The human life span is not enormous, but it’s long enough for society to reinvent itself in dramatic ways.

When I was a child, America still had living Civil War veterans and elderly blacks who could remember being born into slavery. My first radio memories were of Perry Como and Frank Sinatra. Elvis and the Beatles hadn’t yet recorded a song.

The first color TV I ever saw was a weird thing. A manufacturer had slapped an orange-tinted screen on a black and white model. Every image appeared to be bathed in orange juice.

I was 6 years old. I envied my neighbor with the orange TV. I wondered if they sold TVs in blue, my favorite color.

And then there is marijuana.

During my high school years, marijuana didn’t exist — unless maybe you were a jazz musician — so high school teachers didn’t have to warn against it. They could focus on sex and alcohol.

My freshman year at a public university was similarly pot-free. My dorm was awash with beer, but no one was smoking anything.

Not that I would have been the first to know, but it wouldn’t have escaped my attention, either.

The campus scene was day-and-night different by my senior year. A purple haze had descended.

Thoughts about marijuana and its evolving place in American society were with me this past week as I drove to Sebastopol to check out that city’s medical cannabis dispensary.

Why would a Napa reporter be sent on such a venture? If you’d asked me six months ago, I wouldn’t have been able to concoct an answer. The marijuana doings of a small city in Sonoma County wouldn’t have been of remote interest to a Napa City Hall reporter.

How things have changed. Our city council, generally considered a conservative bunch, is thinking about allowing pot clinics. Rules are being drafted as we speak.

If I said I wasn’t excited about my Sebastopol assignment, I’d be lying. I had trouble sleeping the night before. The prospect of touring a pot clinic had straight-laced me slightly unstrung.

My Register cohorts handled things only slightly better. My assignment brought out everyone’s inner Cheech and Chong. Lame pot jokes flew fast and furious. I think they were jealous.

To prepare for Sebastopol, I did some research. I learned that California these days is awash with hundreds of pot clinics where a once-taboo herb is legally sold to patients who have jumped through a few simple legal hoops.

Medical marijuana was approved by California voters in 1996, but only now are dispensaries popping up in large numbers, including in small cities. Sebastopol and Santa Rosa have clinics.

The sudden ubiquity of medical marijuana and the ease with which it can be obtained surprised me. As a Register reader, I’m used to stories about police raids on pot farms and random arrests for suspected sale. Every pot story seemingly carried a go-to-jail tag line.

My first stop in Sebastopol was the police station where I interviewed Chief Jeffrey Weaver. He confessed to having misgivings when his city council proposed inviting a pot clinic to town.

He’d spent his law enforcement career fighting the drug war. Now he was expected to make nice?

Given the political realities, things had worked out reasonably well, Weaver said. The clinic, Peace in Medicine, is a clean operation. It hadn’t become a magnet for crime. The city recently authorized a second outlet.

The name, Peace in Medicine, sounded back-street hippie, but the place wasn’t. The dispensary is housed in a modern building in a small commercial center on one of Sebastopol’s major streets.

The clinic’s executive director, Robert Jacob, ushered me through several locked doors into the inner sanctum, the sales room where baby plants danced to a breeze and patients scrutinized pot products in display cases.

But for the provocative labels on the merchandise — God’s Daddy, Lemon Skunk — I might have been in a boutique jewelry store, although one with a funky herbal smell.

With nearly 10,000 patients, the dispensary is growing like topsy, Jacob said. Sales will hit  $5 million this year, making Peace in Freedom one of Sebastopol’s largest sales tax generators. Hundreds of his customers come from Napa.

I left Sebastopol with a mild case of future shock. Marijuana is seemingly going mainstream. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to imagine a professionally run operation like Peace in Medicine in Napa’s future.

All this in my lifetime. All this since marijuana’s conquest of my college campus. 

I wish I could see the faces of guys back in the dorm when they get the news.

Kevin can be reached at 256-2217 or Napa Valley Register,  P.O. Box 150, Napa 94559 or kcourtney@napanews.com