One of the greatest strengths of American Pot Story is how it recovers the queer, disabled, and Jewish voices that played a pivotal role in the grassroots effort to normalize the use of cannabis.
Part of the reason why it’s hard to take seriously this notion of a “restored self” as a medical benefit of cannabinoid therapy is because we tend to think about PTSD as a pathology of memory or repression that can be cured with the right therapist or strain of weed.
It has given me no small amount of pleasure to learn that Israeli researchers are finding that with regard to understanding the medical benefits of cannabis, the biomedical model—based on mind-body dualism—just doesn't work.
As I was reading about this system that perpetually collects and analyzes environmental data in the grow room to correct for any problems before they occur, I kept thinking about a grower I know who spends most of his time collecting that data himself, and rarely leaves work.
In the tradition of Dr. Franz Fanon and his classic work Black Skin, White Masks (1952), we can think about being-Ashkenazi in terms of the psychic scars suffered from being racialized and living in the world as a remnant.
