As Jennifer Pelham sheds her  black Marc Jacobs pumps, slips from her trim Theory blazer, and collapses around the couch. The 29-year-old corporate attorney for just one of Manhattan’s top lawyers just clocked another 12-hour day, despite the fact that it’s over, she’s getting a difficult time trembling off her frustrations. (Someone had eviscerated anything she’d drafted, then left before Pelham had an opportunity to explain herself.) Still distracted, Pelham orders dinner-sushi, as always-then reaches for any plastic orange prescription bottle sitting on a corner of her coffee table alongside a glass pipe and blue Bic lighter, just like the cleaning lady left them. She twists from the cap, pinches off a bit of the aromatic eco-friendly medical bud inside, gingerly places it within the bowl from the pipe, and illuminates. Within the next half an hour, she takes three deep drags, enough to drown the noise whirring in her own mind. Then she eats.

“I personally don’t like the word pothead-it connotes that I am high 24/7, which I am not,” Pelham states, wincing. “I do not require it to cope with my day. I simply appreciate it when my day has ended. Her nightly medical marijuana ritual costs only $50 per month, a pittance in comparison with the price of her monthly gym membership or perhaps a Saturday evening by helping cover their her fiancé, a good investment banker, who from time to time smokes together with her. At 5’4″, slim and sports-she went three miles each day during law school-Pelham demands that pot is the perfect antidote to some hairy workday: It never induces a publish-happy-hour hangover and, unlike the Xanax a physician once recommended on her anxiety, never leaves her groggy or numb. “Look, every female attorney I understand has some vice or any other,Inch Pelham shrugs, tucking her lengthy brown hair behind her ears, her 3-carat cushion-cut gemstone catching the sunshine. “Almost all a

The majority of us have a friend like Jennifer Pelham, a balls-to-the-wall career animal whose concept of decompressing following a difficult day is not a glass of Chardonnay but a toke (or three) of some medical cannabis … and not only from time to time, but regularly-the kind who stashes a pack of E-Z Wider moving paper within the silverware drawer or looks after a pipe prepared alongside a pile of bills. Based on research conducted recently through the Drug Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, an believed 8 million American women smoked up previously year-a lowball figure that reflects only individuals prepared to cop into it. Included in this may be the upper-middle-class Pottery Barn set: 1 in 5 ladies who accepted to involving in the earlier month lives inside a household generating a lot more than $75,000 annually. They cut a large swath over the professional spectrum, including lawyers, editors, insurance agents, TV producers, and financial biggies, searching nothing beats the blotto hippie teens of Dazed and Confused or even the unemployed, out-of-shape schlubsters who’re a standard feature of the Judd Apatow canon. By all outward looks, they’re card-transporting, type A workaholics who just occur to prefer kicking back having a blunt rather than a bottle.

“I enjoy possess a glass of vino now and then, but heading out and downing sugary cocktails is not fun for me personally. And consuming is a lot more costly,” states Darlene Schwartz, a 28-year-old reality-show production manager who lately gone to live in New You are able to from La. Her job is relentless-15-hour days spent matching millions of moving pieces, controlling expenses, setting production agendas, and mollifying gimme-gimme talent. Her company just slashed her budget in two, that has left Schwartz scrambling to chop costs to ensure that she will not need to laid off employees. After work, she can’t think about anything she’d rather not do than put on a set of heels plus some makeup hitting the neighborhood bars. “I’ll visit the gym to have an hour, then return home and smoke some pot as i pay attention to jazz and browse a magazine-I simply finished The Fountainhead. It’s my moment personally before I must wake up and get it done once again tomorrow. It’s my bubble bath,” Schwartz describes. She does not keep her illicit habit under systems, either.