Primary Sources from a Culture in Transition

Historians of Prohibition rely on a thin record: court documents, newspaper editorials, a few memoirs. The ordinary experience — what it felt like when the law changed — was mostly lost because no one thought to save it.

The legalization of cannabis is producing the opposite problem: an enormous record, scattered across platforms designed to delete it. Content moderation, account bans, and dead startups are quietly erasing the primary sources of a cultural revolution.

A dedicated archive changes the preservation equation. When experiences, reviews, and photos live in a purpose-built home — Smokeciety's model — they survive the algorithm changes and policy purges of general-purpose platforms.

The methodological note for future researchers: user-generated archives carry selection bias and self-reporting limits, and any honest archive should say so. But a biased record beats none. Ask the historians of the 1930s.