My Grandma Smoked Pot
By Rudy Young

This is a true story. It happened back in the early seventies. I was raised by my grandmother and as such enjoyed a relationship more akin to mother and son. Even when I got my first art job and moved away, it was only fifty miles, so we saw each other regularly. As an artist-musician in the mid-seventies, I smoked pot, and at first I would hide this from my Grandma by rolling my joints and smoking them in my room or outside. But then I decided this was silly, and began smoking in her presence. I can hear her now, “Aba, Rudy! Don’t you know Art Linkletter’s daughter killed herself because she couldn’t get any Marijuana?”
“I know just how she felt, Grandma,” I remember replying. A month later she came to me with a magazine article that had the headline, Marijuana Relieves Arthritis Pain. “Is that true?” she asked.

Now, this is a woman who suffered so severely from Arthritis she once told me she wished she could stick a knife in her body and let out the pain. I told her what I thought, “It probably does, Grandma.” Imagine my surprise when two days later I got a letter asking me to bring some of that “stuff” the next time I came. Of course I was intrigued, so I got in the car and drove over that afternoon. We lit a candle and sat around the kitchen table, and I rolled a joint. “Hold the smoke in your lungs as long as you can,” I instructed her. Her eyes would become large as she did this, her cheeks puffed out; and then she would exhale. I didn’t know how this new experience was affecting her until there was a loud knock at the door. I scrambled to hide the evidence, dust away the ashes and, peeping through the curtains, could see that it was our next-door neighbor, Ben. Ben and I had grown up together, but he disapproved of my lifestyle. As I got up Grandma took my arm and whispered, “Whatever you do, don’t tell Ben what we’re doing.”

I assured her our secret was safe and went to answer the door. Ben entered and went to sit at the end of the table like he always did, but the Marijuana smoke filling the room was hard to ignore. And then, without a moment’s hesitation, my grandmother looked at Ben and said, “Ben, guess what? I’m learning to smoke Marijuana.”

Ben got up, walked out the door, and I caught him halfway back to his house. “Ben,” I explained, “Grandma has Arthritis, and we believe pot will help alleviate the pain.”
Ben looked at me. “Rudy, your grandma’s over twenty-one; I guess she can do whatever she wants.” And that was that, as far as my neighbor Ben was concerned. I would notice knowing glances passed between Ben and his wife when my grandmother was mentioned later on, but the subject was never discussed between us again.

Back in the kitchen, my grandmother and I smoked some more, cooked up something good to eat, and when I left that night she was in wonderful spirits. The next day I called her.

“I danced,” she told me. “I got up this morning and I danced.” My grandmother’s arthritis pain was gone.
When my musician friends found out my grandmother was smoking pot, they began sending her gifts; Sensamilla, Colombian Gold, and black hash from India and Germany. Grandma was enjoying the finest herbs on the planet. She kept her joints and roaches on a saucer, which she hid in the oven, and every day she would smoke a little, and every day she would dance. I can remember her pointing to certain roaches on her saucer, the ones almost black with coatings of hash oil; “Those are the best,” she would say.

My grandmother’s pot smoking ended when my uncle discovered her saucer in the oven. They called the police, the Sheriff, the drug-enforcement people, but none of them would interfere. “She’s over twenty-one,” was the consensus, and the grandson lives in another county. After that, my uncle made sure Grandma never smoked Marijuana again.
She died crippled with arthritis.

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