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SAN FRANCISCO — When recreational cannabis user Lance Dalton walked into the Higher Plane dispensary yesterday to purchase a few pre-rolls, budtenders were taken aback by his insistence that he should buy the strain called “Coma” because of its “deeper, literary meaning.”
“Trust me, I know what the reference is. I read a ton of books. I’m very smart,” Dalton assured the staff while quickly skimming for the strain on Leafly. “It’s called ‘Coma’ because of that book with John Malkovich and Lieutenant Dan. It’s a super famous quote: ‘It was a day of Mice in comas, and men in comas, until a mouse’s coma was no longer a coma. He came to, and quoth the man’s coma, evermore.’ It’s a metaphor for how the best weed comes from mice. Trust me, I absolutely get it.”
Though Dalton’s farfetched explanation was incorrect, strain creator Michelle Chan offered an equally suspect explanation.
“It’s ‘Coma,’ like the drug in 1984. You know the one,” Chan said while attempting to subtly skim the Cliff’s Notes for 1984. “In that book, it’s like… a dystopian future, where everyone takes a drug that makes them happy. How could you not name weed after that? It’s the one redeeming thing in society. In the book it’s like a magic elixir — a cure-all for any disease, mental and physical, just like weed is in real life.”
Though Chan named the strain, literary scholar and Yale professor Mark Weiss took issue with her methodology.
“OK, so, it sounds like she’s thinking of ‘Soma’ from Brave New World… which would be a horrible name for weed, because the whole point is Soma exacerbates the problems in the dystopian world — naming it after that implies weed is actually hurting society and we should ban it,” Weiss explained via three-hour lecture. “As for the other guy trying way too hard to make it about Of Mice and Men… I don’t know, I think he’s just dumb? Anyway, they’re all stupid, weed makes you tired, comas are sleep. Just lean into that. Like, who are these baked-out space heads that don’t see that?”
Upon further investigation, Chan finally revealed the truth behind the name, confirming “Coma” was actually just a typo on the label and it was supposed to reference male bodily fluids.
Cameron Foley is a comedian and writer. He’d prefer you call him Cam.
