“Do you know why I stopped you this evening?”
“No sir, I was going the speed limit…”
“You have a taillight out, and you failed to stop before entering the roadway back there at the gas station. Do you have your license and registration?”
“Uh, yeah, it’s right here… I’ll get that fixed as soon as possible. I didn’t even know it was out. I guess I’ve been working so much that I didn’t notice—”
“Sir, I’m detecting the odor of marijuana coming from your vehicle. Can you step out of the car and place your hands behind your back? You’re being detained while I conduct a search of your vehicle. This other officer will collect your documents.”
This was routine police work at the time. Today, it’s the part of my career that haunts me the most.
From 2017 to 2020, that was me. I was a city cop at a medium-sized department in Virginia. I arrested people for marijuana possession. Today, I stand for a different cause.
A Little Background
I grew up in a very small town in rural Virginia, where fewer than 100 people called home. To say it was heavily religious and conservative would be an understatement. Most people owned farms, and a traffic jam meant getting stuck behind a combine or a horse and buggy. It’s strikingly different from where I now live in Seattle, Washington.
Growing up there, I learned early that drugs were bad and that people who used them ended up like the guys living in run-down trailers up the road. Combine that mentality with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder—something I remember dealing with as early as 2001—and heavy religious thinking, and you get a kid who steered hard away from cannabis.
I didn’t experiment with drugs or alcohol. The anxiety caused by being around classmates who were high was crippling. I was convinced anything like that would land me in hell. Ironically, cannabis probably would have helped me work through that a lot sooner.
Becoming a Cop
This wasn’t a childhood dream or some calling from God to join the thin blue line. It was something I stumbled into. It felt like a noble career with a steady paycheck.
I excelled early. I graduated the academy as Class President, received multiple referrals for leadership, and breezed through post-academy and field training. I was assigned to a day shift squad in a lower-income, higher-crime district. I became a forensic evidence technician, trained to maintain weapons, and fell into a new obsession: interdiction.
Interdiction teaches you to read bodies instead of words. A shaking hand means more than a driver’s license. A pause before answering a simple question gets logged mentally. The smell of air freshener matters. So does how carefully someone avoids looking at a glove box or center console. None of it is proof, but all of it is treated like truth.
I loved finding drugs and guns. It felt like a treasure hunt with real stakes. At the time, I believed I was doing meaningful work.
When It Started to Change
Interdiction had started to feel mechanical. I was good at it, but the wins began to feel smaller. A baggie here. A firearm there. A few charges that would move someone through a system I wasn’t sure was helping anyone.
The more time I spent writing reports, the more I noticed how detached it all felt. A stop turned into probable cause. Probable cause turned into a search. A search turned into charges. Then I went back to my patrol car and waited for the next one. It was efficient. It was procedural. It was also beginning to feel empty.
Around the same time, I found myself lingering longer on calls that didn’t require enforcement. I’d finish a report and end up sitting on a curb talking to someone about their eviction notice. I’d run into the same unhoused individuals night after night and realize that arresting them wasn’t changing anything.
So I moved away from interdiction-heavy work and into more foot patrol. I wanted to see if proximity changed perspective.
It did.
On foot, you can’t hide behind tinted windows and a spotlight. You’re present. You’re human. You talk longer. You hear more. I started giving rides not because policy told me to, but because it felt like the smallest way to make the badge less transactional. A ride to a shelter. A ride home so someone didn’t freeze. A ride to a bus stop so a situation didn’t escalate.
None of it was heroic. It just felt more honest.
Eventually, I spent hours playing basketball with kids, attending community events, or sitting on an elderly woman’s porch listening to stories about the city decades earlier. She was an older Black woman, and her perspective seeped into my thinking and slowly changed how I viewed my role.
Because of her, I wanted to be a better cop for the community.
But the more I listened, the harder it became to reconcile what I heard on those porches with what I did during traffic stops.
The Arrests That Stayed With Me
I started researching crime statistics, effective policing, community-based alternatives, and how other countries approach law enforcement. The conclusion I reached surprised me: I began to feel that much of what we were doing relied on outdated methodologies, often created the issues we claimed to enforce, and that cannabis laws were rooted in racist ideology while functioning largely as a revenue stream for courts.
At first, I didn’t believe that. I thought that was activist language. I thought people were exaggerating.
Then I started reading.
I learned about Harry Anslinger and the way cannabis was tied to fear of Mexican immigrants and Black jazz musicians. I read Nixon’s own advisors admitting that the War on Drugs was designed to disrupt Black communities and anti-war activists. I realized that what I had been taught as “public safety” had roots in something far less noble.
But what made it personal wasn’t a history book.
It was my district.
The area I worked was predominantly Black and Hispanic. Lower income. Heavily policed. The smell of marijuana in that district meant we were deploying a narcotics dog, ordering everyone out of the car, and starting a search. At minimum, someone was spending an hour on the sidewalk while their car was torn apart. At worst, they were going to jail.
Meanwhile, there was a well-known college in another district. When I learned that students caught with cannabis often walked away with community service, a fine, or nothing at all—especially if they were athletes—while people in my district were fed through the legal system with barely enough money for groceries most weeks, something inside me broke.
I felt sick.
A short search confirmed it wasn’t just my city. Disparities in marijuana arrests had been documented for decades, even though usage rates were similar across races. We weren’t just enforcing the law. We were enforcing it unevenly.
