This is an opinion column.

Recently, I got stoned. Only, I got my buzz from off the shelf at my local grocery store — THC in a can.

I’ve never cared much for weed, but I was born with the fabled cat’s fatal curiosity and I couldn’t let this go. Something labeled THC. On a shelf. At the store. In Alabama.

This couldn’t be real, right?

Instead of the acrid stench of a college dorm, the fizzy beverage gave off a hint of grapefruit and a tickle of carbon dioxide. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought I was drinking a LaCroix.

But after my second can, I had my answer: Yep, this was weed.

Music sounded different. Brushing my teeth took way too long. That feeling that someone in the bushes was watching me followed, only this time what I was doing was …

Legal?

I’ll let the chemists explain the difference between the delta-8, delta-9 and THC-A. When my colleagues looked at this issue last year, they produced a nifty side-by-side comparison showing them to be nearly the same thing.

Nor do I get the legal distinctions between marijuana and hemp. But I can now tell you from experience, the effect is close enough. Those billboards along the roadway already dispensed with the pretense.

“Bama’s Best Bud” isn’t an advertisement for Anheuser-Busch.

Manufacturers maybe took the long way around to get here, processing and concentrating ingredients from hemp, but in the end: This is weed. You can buy it at the grocery store and from a growing number of gas stations throughout the state. Use enough and it will make you high like weed. The delta-9 stuff contains the exact same main psychoactive ingredient as weed. My colleagues even reported you can test positive for weed after using it.

And somehow that’s … legal? In Alabama?

I’m not arguing it shouldn’t be. Rather, I’m puzzled why the old-fashioned stuff, the plant growing out of the earth, still isn’t.

Because, if you shift the context a little and switch up the people involved, messing around with nearly the same kind of stuff results in very different outcomes.

You could get thrown in jail.

Or end up dead.

Consider the case of Randall Adjessom, a 16-year-old from Mobile who died in late 2023 after a fatal encounter with police.

Adjessom was asleep in bed when someone burst through the door of his family’s home, where he lived with his mom, grandmother and three sisters. The teenager found a pistol and turned a corner into the hall to confront the intruders.

The intruders were a Mobile Police SWAT team on a no-knock raid.

According to a lawsuit filed in federal court last month, Adjessom put his hands up, but one of the officers shot him anyway — four times in the chest and torso. (There’s bodycam footage of this, but Alabama has decided taxpayer-funded videos meant to hold police accountable are not public records, so the public can’t see them, to hold police accountable.)

The police were looking for Adjessom’s older brother. What for? They suspected him of dealing marijuana. Out of the home, rather than out of the grocery store or gas station.

Adjessom lay bleeding for several minutes as police searched the house. He died at the hospital.

As it turned out, Adjessom’s older brother didn’t even live there, according to the complaint.

A no-knock warrant in a castle doctrine state is deadly stupid by itself. (At least, Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson suspended the practice after the teen’s death.) But it’s long past time we confronted another question.

Why are we still doing this?

If you’re a suburban middle-aged, middle-class white man, you can get your buzz from the Piggly Wiggly and nobody at the checkout will look at you funny for buying drugs at a grocery store.

But if you’re a 16-year-old Black kid, you can be shot and killed without warning, in your own home, because the cops thought your brother might be selling practically the same drug there.

How does this make any sense?

About half of U.S. states have legalized recreational cannabis, and the so-called deleterious effects on society seem to be a lot of nothing. The most significant problem has been non-fatal overdoses among children because someone thought it would be a good idea to make pot look like candy.

Almost four years ago, the Alabama Legislature ostensibly legalized medical cannabis, but it handed control over to a group of hapless yokels called the Alabama Cannabis Commission. Since then, wannabe state-sanctioned drug dealers have been fighting a bureaucratic range war over who gets to sell gummies to people who need them to treat doctor-diagnosed diseases.

But every time the commission has tried to grant these limited licenses, somebody gets left out, and then that somebody sues and the state winds up in court. One time they even drew license winners out of a bowl. That didn’t work either. Nearly a whole presidential administration has come and gone and Alabama doesn’t seem any closer to using cannabis as medicine.

Alabama is so bad at this, it can’t even legalize drugs when it wants to.

Meanwhile, I can buy funny fizzy water at the Pig.

Meanwhile, kids are getting shot in their homes.

I’ll ask again, how does this make sense?

It’s high time for Alabama to admit that this is stupid. This is deadly as it is dumb. It’s time for us to stop. It’s time to relax the law. It’s time for lawmakers to chill out.

And if they can’t, then make a stop at the Pig.