Cannabis Has Become Upscale Chic. I Miss the Old Red-Eyed Stoners.

Widespread legalization has created a polished new market for cannabis products — one that’s trendy, spalike and weirdly unfun.

Last summer, in an effort to cut down my drinking after a particularly boozy vacation, I bought a case of cannabis soda online. The soda — called Lo Boy, by the brand Cann — was blood-orange-and-cardamom flavored; each can contained one milligram of THC and 15 milligrams of CBD. I’d drink one in lieu of a glass of wine while cooking dinner. On an empty stomach, it would give me the mildest feeling of euphoria — the equivalent of, say, a half a glass of wine — which faded after about 10 minutes.

This suited my needs perfectly. I am in my 30s, and I can no longer handle a high dose of any recreational substance. The last time I tried a five-milligram THC gummy, I had the archetypal paranoid experience, and could calm down only by writing a detailed description in my iPhone’s Notes app of how terrible I felt as a warning to my future self. (Sample sentence: “There is a lag in my understanding of everything I am seeing and hearing, and in the space of this lag I feel an incredible amount of anxiety that understanding will never come.”) A Lo Boy’s low dose worked for me, and the sodas were sufficient to help me scale back on drinking — which, as I keep reading, is very, very bad for you.

After the case was gone, I continued to be served ads for Cann on Instagram. Soon I was seeing ads for similar brands as well. (The algorithm seemed to think I was really sucking these things down.) There was Cycling Frog, with its twee mascot of a frog on a velocipede. There was Mary & Jane, whose ad for a product named Sunny asked: “What’s the microdose product that you and your book club have been taking?!” There was Rose Los Angeles, advertising a lychee-martini gummy with “Italian nipple lemon,” endorsed by the comedian Kate Berlant and modeled after a drink at a Los Angeles restaurant called Jar. The products came in flavors like blackcurrant, watermelon marjoram and yuzu.

I was struck by the aesthetics of the branding: clean, bougie and firmly millennial. The Cann look, for instance, features elegantly bright colors; if you didn’t know better, you’d think it was an I.P.A. from a trendy microbrewery. Another brand advertised a gummy called Out of Office, which seemed to bank on customers being white-collar and deskbound: “Unwind like you’re on Vacay,” its website advised. Many ads stressed the wellness attributes of cannabis. Cycling Frog promised a “healthier buzz.” One brand was literally called Erth Wellness. Another, called Molly J., offered a picture of a box of gummies surrounded by bowls of almonds, blackberries, a handful of strawberries, a loose pear. The inside of the box — a gentle aquamarine — read “Chill is a state of mind.”

These are the same virtues a certain strain of pothead has been advocating forever: that marijuana relaxes you, that’s it’s healthier than alcohol, that it soothes any number of ailments, that it comes from the earth. This argument may have received a yuppie makeover and a slick design update. But many of the selling points are the same as they were back when cannabis was just regular old weed, delivered to your door in a crinkled baggie by a shifty guy on a bike.

Marijuana Convictions: Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland signed an executive order that forgives more than 175,000 convictions on low-level charges related to marijuana use.

Americans’ Drug of Choice: A new study shows a growing number of people are regularly using cannabis, while frequent alcohol consumption has remained stable.

Risk to Seniors: In Canada, cannabis poisonings rose sharply among people 65 and older after the country legalized the drug, a new study found.

Easing Restrictions: The Biden administration moved to downgrade marijuana from the most restrictive category of drugs, signaling a significant shift in how the federal government views the substance.

As of this year, 24 states have legalized recreational marijuana, raising a fascinating new question: What does it look like to sell cannabis like any other product? As brands try to reach the maximum number of customers — including professionals who have, perhaps, aged out of mixing with dealers — their answer has, so far, resembled selling vitamins at an Apple Store. The dispensary near where I live in the Hudson Valley is bright, spare and immaculate. The staff members wear lanyards and are happy to answer questions. There exists not a trace of the head shop of yore: no novelty bongs, no Bic lighters adorned with pot leaves, no weird unlicensed drawings of Stewie from “Family Guy” smoking a blunt. All that stuff has moved to vape shops, which generally do not (or should not) sell weed but have nevertheless inherited the shelves of blown-glass pipes.

