Smoking pot has been a fact of life on Martha’s Vineyard for decades and the decriminalization of small amounts of marijuana in Massachusetts last fall by state-wide ballot came as a welcome relief to many Islanders, even to some who don’t smoke.
Getting high had a much more public face on the Island in the 1970s and ’80s. There were bars, restaurants, and other establishments where smoking pot was either encouraged or at least sometimes tolerated, whether one was having a midnight breakfast at The Black Dog Tavern in Vineyard Haven (back when they served late-night breakfast after dinner was finished), hanging out at the long-gone Art Worker’s Guild in Vineyard Haven, or dancing to an Island rock-and-roll band in the lounge at the Seaview hotel (now condos) in Oak Bluffs. There was a colorful record shop in Vineyard Haven where patrons sometimes got high with the owner while deciding whether or not to buy an album. And pot was as common as alcohol at many Island parties.
The Vineyard’s entire culture was looser a few decades ago. There were more hitchhikers on the roads, and going to the beach naked was far more common than it is today. Many Islanders simply didn’t own bathing suits – and they did go swimming. And many people lived creatively: in tent cities and in dwellings such as teepees and illegally constructed shacks. Camping wasn’t only cheaper, it fit with the anything-goes alternative lifestyle; there were no landlords to worry about, and forfeiting a damage deposit was of no concern.
Smoking pot was an integral part of that lifestyle. The Vineyard had embraced the sixties hippie culture through the next two decades in ways that rivaled places such as Greenwich Village and San Francisco. If American culture was getting looser overall, then the Vineyard was becoming a veritable invertebrate. Many people moved to the Island in those decades to flee the corporate work world, to drop out of society altogether, or simply to drop out of college.
During summers in the seventies and eighties, the Island was the equivalent of Mecca for college students from around the country looking for sun and fun, a taste of love, and maybe a restaurant job. Not all of the college students who flocked here were pot-smoking hippies or hippie wannabes, but a lot of them were. And the Vineyard’s current adult population includes many former students who came to the Island for vacation and either dropped out and stayed or moved here after completing school.
The sixties culture is over now – for better or worse, or maybe a little of both. The country has changed and the Vineyard has changed along with it: It’s a lot harder to get around the Island by hitchhiking, bathing suits are far more common on the Island’s beaches, and the tent communes are gone. But just as the sixties changed America forever, the antics of the pot- smoking hippies who moved here or came of age on the Vineyard in that era altered this Island for years to come – adding a wacky twist to the Vineyard mystique.
Today, a group of people huddled together passing a joint around a party, outside a concert, or at an adult-league softball game is a fairly common sight on the Vineyard. Some construction crews still celebrate the end of the work week, or the end of the work day, by lighting up and having a couple of cold beers. But the times have definitely changed – and so have many people’s perception of what is acceptable.
Voices of three users *
“I smoked a lot of pot when I was younger,” says a mother of two who has a professional career on the Island. Now she only smokes a few times a year at parties when someone offers it to her.
“I moved here almost twenty years ago,” she says, “but I’ve been visiting the Vineyard since I was in utero.”
She has watched the Vineyard change over those years: “The Island was wilder back then. There was definitely more of a hippie thing going on. I remember people smoking pot on the ferry. A lot of people smoke less now, but I’d say that most of my friends do still smoke sometimes.”
As a mother of a teenaged child who recently began smoking marijuana occasionally, she is happy that it was decriminalized in Massachusetts. Overall she thinks that decriminalization is a good thing, but she is concerned that it makes the drug more available and puts it in a gray area for teenagers, breaking down a valuable barrier that existed before. She says for her smoking pot was an act of celebration, but she sees it as a slightly darker thing for today’s teenagers, who are more preoccupied with rebellion.
“The thing I miss about the Vineyard from twenty or thirty years ago is how it felt more idealistic and optimistic. We were concerned more with big ideas than with big money.”
She also misses the experiences she used to have. “I got high the first time I went to the beach at Gay Head,” she says. “I remember seeing a woman walking toward me on the beach who looked eight feet tall, which shows you where my head was at. She was totally naked and painted completely in clay, and she was wearing a headdress made out of seaweed. You just don’t see things like that anymore.”
