It can be safe to say, from a cultural zeitgeist standpoint, most would cite the mid 60s as a time of mass expansion of counter culture, as well as social revolution.

 

The Civil Rights movement and student protests against the Vietnam war litter our memories of the decade.

 

The 60s gave us the phrase “Flower Power,” speaking upon the virtues of leading a peaceful, natural life. While this “make love not war” spirit rang clear, it was also a time of resistance, where chants like “Do your Own Thing,” and “Resist Authority!” came from the mouths of young people. Those mouths also happened to smoke quite a bit of cannabis.

 

There was one thing that the social and cultural movement we often accredit to the 1960s didn’t have. The hashtag.

 

While the 1960s did bring mass amounts of people together, it’s no surprise that by the mid 60s  polling found only 5% of Americans supported cannabis legalization, and the passage of the controlled substances act in 1970 all but hindered most progress pro cannabis legalization groups had made.

 

During the 1960s, the counter culture could not match the speed or outreach social media provides cannabis legalization efforts today.

 

Sure, nearly 150,000 people camped at woodstock for 3 days in 1969, but even during this time of unity and togetherness there existed gaps between younger and older attendees in terms of their musical preference, which suggest there may have been more ideologies and social ideas at conflict than previously imagined.

 

Because of this, cannabis acceptance and support for legalization grew at a snail's pace until the late 90s, when proposition 215 passed in California on November 5th, 1996, legalizing medical cannabis in California for the first time. The bill’s late author Dennis Peron wrote prop 215 because he and his partner  used cannabis to treat symptoms of AIDS.

 

Allen Ginsberg, beatnik author and member of one of the first groups dedicated to legalizing cannabis, LEMAR, famously handed out business cards that said, “Marijuana is fun.”

 

The legalization movement have countered, “marijuana is medicine.”

 

Ginsberg wasn’t famous enough for his cards to do much good. But social media gives us something much better than business cards. The digital revolution has amplified and spread the message of  “cannabis as a cure” as well as “cannabis as a recreation” in a way that no 1960s, 70s, or 80s pro cannabis movement could achieve.

 

Today we see websites full of social media pages dedicated to all things cannabis. People trade stories of cannabis and cannabis cures on Twitter, and people love to peruse pictures of beautiful looking cannabis on Instagram.

 

It’s been almost 60 years since the 1960s began, and more than half of the country has legalized some form of medical or recreational cannabis, but most of those states did so recently, all since prop 215, with a large bulk of states legalizing during the last decade or so, at the height of social media's ubiquity.

 

Even when social media has challenged it’s cannabis content, the content has prevailed.

 

In 2014, studies were conducted that claimed social media promote “drug use,” especially with regard to cannabis. In 2013,  Instagram actually banned #Weed, and By 2016, many dispensaries and pot shops found their Facebook pages taken down, because of a Facebook policy that stated business pages could not promote drug use.

 

For many of these cannabis businesses, they lost follower-ships in the twenties of thousands. This led to many other types of cannabis groups losing their pages, even those who promoted or sold nothing related to cannabis.

 

But the dispensaries, pot shops, and pot enthusiasts did not buckle. Many created new pages, and today, you can find tons of dispensaries and blogs that have social medias across all platforms.

 

As I mentioned before, Instagram is riddled with cannabis influencers and people who show off actual cannabis products. Some have up to half a million followers.

 

While Social media pushed back early on in the twenty-teens, we are seeing more and more positive momentum. Each year when election season rolls I see reports on my Facebook feed about the states likely to legalize cannabis in some form, and I get updates on cannabis legislature through social media platforms.

 

The exposure and engagement social media brings has done more for cannabis legalization than Allen Ginsberg could have ever dreamed of.

 

So yes, we should laud the generation that gave us the 1960s for paving the paths most cannabis activists and advocates walk today, but the growth and expansion of cannabis’ social media revolution should not be discounted when describing the great progress our movement has made in recent years.

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Works Cited

 

Bosker, Bianca. “The New Banned Hashtags Of Instagram -- Now With More #SexyTimes.” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 29 Oct. 2013, www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/29/banned-instagram-hashtags_n_4171589.html.

 

Breen, Marcia. “Why Is Facebook Taking Down Marijuana Dispensary Pages?” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/why-facebook-taking-down-marijuana-dispensary-pages-n514976.

 

Bricken, Hilary. “Marijuana And Social Media: The #PotPolice.” Above the Law, Above the Law, 15 June 2015, abovethelaw.com/2015/06/marijuana-and-social-media-the-potpolice/?rf=1.

 

Cavazos , Patrica, et al. “Characterizing the Followers and Tweets of a Marijuana-Focused Twitter Handle.” Journal of Medical Internet Research, JMIR Publications Inc., Toronto, Canada, www.jmir.org/2014/6/e157/.

 

Davis, Joshua Clark. “The Long Marijuana-Rights Movement.” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 6 Nov. 2014, www.huffingtonpost.com/joshua-clark-davis/the-long-marijuana-rights_b_6113894.html.

Entertainment™, Cannabis. “Cannabis Entertainment™ (@CannabisENT).” Twitter, Twitter, 10 Feb. 2018, twitter.com/CannabisENT.

 

Francisco, Reuters in San. “Dennis Peron, Father of Medical Marijuana in California, Dies at 72.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 28 Jan. 2018,

www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/28/dennis-peron-medical-marijuana-california-dies.

 

Ginsberg, Allen, and Ed Saunders. “Mimeographed Handbill for the 'LEMAR (Legalise Marijuana)' Campaign, Headed 'Free Marijuana Prisoners'.” Richard Ford Manuscripts , www.richardfordmanuscripts.co.uk/keywords/lemar.

 

Government , Federal. “The Controlled Substances Act of 1970.” Summary of Federal Laws - Office of General Counsel, 5 Nov. 1970, counsel.cua.edu/FEDLAW/csa1970.cfm.

 

Humour, Stoner. “Weed 💨 (@Weed) • Instagram Photos and Videos.” Instagram, www.instagram.com/weed/.

 

Nation, Stoner. “-Weed Porn-.” Instagram, www.instagram.com/_weedporn_/.

 

Perrin, Andrew. “Social Media Usage: 2005-2015.” Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech, 8 Oct. 2015, www.pewinternet.org/2015/10/08/social-networking-usage-2005-2015/.

Rosenburg, Jennifer. “Organizing the 1969 Woodstock Festival.” Thought Co. , Thought Co. , 7 Aug. 2017, www.thoughtco.com/the-woodstock-festival-of-1969-1779367.

 

Taylor, Paul, and Rich Morin. “Forty Years After Woodstock, A Gentler Generation Gap.” Pew Research Center's Social & Demographic Trends Project, 11 Aug. 2009, www.pewsocialtrends.org/2009/08/12/forty-years-after-woodstockbra-gentler-generation-gap/4/.