheesily-perfect pop song.
Words by Ted Barrow
I was also skateboarding a lot in this era. Looking back, it was probably the best I ever skated. Such is life when you’re 24, in peak physical form, and unaware of how potentially cheesy smoking weed to Daft Punk’s “Digital Love” at 4:20 on 4/20 will seem nearly two full decades later at 42.
From the rose-tinted rearview reflection of my perspective, I can also say that I am SO GRATEFUL that I waited until I was a mature adult before smoking. I was lucky that, in my youth, mainstream skateboarding didn’t really address or promote weed smoking. Not to say that people didn’t do it (of course they did—this is skateboarding, after all), but it wasn’t as completely and openly entwined into the culture as it is today.
See, in the 80’s, as was recently pointed out, cannabis wasn’t that cool. The drug on the high end was cocaine, on the low end, crack. Skateboarding was too young to directly address either of those, but by 1992, around the time I got my driver’s license, weed imagery and parlance was becoming more and more popular within skateboarding, largely due to the popularity of the Beastie Boys, Cypress Hill, and Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic” among skaters. Skateboarding has always run parallel to hip-hop culture, and has always adapted the aesthetics and countercultural strategies of other movements and subcultures to its own. So too with hip-hop’s love of pot.
Lest this be misconstrued as another “clueless old skater can’t understand contemporary skateboarding and is ranting about it upon a quaintly verbose splintery soapbox,” let me make my opinion about weed in skateboarding clear in three succinct points:
- There is nothing wrong with the habitual act of smoking weed
- There is nothing wrong with the habitual act of skateboarding
- However, when the first activity, which is best enjoyed responsibly as an adult, gets mixed and promoted with the second activity, which is best enjoyed irresponsibly as a teenager, it becomes problematic.
Another problem I have with the intersection of weed culture and skate culture has to do with commercialization. About 11 years before that fateful afternoon on 4/20, I had an epiphany. I realized that the SKATE AND DESTROY ethos that I so recently had decided to live by was actually a slogan, one invented and sold to me by companies who made money from skateboarding and, more specifically, made money from the parents of children like me who destroyed our equipment (shoes, clothing, decks, etc.) by skateboarding. Put into a simple formula: SKATING + DESTROYING = BUYING.
Knowing this didn’t change the way I skated—I didn’t thrash any less as a result of that early moment of woke-ness—but I was a little more tooth-sucking and phlegmatic towards those bombastic slogans whenever I saw them as banners in magazines thereafter. News flash: most magazines are, generally, a vehicle for advertising. This was especially true in 1989, and I started to understand that there was a key difference between the act of skateboarding and the industry of skateboarding.
So, too, with weed. As marijuana use is becoming increasingly legalized, popularized, normalized, and even banalized, we see more and more overlaps on the industry side of these two strange bedfellows. Let’s call this burgeoning legalized weed industry Big Weed. Big Weed works like this. More and more professional skaters actively promote their own weed smoking in a less and less countercultural way. Think about the hidden pocket in the tongue of Chad Muska’s pro shoes for és and C1rca. Highlighting cannabis culture in skate culture is nothing new. What is new, however, is when aggregate weed connoisseurship brands (Weedmaps) sponsor skateboarders, take them around the world, and use their chill stoner/skater image to promote their dispensary listing service. And somehow this is considered a good thing for skateboarding? No. It’s a good thing for the sponsored skaters of Weedmaps, but not for skateboarding.
Here’s why. Despite the fact that codgers like me still do it, skateboarding is an industry that is promoted to and funded by children. In fact, children are the main consumers of skateboards. It is for them that pros perform their impossible feats, and only children really believe in the power of a professional skateboarder’s signature endorsement. (Sure, as older skateboarders, we still adhere to some of these ideas with favorite pros, brand allegiances, etc., but that’s just us being quaintly smooth-brained, if anything). Big Weed sees the market potential in young skateboarders: get them excited about it early, make the activity of smoking weed seem inextricable from the activity of skateboarding, and you have a customer for life. Weed, like skateboard equipment, is an ephemeral commodity: it literally disappears in smoke, and it is a never-ending stream of “re-up”-derived revenue that keeps Big Weed raking it in.