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“A lot of my classmates smoked pot when we were in high school back in the late sixties and early seventies, but not all of them,” says a prominent Island chef who was born and raised on the Vineyard. “I bought my first bag of weed on the school bus.”
He grew up in Vineyard Haven and says that a lot of the wilder, hipper crowd lived up-Island. “When I was sixteen, I decided to become a cook and got my first restaurant job working as a prep cook. My first assignment was to chop fifty pounds of onions, and I can remember thinking that maybe I had chosen the wrong profession.” That was the year he started smoking pot and taking LSD.
“I can also remember the first time I smoked pot. I met up with some of my friends at the youth center, which was called the drug center, in Vineyard Haven, and we went over to the beach and hid behind some boats down by where they were building The Black Dog.”
He has worked as a chef at several of the Vineyard’s most popular and successful restaurants. The restaurant party scene got more out of control in the eighties with the popularity of cocaine, he says. He cooked meals for tables full of people who were too high to eat a bite; and at some places where he worked, the staff overly indulged in coke as well, and he had to look for places to work that moved him away from the cocaine crowd. Different restaurants had different reputations: The Black Dog was known as more of a pot-smoking hippie haunt and the nearby Ocean Club was favored by the better-heeled cocaine set.
“I still smoke pot,” he says, “but a bag that used to last me days now lasts me months. I probably give away as much as I smoke. And most of my friends still smoke too – either that or they’ve become Jehovah’s Witnesses. For me it’s more of a social thing now. It’s not the number one thing in my life like when I was a kid.”
He now mostly smokes indoor Island-grown pot. “Each plant is a clone,” he says, “so the pot is always exactly the same. It gets a little boring.”
His favorite high when he was younger was hashish, but he has trouble finding that anymore. “It shouldn’t be that hard,” he says. “We’ve invaded Afghanistan, so where’s all the hash?”
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A current student at Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School who has tried smoking pot (not the child of the woman above) says that some of his friends get high and some don’t, and it’s hard for the two different sets to hang out together.
“It doesn’t seem that there are that many people actually high at school, except for the occasional burnout you can spot from a mile away.”
He says that drugs are definitely a problem, but he sees them getting blown out of proportion both by some parents and by the police. “I guess it’s their job,” he says, “but it’s not like everyone’s out there ruining their lives. If you’re smart about pot, it’s no worse than alcohol. People have to realize that the problem with pot or alcohol isn’t the stuff itself, it’s when you take it too far.”
Under the law
Taking it too far, abuse, is the darker side of use, and that is one of the great problems with drugs – some people just can’t get enough, especially when it comes to the more addictive substances such as heroin, cocaine, and an array of powerful prescription medications. While it is easy to wax nostalgic about the “old days” when pot was, perhaps, more prolific and smokers were seemingly more brazen, the other side of the story of drug use on the Vineyard, and beyond, is the story of lives ruined or lost to addiction and overdoses, homes lost, families torn apart, careers destroyed, promises broken, and potential squandered – and all the anguish and sorrow that these events cause.
Last November, Massachusetts voters chose to exempt the possession of less than an ounce of marijuana from criminal penalties, but only two weeks after that vote was cast, officers from the Martha’s Vineyard Drug Task Force arrested six people on drug trafficking charges at a home near both the Tisbury School and a private day care – exposing the flip side of drug use on the Vineyard.
Police confiscated more than four ounces of heroin along with just over an ounce of marijuana, prescription drugs, scales and plastic bags (which indicated an intent to distribute), two rifles, and more than $40,000 in cash. State Police Sergeant Jeffrey Stone, who coordinates the Martha’s Vineyard Drug Task Force, called this the largest heroin bust he’s seen on the Island in the twenty-one years he has worked here. “Four ounces is a huge amount of heroin,” he says.
He sees the Vineyard’s drug problem as comparable to other communities in Massachusetts and the national average as far as age, where use of illicit drugs is highest among young adults. A 2008 U.S. Department of Health survey indicates almost 40 percent of the country’s eighteen- to twenty-year-olds use illicit drugs compared to one-quarter of those in their late twenties.
“One thing we are seeing,” Sergeant Stone says, “is that heroin is more available than ever before and it’s attracting a younger crowd, including teenagers. People used to almost always shoot heroin, which had a stigma that kept some people away. But now a lot of people are snorting it like cocaine, so it attracts a wider group.”
