When my sister Margaret Carter first shared with me her involvement with the Mano Amiga coalition’s petition drive to elevate “The Freedom Act” – to decriminalize small quantities of marijuana for personal use – to the November ballot, I was enthralled and mildly surprised that the penalties are basically the same as they were 50 years ago. My head immediately inundated with long dormant memories of my personal experience with marijuana in Caldwell County that skewed the trajectory in my transition from adolescence to adulthood in the late 1960s and ‘70s. 

My controversial experiment with cannabis began when I was 15, a freshman at 1968 Lockhart High School when by chance I was hanging out on the corner of Main and East Market outside the pool hall after being stood-up by a young lady I had asked to a movie at Baker Theater. Dejected but curious, I purchased two pre-rolled marijuana cigarettes for a dollar each when approached by a streetwise Hispanic associate I knew as “Pie” from the neighborhood.  After my initial “high” I was captivated by this new feeling that seemed to enhance my senses and intellectual curiosity versus the intoxicating gaiety of occasional alcoholic beer and wine I had consumed up to this point in my life. 

A regular affordable supply of marijuana was scarce in the late 1960s Lockhart but slowly an underground availability increased with its popularity – at first $5 for a matchbox, or $25 for a Prince Albert canister, and finally a plastic sandwich bag with 1 ounce of marijuana with the prices fluctuating depending on the quality. The varied dealers of that era were old school hustlers, soldiers returning from overseas deployments like Germany and Vietnam with expanded cultural views and drug preferences of their own. Also, college students at nearby SWTSU in San Marcos sold small quantities to pay for their own smoking supply. 

This was a consequential period, both in the country and in this conservative stronghold of Lockhart that was still reluctantly shedding the final vestiges of Jim Crow that were manifest in the demographic segregation, recent educational integration, and criminal justice imposed at the Caldwell County Courthouse according to the Good Old Boy system. By 1970 my partner Weasel and I began to get “high” almost daily with a reliable source of affordable, quality cannabis we had discovered on a short stretch of 24th Street in Austin that ran adjacent to the University of Texas known in that era as “The Drag.” This soon became our regular weekend destination where one side of the street was normal retail spaces and the other side was the periphery of UT and the sidewalks were filled with young men and women of all races and backgrounds buying and selling drugs while exchanging ideas of all kinds with deep discussions of the prevailing issues of the day including civil rights, Vietnam, rock and roll, religion, and other topics that would arise while smoking ourselves into a euphoric daze listening to music by Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, or Sly Stone and others. 

We always left The Drag with an ample quantity of grass to tide us over until our next trip to our Nirvana, but like all things there are always unintended consequences; in this instance we needed a safe place to store our bounty.  Weasel lived with his grandmother, and I lived at home with my parents and siblings with no privacy, so our solution was a metal cabinet to keep our supply in that we decided to conceal in a drainage cavity under the railroad tracks adjacent to one of the Farm to Market roads east of town where we frequently rode and smoked free of detection. In the spring of 1971 shortly before my much-anticipated graduation a railroad maintenance worker on his routine inspection of the tracks found our “stash” of approximately a pound of marijuana. He turned it over to the county sheriff, who returned it to its original location and set-up their surveillance. I vividly remember exiting Weasel’s 1954 Ford Fairlane to replenish our smoking supply and hearing Deputy Dean Reed say, “Coffee: Don’t run.” At that moment my life changed forever.

Reflecting on the events caused by my choice to use a prohibited substance left scars from the consequences I endured that have taken a lifetime to heal. I was labeled a criminal and ostracized from the community, incarcerated, and denied employment opportunities, but the most painful penalty was my expulsion from school and not being allowed to march with my graduating class, a reward I deserved for years of hard work. In conclusion, when the country is rapidly moving toward legalization this author believes no one should suffer under the draconian punishments Weasel and I had to withstand. Vote for The Freedom Act on Nov. 5, 2024. Stay tuned …

BY JAMES COFFEE CARTER