This scene occurs most of the way through Dean Shull’s scattershot but entertaining documentary “California, 90420,” which is sort of, kind of, a movie about Oaksterdam, the institution of higher learning — ha! I kill myself! — in Oakland, Calif., that provides the nation’s first-ever cannabis-centered curriculum. (Yes, many of our campuses have provided such an education for decades, but none officially.) Although the film closely follows the failed 2010 campaign to legalize and regulate pot throughout the Golden State, it clearly gains currency from the recent federal raid on Oaksterdam, which has put the future of weed-ucation in jeopardy. (While California law allows local municipalities to license medical marijuana dispensaries, growing and selling the stuff remains a violation of federal law.)

I don’t know whether Shull intends to debunk the stereotypes surrounding marijuana use or reinforce them, but he does a little of both. While he focuses on a number of characters around Oaksterdam, he can’t stay away from 21-year-old Alix (or just “Ix”), a stick-skinny gamine who is profane and funny and clearly intelligent and massively baked almost 24/7. Ix’s problem may simply be that she’s a kid facing a difficult transit into adulthood (and aren’t they all?), but given that she’s a bright and talented young person who appears to have abandoned all conventional ambitions in favor of growing, selling and smoking weed — mostly the latter — she doesn’t make the world’s best poster child. “Everything you love in the world will either reject you or die,” she tells Shull’s camera early on. “But not marijuana.” Why didn’t they use that in the Proposition 19 ad campaign?

The problem with California’s nudge-wink medical marijuana system is the same as the problem with weed-attitudes (weeditudes!) in our culture generally, whether pro or con. You can find the same problem reflected in pop-culture depictions of marijuana use all the way back to the Beats and the bebop era, and right through high-school scare films, Cheech & Chong, George Carlin and Harold & Kumar. That problem is universal hypocrisy, not to mention the difficulty of having any form of conversation about pot without descending into caricature and bad jokes, often abetted by marijuana users themselves.

Whether “California, 90420″ means to capture all these contradictions or simply does so with stoner felicity, I cannot say. If you are personally familiar with the dank, the skunk, the Irie and the chronic, by the way, you probably don’t need the movie’s title translated. If you’re not, “420″ is longtime West Coast slang for pot smokers and pot culture, reputedly going back to San Rafael High School in the early 1970s. At any rate, we seem to have agreed as a society, for the moment, that we like marijuana being illegal but widely tolerated, disreputable but ubiquitous, associated with subcultures of music and art and surfing and blackness and other things that seem cool but dangerous.

Just to be clear, I grew up in Oakland and nearby Berkeley (so draw your own conclusions about my personal history), and I’m 100 percent in favor of legalizing pot. But California’s current medical marijuana law is a total farce, and you can’t blame people who genuinely think that drugs are evil for claiming that it amounts to soft-focus legalization. Because it does. Yes, cannabis is medically helpful, and in some cases necessary, for people with cancer or AIDS or glaucoma or certain psychiatric ailments. And of course they should be able to get it. But everybody in California knows that’s not how the system works in practice. You find a sympathetic doctor (and the right ones advertise widely), and you say, “Gee, doc, I’ve been feeling kinda depressed lately. Plus I’ve been having hella headaches. Kind of seems like a recurring situation, dude.” He or she signs something, you get your ID card, and you’re gold. Or Purple Urkel, or Diesel Granddaddy Mandala, as the case may be. (Blends of, y’know, medicine that are evidently for sale in downtown Oakland.) As Ix says when she first sees a legal cannabis dispensary, “This is what heaven would be like if God were real.”

I suppose there’s nothing so morally or ethically troubling about that, as a temporary hack to a vexing social dilemma, that of how to police a substance that does little harm and is widely available but retains a strong stigma in some quarters. Prop. 19, the failed ballot initiative spearheaded by Oaksterdam chancellor Dale Sky Jones and her husband, longtime pot activist Jeff Jones, tried to raise marijuana to the legal but heavily taxed and regulated status of alcohol and tobacco. That was, perhaps, entirely too rational and non-hypocritical an approach to the problem, and (as we see in the film) was resisted by both Northern California’s big pot growers and Southern California’s most conservative law enforcement officials. Perhaps the most telling moment in “California, 90240″ comes when Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca tells voters that if they want to “do a joint” in the privacy of their homes, he doesn’t care and doesn’t want to know about it. But we still can’t have legalization because, as Baca puts it, “You can’t pass a law that would be illegal.”