One of the differences on the Island is that drugs fetch a higher price so the market here attracts dealers from Cape Cod, Boston, and New Bedford. Also the sergeant says, “We’re a rural community, so what we see is probably more marijuana plants because we have more land, more public land, than an urban community like, say, Brockton.”
As with some other drugs, such as marijuana, the purity and potency of heroin have increased, he says, which make it more dangerous. Another growing problem is the abuse of prescription drugs, both by people selling them and by those misusing their own prescriptions.
The recent decriminalization of the possession of less than one ounce of marijuana won’t alter the Drug Task Force’s prosecution of pot dealers or growers. “That’s still illegal,” he says. And helicopters will still be flying over the Island looking for the telltale distinctive green tone of marijuana leaves. No special technology is used in the flyovers, Sergeant Stone explains; it is simply a visual search.
“It’s hard to investigate drugs in a small community,” he says. “Everyone knows who the police are and people are unwilling to come forward to talk about someone they know or who is a friend of a friend.”
Getting help
Incarceration is not the only approach to solving or at least coping with the addiction problems from which many people suffer. The Island Counseling Center of Martha’s Vineyard Community Services offers several options for individuals and families on the Island facing mental health, domestic violence, and substance abuse issues.
“We offer outpatient mental health and substance abuse counseling and emergency services for someone in an acute crisis 24/7,” says Tom Bennett, associative executive director and senior clinical advisor of Community Services.
“We offer walk-in crisis services here at our offices [in Oak Bluffs], but a lot of times people in crisis end up at the emergency room, and when that happens we go to the hospital to perform evaluations and to consult with the doctors and make recommendations. Often at the hospital, we see people with dual mental health and substance abuse problems.”
People with severe addiction problems or those who are facing a crisis situation such as a drug overdose are often sent off-Island to an inpatient facility. “We don’t have anything like that on the Island,” Tom says.
The purpose of inpatient stays are to help people stabilize and recover from whatever crisis they may be facing and to detoxify. The length of a stay varies with the person and the situation; five days is about average, Tom estimates, but some people stay longer than that.
Community Services also provides substance abuse services at the Dukes County House of Corrections and has a sixteen-week program for people who have been caught driving under the influence of alcohol or other debilitating substances. Participants in this program are usually referred through the courts.
There are also housing options for people on the Island recovering from addictions. “We make recommendations for people to move into the Vineyard House, although that is independently run,” says Tom. The Vineyard House is a sober group-living accommodation in Oak Bluffs for people in recovery.
“There is also a substance abuse program at the hospital on the Island. That is independently run, but we work closely with them as well as with the doctors at the emergency room. We have a good working relationship with the hospital staff,” Tom says.
Hazel Teagan, who works as a substance abuse counselor at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital, says that drugs are a “huge problem” on the Island. “I don’t have the exact figures, but I would say that at the least a few hundred people from the Vineyard go to inpatient treatment off-Island every year. I don’t know how many are privately referred and don’t come through the hospital. That’s a large number for a community our size,” she says.
Hazel describes herself as “frustrated” at seeing so many people have to go off-Island for substance abuse treatment. “It makes treatment very hard for people to fit into their lives,” she says. “Sometimes people need to check into a facility,” she says, “but I would like to see an intensive outpatient program here on the Vineyard that allowed people to not have to leave their jobs and still get treatment.”
The good news, Hazel says, is that rehab does work. Sometimes people do relapse and have to go back into treatment, but she has seen substance abuse treatment save people’s lives and help them maintain their jobs and hold their families together. “It’s a chronic disease,” and when it reappears you have to treat it again.
One of the most difficult things for Hazel is seeing how many teenagers struggle with substance abuse. “I think that it is at least as big a problem for teens as for adults,” she says. “It’s an experimental time of life. Drugs are almost a rite of passage. The problem is that you never know who is going to make it through okay.”
The professional mother whose teenage child started smoking pot last year is concerned for his well-being. “I think I’m lucky though,” she says. “He’s seen some of his friends make bad choices and get in trouble, so he’s backing off a little. He doesn’t seem out of control.”
The chef who still likes to smoke occasionally has a preteen child who he is concerned for. “I talk to my son about drugs,” he says, “but I don’t tell him everything I’ve done. Ultimately you just have to hope that your kids make smart choices.”
