Pizza Hut was my first regular employer. That summer, I was living with my dad and then-stepmom in Buena Vista, Colorado. Anxious to get home from work and change for a party I’d been invited to one night, I rolled through a stop sign. A police officer who’d recently undergone some kind of drug enforcement training pulled me over. At that point, I’d never even seen cannabis in my life. Still, Johnny Lawman insisted that I was high, and that my dilated pupils and the green blisters on my tongue were evidence. I was understandably shocked that he would accuse me of something that was literally impossible at that juncture. I helpfully explained that what he thought were green blisters was actually plaque, and agreed to accompany him to the station for a drug test. Because we were a block from my father’s house (and I was a wee teenager), the officer first invited my old man to join us. Lawman performed a series of tests at the station. If what’s left of my memory serves me correctly, the tests took about 20-30 minutes in all. His eventual conclusion? “Well, you’re not high.” No shit, Sherlock. “Don’t ever scare me like that again,” said my dad on the awkward drive home. My curiosity was piqued, though. Several months later, across the street from my mom’s Ordway home (the one I‘d grown up in), I partoked cannabis for the first time with my longtime neighbor TJ before eventually boarding a school bus for a pep band trip. It wasn’t until my 4/20 birthday rolled around during my freshman year of college (a couple years later) that I realized I was born on a bona fide cannabis holiday. Cannabis was my birthright.