That confusion is actually right on point, and reminds us that the current, fudgey social covenant on marijuana allows it to be used as a covert instrument of social control. Baca’s version of “don’t ask, don’t tell” seems like a reasonable complement to the fuzzy status of medical marijuana, but we all know that he and people like him will enforce the existing laws when and how they choose to. If people get high at a backyard barbecue in my middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood, there is exactly zero possibility of the cops giving a crap. If young men who don’t look like me get high on the street in a different part of Brooklyn, they could easily get roughed up and spend two or three days in jail, just for the hell of it.

It might sound like pothead paranoia to suggest that President Obama told the Justice Department to go after California’s medical marijuana industry because it’s an election year and he’s willing to trade the freedoms of stoners in Venice Beach and Oakland for a (largely theoretical) handful of blue-collar voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania. But this is the Democratic Party we’re talking about, so almost no level of moral cowardice is inconceivable. Obama himself seems way too tightly wound to have been much of a toker (whatever he may say about his Columbia years), and has proven to have little concern for civil liberties of any sort, except as they are deemed to affect electoral votes.

Over the next generation or two, pot will probably become decriminalized, step by step, but for the time being we’ll make do with massive hypocrisy on all sides, as depicted half-accidentally in Shull’s film. Oaksterdam is in trouble, and Ix never got to teach her proposed class on “bluntology” and the importance of avoiding “canoeing” (you figure it out). On the other hand, she’s now a copywriter at NASA, and that joke finishes itself, I think.

“California, 90420″ plays this weekend for brief runs at numerous theaters across the country. Check website for complete listings.

I am very eager to have babies with the man I love. With us now moving, kids are on the back burner because we won’t have health insurance until one of us lands a job with benefits. We had been trying to get pregnant until the decision to move was made because I have decent benefits with my current hateful job. (One of the reasons I haven’t quit, the other main one being that I’m trying to hold this job out till we can move.) I really want kids soon; I have wanted to be a mother since I was 5. But the stress of life and my failing body seem to want other things for me. I had injured my back at work and now am in physiotherapy to heal it, yet I’m still obligated to work my full shifts. Those eight-hour shifts literally drain me. I haven’t had a period in 3.5 months (my doctor insists it’s stress-related). And most recently, my pap test came back with abnormal cells on my cervix. No further tests have been done, but my doctor thinks my back, lack of period and abnormal cells are at least partly because of too much stress. Hard not to be stressed when all these symptoms have made me worry and fret even more about never being able to have children! The more that I worry, the more stressed my body becomes. The more symptoms of the stress I experience, the more I worry. (A huge catch-22.) One of my worst fears is to end up being barren.

On to my other issue. My fiancé and I both smoke marijuana regularly. I will note here that we do not smoke cigarettes at all, nor do we drink alcohol very often. Although I have heard that it can prevent couples from conceiving, I only “slowed it down” when we were trying to get pregnant. My fiancé seems to have his usage under control. He is able to use on a part-time basis and not every evening and every weekend. I am a different story altogether. I use (abuse) marijuana for stress. I rush to get home after work to have the bad memories of the day dissolve into higher thoughts. I am not high at work, but evenings and weekends are full of my usage. It’s the way I’ve taught myself to deal. Although I don’t think marijuana is an “evil drug” that “leads to other drug usage,” I know that I am misusing it. I have never felt the need to try any other drug (besides alcohol and caffeine). But I barely even notice the effects any more. Despite that, I can’t imagine quitting it altogether. I know that if I were pregnant I would not smoke at all, because there is another human being involved who would be affected by it.

But without marijuana, how would I deal with life’s stress? Plus there is some part of me that feels like marijuana is not bad. You ought to know that in my family, a few other people smoke marijuana. My aunt and cousin probably use it once daily, and my mom and brother once or twice a week, and my dad on occasion. While they never permitted any drug usage as a teenager, I found out and smoked with family after turning 19. Obviously this is a huge part of the reason why I can’t seem to convince myself that marijuana is “bad.”