This gentrification was inevitable, but I remain in awe of how fast it arrived and how total it has been. With the exception of college campuses — where I suspect you’ll be able to find Bob Marley posters for as long as dorms exist — it feels as if the old stoner subculture, the classic pothead aesthetic, has been almost eliminated from mainstream consciousness.

That subculture — crusty and shaggy and red-eyed, silly and exuberant and corny — existed for decades, wandering from hippie culture to rap music, from dorm-room philosophers to Willie Nelson. It swirled together Cheech and Chong; the Grateful Dead; old High Times covers with their ludicrous, towering plants; a dash of R. Crumb. It encompassed much of Snoop Dogg’s work and Cypress Hill’s “Hits From the Bong,” with its opening sounds of bubbling water before a Dusty Springfield sample kicks in. (The lyrics are instructive: “Pick it, pack it, fire it up, come along/And take a hit from the bong.”) Hollywood positioned weed as a touchstone of male friendship in films like “Friday,” “Dazed and Confused,” “Pineapple Express” and “Half Baked.”

I recently rewatched “Half Baked,” which is essentially a greatest-hits tour of the old iconography. Three roommates — played by Dave Chappelle, Jim Breuer and Guillermo Diaz — embark on a weed-selling scheme to try to save their friend, who has been jailed for accidentally killing a police horse by feeding it the group’s junk food during a munchies run. The film is a cavalcade of stoner mainstays. Breuer’s character wears tie-dye and a yin-yang necklace (and later, a leather pouch supposedly containing Jerry Garcia’s remains); the trio reveres a rapper called Sir Smoka Lot; none of them own a car. The movie celebrates the dopey innocence of the stoner ethos, the wild theories and love of cartoons, the slacker mind-set of the barely employed. Most familiar of all is the apartment where many scenes are set. There are beaded curtains and a shelf of comically large smoking accessories. A colorful Mexican-style rug covers one couch, and if you had the same kind of semi-feckless young adulthood as I, you’ve sat on that couch. You know exactly how it smells.

Chappelle’s love interest in the film is a woman named Mary Jane. A focused and career-oriented person with a carefully arranged apartment, she adamantly opposes the stoner life and dumps Chappelle’s character when she finds out he’s dealing drugs. When the movie came out, in 1998, Mary Jane was a symbol of a square lifestyle. Now she is exactly the type of person they market gummies to.

Is it just nostalgia that provokes yearning for the old days of pot-leaf décor and long nonsensical conversations? Legalization seems like a definite good on a moral and policy level. And from the consumer’s perspective, you can now get your edibles in any number of fancy flavors (that all inevitably taste like gummy bears), conveniently ordered online, with perfectly calibrated doses so you don’t take too much and end up leaving yourself a Notes warning.

Yet I have a lot of affection for the erstwhile stoner aesthetic — the Birkenstocks and serapes, the elevation of junk food to near-holy status. There was nothing aspirational about it, nothing calculated. Today’s marketing casts cannabis as a kind of spalike mood regulator — something that might help optimize your lifestyle by letting you unwind and, perhaps, perform a little better when you’re back in the office. But before widespread legalization, pot was the lifestyle: its own mental world with its own charming signifiers. There was no point to it but having a good time, no great aim beyond sitting around with friends, laughing like an idiot. I’m sorry to see it all go.

Erin Somers is the author of the novel “Ten Year Affair,” forthcoming from Simon & Schuster.

Source photographs for illustration above: Gramercy Pictures/Everett Collection; Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection; New Line Cinema/Everett Collection; Universal Pictures/Everett Collection; Michael Warwick/Shutterstock; March Studio/Shutterstock; Universal Pictures/Photofest.