That realization made my last cannabis charge my last.
When Virginia finally decriminalized marijuana, I reached out to the attorney assigned to my cases and asked that every cannabis charge on my docket be dismissed. I told them I would no longer be making cases against it moving forward.
It didn’t undo the years before. It didn’t repair the harm already done. But it was the first concrete step I could take while still wearing the badge.
On paper, arrests were clean and simple. “Odor of marijuana.” “Probable cause established.” “Search conducted incident to arrest.” Under fluorescent lights, behind a keyboard, language flattened everything. Reports turned human judgment into inevitability. There was no room for context. No room for intent. Just words that made a life-altering decision look routine.
In reality, the arrests were messy. People late for work. People trying to get home. People who couldn’t afford an attorney but somehow found themselves facing charges that would follow them for years.
I had never met a stoner who wanted to fight me. I had charged countless people for cannabis possession who seemed like genuinely decent human beings. The disconnect became impossible to ignore.
I became outspoken. I pushed for diversion programs and outreach. I watched eyes roll, and people walk out of the room as I used words like reform and equity.
I vividly remember one officer I worked with around that time. We’ll call him Robert.
We responded to a verbal domestic at a graduation party. Everything was calmed down and under control when we arrived. Alcohol had done its usual damage. While collecting information, we noticed a bowl on a bedroom side table and the smell of burnt marijuana.
After we left, he obtained a search warrant, went back, and ruined a once-in-a-lifetime memory. A family celebrating a graduation watched their home get torn apart over a few joints and a half-smoked bowl. Worried faces. Cold food. A tainted memory. A living room treated like a crime scene for a plant that, in another state, was already legal.
In my short time wearing a badge, I saw a lot. Officers lint-rolling shake from floor mats to justify charges. Wrong doors kicked in. Veterans with complex mental health issues placed in cuffs for something you can grow in your closet.
The irony was impossible to ignore. Almost every cop I knew had said some version of, “If I wasn’t working here, I’d be on a beach smoking a blunt.”
Living With the Guilt
After I left law enforcement, I started looking for ways to manage my OCD differently. I read about CBD and tried it first. It didn’t do much.
Around that time, I watched The Exit Drug and heard people describe using cannabis to interrupt the cycles of addiction that kept pulling them back. The way they talked about those loops felt familiar. OCD isn’t substance addiction, but the pattern isn’t entirely different. Instead of being addicted to a drug, I was often trapped in a physiological response—a thought loop that built on itself until it demanded relief.
I realized I couldn’t have been the first person to see that connection.
And that realization carried weight.
If cannabis could interrupt those cycles, even temporarily, what had I been taking from people all those years? I had written reports that reduced it to “evidence.” For some of them, it was medicine.
I had charged people for it.
The guilt shows up in quiet moments—when I’m looking for peace, and when I least expect it. I feel it when I walk into a dispensary. When I open a jar. When I light a bowl.
It’s gotten easier over time, but there’s still a flicker—a little reminder that I once treated this plant as evidence.
There is one man I think about more than the others.
He was an older veteran living in a budget motel. I had just finished handling a domestic call next door when I encountered him and charged him with cannabis possession. It was routine. I did what I had been trained to do.
In court, he lifted his shirt and showed the judge the scars from multiple gunshot wounds he’d sustained while serving overseas. He said he couldn’t afford the medication prescribed to him and didn’t want to become dependent on opioids. Cannabis was how he managed the pain.
The gavel struck. Guilty. A large fine.
I remember feeling satisfied. Another case closed. Another win.
I don’t know what that fine meant for him. I don’t know if it cost him shelter or stability. I don’t know what followed.
I only know that I walked out of that courtroom proud of my work.
That memory doesn’t feel like a political issue. It feels personal.
With OCD, my mind loops. It replays conversations. It fixates. But this isn’t compulsion. It’s weight. A kind of low-grade depression that sits behind everything else.
When I use cannabis now, I sometimes think about the people who couldn’t. I think about records that are still attached to names. I think about how legalization feels different depending on which side of enforcement you stood on.
If any of the people I charged are reading this, I want them to know that I have done the work to understand what I once dismissed. I’ve walked in the shoes I used to judge. I understand the reasons people turn to the plant. I can’t undo what I did, but I won’t stop speaking about what needs to change.
I don’t think this is a guilt that disappears. It feels more like a ball and chain — something I have to acknowledge rather than remove.
Repair, to me, looks like expungement. It looks like accountability. It looks like telling the truth, even when it implicates me.
This piece is part of that.
Why I’m Speaking Out Now
Cannabis has helped me manage debilitating OCD. It’s helped me connect with people. It’s helped me understand myself after an autism diagnosis. It’s become part of my life in a way enforcement never allowed me to see.
But the guilt hasn’t gone away.
Even as legalization spreads, the damage from enforcement hasn’t been repaired. Expungement is inconsistent. Accountability is rare. The people harmed most by prohibition are still paying the price, while others profit.
I’m still wrestling with how I allowed outdated philosophies to shape so much of my life. This piece is one step toward accountability. I don’t know exactly where my voice fits in cannabis reform, but I know staying silent isn’t an option anymore.
If nothing else, this is me saying it out loud.
This article is from an external, unpaid contributor. It does not represent High Times’ reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.