This new city will not have any marijuana contacts for my fiancé and me, and it is my plan to stop smoking when we move. But really, I don’t want to stop at all, and I feel like I’m lying to myself by thinking that a new city will stop me from finding a way to do it. Plus, my fiancé is moving first, and we will be apart for a month (we’ve never been apart for longer than 10 days in the past four years). I know that with him gone, I will want to smoke even more. Especially because I feel like I want to get as much smoking in before I “can’t” anymore.

I know several people who use marijuana more than I do and who firmly believe that no one can get addicted to it. I guess I’m not so sure about this, but I would like to believe it because then I’m just a hippie and not an addict. I worry about the usage affecting the physiotherapy on my back, but since we aren’t trying to get pregnant, I still smoke whenever I want to. My fiancé knows that I smoke too much, he knows that I KNOW that I smoke too much too. But month after month he still brings it home for us. I have tried to quit before, asking him to keep it all hidden and out of sight. This always fails, because I will find it and sneak some or bug and bug him to get it out of hiding for me.

I don’t think I can stop until he stops bringing it into the house and we get rid of all the marijuana paraphernalia that is around our place. If my fiancé doesn’t want to quit with me, I would be disappointed. But as long as he kept everything out of our house and cars, I think I could do it. I really do want children in the long run and better physiotherapy results in the short term. What do I do?

Moving and Shaking

Dear Moving and Shaking,

You are using marijuana to relieve stress.

Stress is your problem. Whether you stop smoking marijuana or not, you need to learn more and better ways to relieve stress.

Start doing tai chi; start doing yoga; meditate; take naps; breathe deeply a lot; do biofeedback. If you are doing any of these activities already, don’t conclude that since you’re doing it a little it must not work. Instead, do it more.

You may need higher doses of yoga to get relief. Also, if you are consuming lots of caffeine, see about cutting back. Try substituting some herbal teas for caffeinated beverages now and then. Notice the difference. Especially in the afternoon, cut out the caffeine so you can get a better night’s sleep.

You will notice things about yourself this way. You will notice the different qualities of consciousness that arise from various techniques. It will be entertaining and interesting. You will notice a gradual improvement in your ability to go through life in a relaxed, worry-free way. Unpleasant activities like work and dealing with power-hungry blockheads will go more smoothly.

During this time, you might want to experiment with not smoking for a time. Pick an occasional time when you are stressed out, and instead of smoking, do 15 minutes of meditation, or some tai chi or yoga.

Don’t try to quit all at once, especially not on your own. Just learn some better relaxation techniques. Take it easy. Look for gradual improvement.

Once you’ve found other ways to relieve stress, you may not feel so fearful about the idea of quitting marijuana for good. Try going without for a few days at a time and see how that goes. You can always smoke. But experience what it’s like to handle life without it. Try to get accustomed to that feeling. You may feel slightly on edge, but take a deep breath of fresh air instead of a hit of weed.

The thing is, whether you call yourself an addict or not, changing habitual behavior is hard, and it’s especially hard to do alone. It’s hard to do without a program. It takes time, effort and support, and there are ups and downs. So I wouldn’t recommend trying to stop smoking marijuana on your own, or just with your fiancé.

As you say, for a variety of reasons, you are going to want to quit. So what I’m suggesting is that you prepare, in these ways, for the day when you will need to quit. I’m sure marijuana gives you other things besides stress relief; it probably gives you a heightened sense of the beauty of life, of tastes and sounds, and of general well-being. These things you may need to seek out in life; I find that there are other ways to feel these momentary highs. Seek them out.

For quitting things, as you probably know, I favor the 12-step method because it has added benefits: It helps you get your life together and is a lasting program of living. It is a community. It works for a lot of things.

When and how you quit is up to you. I can say that based on experience, it is definitely possible. You can quit and lead a normal, happy life, when you’re ready to. My bottom line is just that A) You should acquire new stress-relief methods first, before trying to quit, and B) what was B? Oh yeah, B) Don’t try to quit on your own. If and when you do decide to quit, do it with a group or a program behind you.

And, hey: Good luck. You sound like really nice people and I wish you the best in life. And say hello to the kids when they come. And say hello to the mountains.