Dear Stoner: I saw they are getting rid of the red card for a new, smaller card. What's up with that?
Blue Over Red
Dear Blue: It's true. After nearly fifteen years of listening to patients gripe about the hassle of cumbersome paper "red cards," the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment has begun issuing credit-card-sized medical marijuana cards. The new design will "significantly reduce" the need for replacements, according to the CDPHE. Complete with a Colorado-seal hologram, the new cards are a welcome change that brings us up to the mid-1990s in ID-card technology.
One thing we couldn't learn from the department is why the color changed from red to "purple mountain hues." We're sure the reason is something mundane, like the low cost of purple ink — or maybe this is the CDPHE's way of punking dispensaries that have paid for banners that read "red cards accepted."
But perhaps there's something more sinister afoot: According to some schools of color psychology, dark purple can create sad and depressed moods and cause feelings of frustration and anxiety; red, meanwhile, represents things like energy, strength, love and passion. We're not actually suggesting that the operators of the CDPHE marijuana registry are actively trying to make us depressed by taking away our red cards and replacing them with purple ones, but people love a good conspiracy theory.
Dear Stoner: My daughter laughed at me the other day when I played a Raffi tape with "Puff the Magic Dragon" for my grandkids. Is it really about marijuana?
Green Granny
Dear Granny: Peter, Paul and Mary have maintained for fifty years now that the song, written in the early 1960s, was about "childhood innocence" and not marijuana. But the kid's name was Jackie Paper. He called his dragon "Puff." They lived in Hanalei, Kauai, Hawaii (which in the '60s was akin to a hippie colony). They frolicked in the autumn mist, which could easily have been a reference to weed smoke from the fall harvest. Still, we can just as easily see some hippies in San Francisco having a deep, un-ironic debate about an innocent tune and then deciding that, yes, it's about weed — thus setting the longstanding rumor in motion.
If it is a song about smoking weed, then it's also a song about giving up smoking weed — Jackie Paper grows up and forgets about Puff, who resigns his green scales to life in a cave alone.
