Americans who rarely, if ever, smoked marijuana before the pandemic now say they’re turning to weed to help them cope
Three years ago, Ricardo Capuano, 32, didn’t know how much a gram of marijuana cost. Now, after years of lockdown and an extended period of overwhelming anxiety, he has become something of a weed connoisseur.
Capuano was never a stoner; sure, he dabbled in high school, but beer and mezcal were always his “weapon of choice”. It wasn’t until the summer of 2020, in the pits of Covid despair, that he found himself reformed as a proud, regular toker. In fact, Capuano found himself actually proselytizing about the splendor of cannabis to his friends during their weekly online poker games. “I was starting to become an advocate,” he laughs.
“I didn’t have to interact with that many people,” continues Capuano, who recently became engaged to his girlfriend of five years and moved from Mexico City to Houston to facilitate a career pivot. “I was cooking and doing dishes, I was sitting and waiting for time to pass. Weed is enjoyable when you’re doing those activities.”
“We didn’t see my parents or my friends,” he adds, “but we did see our dealer quite often.”
The Covid-19 nightmare sparked a number of shake-ups to the social order – a burgeoning anti-work movement, a sharp economic swoon, and tiresome new polarities in the culture war. But as lockdown orders marched on, many weed agnostics dived in to the community with gusto, forming a new cohort of pandemic-era stoners. According to the data analytics firm Headset, legal marijuana sales increased by 120% in 2020 , and 61% in 2021, and Fortune reported that Americans bought $18bn worth of cannabis in our first coronavirus year, $7bn more compared with 2019 transactional figures.
There are multiple factors at play here: cannabis is increasingly accessible, with 37 states that have medical marijuana laws on the books in addition to 18 states that allow recreational use. The trend also coincides with a gradual de-stigmatization of the drug in the general populace. But clearly, something about the Covid experience sparked a cannabis renaissance in […]
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