On a sunny Sunday morning, I sat with my father as he reminisced on his time at Mendo High, over twenty years ago. I listened to his stories of sneaking off and smoking at the tree, hiding from teachers and dodging suspension. His stories were strikingly similar to those of the students today.

About a month after this conversation I left for tour, I met people from around the world: France, Italy, Vermont, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Florida and Brazil. We all shared stories, past experiences, as we looked into each other’s lives. As I told them about Mendocino, the habits and small town characteristics that shape the county and the school, they were shocked. All 20 of my castmates, all internationally-based, all different types of people, genders, and backgrounds, were shocked to hear that it’s culturally acceptable to smoke cannabis at school, but to me it felt so normal. After these experiences I was intrigued to try to understand why our school is so strikingly different.

As I embarked on this article I decided to interview two of the oldest staff members and the two that deal the most with situations such as these, Derek Hutchinson and Tobin Hahn. The two came up with a number of different theories as to why Mendo High is the way it is.

We spoke about how the school has changed over the years, and how it has stayed the same. I questioned both of them as to what has evolved over these 23 and 18 years at the high school. Tobin said, “It wasn’t as pervasive of a culture in the day-to-day life of people at school.” Students that weren’t interested in that type of behavior could go all four years and never even see drugs. But now with the uprise of technology, its nearly impossible to not see these activities, perhaps leading to a sense that everyone is doing it.  Derek interview went similarly as he spoke mainly of how students were more able to see a clear boundary between school and recreation.

On this point, they agreed on the fact that students used to be better at hiding their habits from the staff and other students. Without social media nobody could have any idea of what someone might be doing on the headlands at lunch. But with the birth of technology, it’s not that students are using more, it’s that they feel like they can hide behind the thin veil of a screen and assume that nobody will know and nothing will happen. This ties in with students not knowing how to play the game. It’s not even that they don’t know how, it’s that they don’t even know that they should be playing the game, accepting that smoking weed on campus and not getting caught is the norm; ignorance is bliss until you get caught and lose the game.

We also both spoke in detail about how the cannabis industry influences this region, and how this shapes local and school culture. The cannabis industry brings a culture of secrecy with it, creating a culture of permissiveness that dominates the region, affecting student behavior greatly because so many are involved in the industry and so many smoke weed, causing students to think that it’s okay to do all the time whenever. They wondered how the legalization of cannabis will affect the culture that surrounds us.

However, every region has a predominant resource, and just because that resource happens to be cannabis, it doesn’t mean that everyone in Mendocino is a stoner. In my interview with Derek, he stated: “You go to the wine country and just because you’re in a school in the middle of wine growing area it doesn’t mean that everybody’s showing up to school and work drunk all the time.” This shows that it’s not the accessibility to cannabis that affects the usage but the ability students seem to lack to either hide their habits or be able to restrain from them completely.

One explanation might be that Mendocino and Humboldt have the highest rate of childhood trauma in California, such as parents divorcing, violence in the home, etc. Data like this has shown that people with childhood trauma have more stress than normal people. This data also translates into the popularity and access to all kinds of drugs within the county. We all know people who are scarred often turn to substances for relief from their problems. Whether they use responsibly or irresponsibly, there can be a direct line of cause and effect for those who have struggled in their childhoods.

Personally, I believe that with the increased popularity of social media and electronic cigarette technology, the blatant usage of drugs has increased more than the actual physical usage. Today’s generation seems to lack the ability to know how to hold their business and their personal activities separately. Mendocino High school has been the way it is for many years now, and there’s no expectations that it will ever change. After all I’ve experienced in the creation of this article, I can easily see how transparent the actions of drug consumption are and how little people seem to care about respecting boundaries. Learn how to play the game, Mendocino.