In order to infiltrate the skateboard/lifestyle market, therefore, Big Weed needs to demonstrate how consonant regular marijuana use is with the skateboarding lifestyle. The way what Big Weed has chosen to do so has been through sponsoring well-known athletes and sending them on simulacral skate tours that strike a balance between the traditional skate tour video format and a focus on normalizing marijuana use. (Ed. Note: Ignite, one of the co-sponsors of the “Weedmaps Wellness House” in Hawaii, where the Weedmaps skate team recently sojourned, is owned by noted asshole and purveyor of sexist cannabis ads Dan Bilzerian. Fuck him forever.)
This in and of itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing, on the consumer’s end. Unlike skateboarding, weed is putatively not addictive. Things are different, however, on the production end. Legalization is a risky gambit: long harvested by outlaws and cartels (see Murder Mountain), the federally-sanctioned and taxable potential of legalized marijuana has only served to escalate the violence on the production end, essentially gutting an entire industry of growers who had previously remained outside of the law. Profitability justifies all investments, and skateboarding is nothing more than a potential investment for Big Weed. There is no “core,” skater-owned weed company, just as there are fewer and fewer weed companies whose officers even come from cannabis culture. Big Weed is an outsider in all things.
Normalizing a once-outlaw activity is, well, normal. Things get legalized when they can be taxed for a profit. Skateboarders have always loved weed, in a countercultural way, but now skateboarders are themselves pretty profitable, and so is their weed use. Lionizing weed use within skateboarding, promoting a professional skateboarder’s pot habit, and linking that to their talent, which is then promoted to impressionable children as something to aspire to, just sucks. To my mind, it’s ok to buy a pair of Kyle Walker model Vans in the hopes that the shoes might help you skate like Kyle Walker: they’re good shoes either way, and that imaginative leap from product to performance is aided by the fact that good shoes help you skate better. Less clear is the link between weed use and skate performance. Or, for that matter, the potential link between cannabis use and changes in the endocannabinoid and brain systems of teens. While there is no conclusive evidence that heavy cannabis use in adolescence causes lasting harm to the brain on its own, there have been enough studies suggesting it over the years that kids might do well to worry. Big Weed doesn’t want you to know that. It is worth noting, of course, that teen cannabis use has gone down in states where it’s been legalized, but that doesn’t excuse Big Weed’s cross-promotional efforts within skateboarding, given who skateboards are typically marketed to.
I want you to know that I have plenty of friends that have been lifelong weed smokers from, say, 1992 until now. Weed doesn’t necessarily zap your creativity, as the archaeologists who dug up Elizabethan pipe stems caked in weed residue from Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon garden will affirm. But I also have plenty of friends that dropped out of skating because weed zapped their motivation. I’m not here to tell you what to do, but to simply highlight that the industry promotion of marijuana use in skateboarding is NOT something that is organic, coming from the inside. Make no mistake: weed doesn’t help you skate better. Big Weed needs skateboarding, skateboarding doesn’t need weed.
It makes sense that Big Weed would want to attach itself to the ascendant and soon to be Olympian heights of the skateboard market, but what do we, as skateboarders, get out of it? To me, it seems like another outlaw aspect of our culture being banalized, repackaged, and sold back to us for a price. The seemingly endless parade of insipid, cannabis-branded skate products is testament to that. But for many cannabis-loving skaters, smoking (like skating) was something one did to step out of mainstream culture. Like skateboarding, it is now on the threshold of the legalized, federally-sanctioned, taxable, and profitable mainstream. Let’s be wary of this. Skate and Destroy, Smoke and Destroy, but most importantly, keep it outlaw. Destroy the establishment, don’t let your skating or smoking become a tool of it.
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Follow Ted’s brilliant satirical skatepark footage review account on Instagram, if you don’t already: @feedback_ts
Header image via @wmsk8 on Instagram.
