From Red to Pink - Part II: The Backstory
Photo Courtesy of Girl With Red Hat/ Upsplash
Read Part I, THE BEGINNING, here.
Lindsey Gunter/Personal Archives
THE BACKSTORY: I've been a performing artist since childhood, attending every conservatory, “magnet school,” and extracurricular program my business-owning parents would allow - mostly for Musical Theatre. Like many young girls who are dealt the solitary life of an only child, I felt the pressure to keep up with my mostly-adult company; I found performance to be a consistent pride point as opposed to my less-than-perfect math grades.
Back in the GT/AP era of Texas public schools, you were either good at all of it and subsequently seen as a surefire success, or not, so, the rift between myself and my academically-inclined linguist CFO father, who had been raised all around the world, was pretty inevitable. For all his worldly wisdom, his addiction to opioids like Vicodin and Soma (which was somehow reinforced by a choice to abstain from his own art in exchange for a business career) was a big, ironic “not.”
Have you ever seen that movie, “The Wolf of Wall Street”? You know the part where Leonardo DiCaprio’s character is dragging himself for dear life to his car on quaaludes? Yeah, some of us watch that and can’t laugh nor stare in disbelief; we only remember seeing our loved one(s) like that in real life. Watching that scene immediately transported me to the parking lot of my middle school in Houston. My dad, who was having a major back spasm and seizing inside the open trunk, was asking me to not tell mom I had to drive us home (again). I was waving the rich girls of the local neighborhood off with a smile, dismissing the situation as handled, just so they could walk the short distance home to their own lovely, messed up lives where they threw themselves down flights of stairs to frame new stepmothers.
My father is a perfect example of a boomer trapped in the defining era of what is now known as “The Opioid Crisis.” His doctors, knowingly or not, overmedicated him, exploiting his desperation to get rid of his chronic pain and not caring much for monitoring things such as his building tolerance. They also didn’t anticipate any long-term effects, probably because it would take away from all the money being made at his expense.
CDC opioid dispensing rate maps and tables clearly display the exploitation record. The number of folks with an opioid prescription steadily increased from 2006, peaking in 2012 at 81.3/100 and only beginning to finally decrease the next year, 2013, when people started becoming aware of what was happening. As of 2020, only 43.3/100 people still carried an opioid prescription - a little over half of the amount just eight years prior.
Chronic pain like my father’s affects more Americans than diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, and cancer combined. Cannabis is a known, affordable avenue of pain management, and, with high stakes exacerbated by a lack of oversight regarding the effects of pharmaceutical opioids, it can quite often be a necessity. Sadly, it was not an accessible or understood option for my father.
Osteopenia and knees injured in college basketball days were to blame for my father’s chronic pain, and, though I appreciated at first the relief he got, he was a little “too happy” (think uncanny valley), and, as I illustrated earlier, utterly unable to be trusted to drive. At some point after some therapy, my mother and I both realized something was happening to my father, so we canceled hosting Easter that year and moved out in order for him to choose: us, or the pills.
Two years later, we reunited in time for his bypass surgery. He was walking with a cane at the tender age of 50 due to alarmingly low circulation in his legs and other parts of his body. But, hey, he co-owned a multi-million-dollar sign language interpreting company with my mother, who was now back home with his only daughter. What’s the worst that could happen?
During the surgery my father had a stroke, but didn’t die. He just became severely handicapped with a bad case of aphasia to boot. I remember the doctors explaining how he was still literally my father, but he was no longer “the father [I] once knew.”
Lindsey Gunter/Personal Archives
A little over a year after the surgery, my mother died of a giant, ruptured aneurysm she suffered while I was away at theatre college in New York City. Maybe if cannabis had been available to Texans back then, my mother could have managed her anxiety in combination with the thyroid issues. Both health crises emerged as a result of having to suddenly run the family company without her husband at the same time she assumed the role of his caregiver.
I view my family’s abrupt demise as a combined result of prolonged opioid and tobacco use and the unmanageable stress of trying to pick up the pieces without the aid of medical alternatives like cannabis. The only option available to them was pills. My mother was just beginning to actively advocate at the state level when she passed. Her advocacy centered on better health insurance coverage for people who, like my father, needed physical, occupational, and speech therapy more than, say, six hours a year.
Lindsey Gunter/Personal Archives
I have only been back in California for five years and some change. I lived here previously in North Hollywood for a year at the ages of 20 and 21, during what’s now warmly referred to as “Prop. 215 days” or “pre-rec days.” During this time, I personally witnessed my literal friendly neighborhood medical dispensary get raided by the DEA in the barbaric fashion we have all come to see cops display nowadays.
Soon after that, I myself would be pinched twice in Texas for possession of marijuana (POM), misdemeanors that will not be expunged, even if the plant is federally legalized, and which bar me from ever having things like a government or bank job. When my mother passed away, one of the first things that happened was I was abruptly taken off health insurance, so, to be quite frank, my consistent anxiety medication over the past ten years has been cannabis.
To summarize, I care about cannabis a great deal. I see profitability as well as the potential to champion workers’ rights across all industries. I also see the potential within the industry to produce jobs in a climate-change driven future. The industry is primed to lead as an example of a United States entity that cares about real healthcare, green jobs, and investing in communities that are disproportionately affected by the age-old War on Drugs. I believe that people should be as excited about their endocannabinoid system as their astrological birth chart, and I believe that self-discovery in cannabis can lead to self-discovery for many other relevant, health-focused genres.
Check back next week for THE START UP installment, where I get into what you’re here for - my hiring at “Red.”
