Stoned

ON CHARLOTTE GILL’S FIRST DAY of first grade at Southwest Harbor’s Pemetic Elementary, on Maine’s much-touristed Mount Desert Island, Mrs. Dodge instructed the students to place hands over hearts for the Pledge of Allegiance. But Gill, who had just moved to Maine, wasn’t used to the r-dropping accent. She heard hand over hat, and though she wasn’t wearing a hat, she raised her right hand and held it flat above her head. Her new classmates burst out laughing. “That’s sort of how school went for me,” Gill says, “I was a bit of a fish out of water.”

The summer after second grade, she decided to make some money. She sold drawings to neighbors for a dime apiece and picked raspberries behind her family’s home on Clark Point Road to sell at the Claremont Hotel. “Every week, I’d add up my earnings, go across the street to the pier, and buy as many lobsters and crabs as I could,” she recalls. “Then, I’d very proudly walk them down to the end of the pier — the lobstermen standing there watching probably thought this was pretty amusing — and I’d drop them back into the harbor.”

Now, some 40 years later, Gill owns Charlotte’s Legendary Lobster Pound. In 2011, she took over a dilapidated former ice cream stand, a few miles beyond downtown Southwest Harbor, on the way to Acadia National Park’s Seawall Campground. As a kid, she used to go there for scoops and to play in the adjacent field. Once she started selling lobster rolls there — regular size and foot-long — she decked out the midcentury shack in a jumble of red and white and stocked it with hula-hoops, squirt guns, and wiffle-ball equipment, plus stick horses and real pet goats. The yoga mats stacked out back are for picnicking or for yoga. “I tell people that if you could view this place from outer space, it would just glow with positive energy,” she says. “People are happy here.”

Except that Gill hasn’t always been happy there. Recently, she texted me a quote from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov:

“Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature . . . in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell me the truth.”

Was the edifice of her livelihood, Gill wondered, founded on the unavenged tears of hundreds of thousands of lobsters? “At heart, I’m an animal lover,” she told me the first time I met her. “I know it sounds hugely hypocritical, but I’ve really struggled with that ever since starting this place.”

Her crisis of conscience actually goes back even farther. In 2010, she was leasing Bar Harbor Lobster Pound, on the other side of the island, when the man she was dating died of heart failure, at age 47. “The next day, I had to go and cook lobsters, and I sat there with them for the longest time, having the greatest difficulty putting them in the pot,” she says. “But I had the order, and I put them in. Right away, I had an overwhelming feeling that I’d just done something terrible, so I lifted the lid. I saw what was happening, all the thrashing. It would have been worse at that point to take them out.”

At Charlotte’s Legendary, she started a buy-and-release program — anyone could purchase live lobsters at cost if they wanted to return them to the ocean. But the whole business kept bothering her, and one night last year, she prayed on it: “Hey universe or God or whoever, what can I do to make this better? I don’t want to turn this into a lemonade stand, but I will if that’s what you want.”

She woke up in the wee hours of the following morning with a plan: she’d try to get lobsters high.

THE MOUNT DESERT ISLANDER, a local weekly, was first to report on what Gill calls her “high-end lobster” project. The story landed in mid-September, and a few days later, Gill saw a headline online about a Maine lobster pound sedating lobsters with cannabis. Her first, mistaken reaction was, “Whoa! I didn’t realize someone else is doing this too.” Soon, major news outlets from around the world were calling. “It was so nonstop, we had to take our phone off the hook,” she says. “I thought it would last a couple of days, but it went on for a solid two weeks.”

By that point, Gill had only dosed one lobster, an average-size guy with a damaged claw whom she named Roscoe. The setup for the procedure was simple: She took an airtight plastic container and poked a hole in the lid, through which she could insert a straw. Next, she filled the container partway with seawater, put Roscoe inside, and snapped the lid shut. She packed a glass lobster-claw pipe (from a Bar Harbor souvenir shop), and then she and several staff and friends took turns blowing hits through the straw. “Basically,” she says, “it’s a lobster bong.”

A couple of minutes later, they popped off the lid and found a thoroughly zonked lobster. Gill kept him in the tank for another few weeks before releasing him, “for his contributions to science.”

A Nashville country duo memorialized Roscoe in a song set to the tune of Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Puns — “baked, then boiled,” “into the pot,” “some herb before the butter” — proliferated across the internet. But while the har-har clickbait novelty of the experiment clearly drove much of the public fascination, genuine concern about how we treat lobsters has ebbed and flowed over time, and Roscoe’s big moment coincides with a high-water mark of distress.

Last December, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals released undercover video from inside the Maine Fair Trade Lobster processing plant in Gouldsboro, showing workers dismembering lobsters that remained alive throughout the process. (PETA made similar claims, after releasing footage, against Sea Hag Seafood in Tenants Harbor and Linda Bean’s Maine Lobster in Rockland in recent years. Both of those facilities are now closed.) The group also rebooted a high-visibility ad campaign in the Portland and Bangor airports to discourage people from eating lobster — “I’m ME, Not MEAT,” the posters proclaimed. Meanwhile, in landlocked, reluctant-to-take-sides Switzerland, the national government made headlines last year for banning the boiling of live lobsters without stunning them first.

Of course, whether or not lobsters care what we do to them is an open question. A recent Popular Science headline neatly summed up the situation: “No one knows if lobsters feel pain, which makes boiling them alive rather complicated.” Humans can’t even gauge one another’s pain without a subjective report — hence those smiley-to-frowny pain scales in doctor’s offices. Some animals have nervous systems similar to ours, and it’s reasonable to assume they experience pain much as we do. But lobster nervous systems are something else entirely, made up of a small brain threaded to nerve clusters along the length of the body.

Before I met Charlotte Gill, I’d eaten lobster all sorts of ways, from classic (in a roll, in bisque) to inadvisable (on pizza, in ice cream). And yet, I had never cooked one myself. At the fish market nearest where I live, in Camden, I found the staff doesn’t ask you to pick which lobster you want, and knowing what I was going to do to that lobster, it was nice to forfeit some agency. At home, I laid the bag flat on the floor, but the 1½-pound bug stayed pinned to a back corner, its tail pressed upward, like how a scorpion carries its stinger. If I were to anthropomorphize, I’d say it looked scared.

When the water hit a full boil, I shook it out onto the counter as gently as I could. It curled its tail underneath itself and scooted backward. One of its antennas was broken off near the base. As I grabbed it by its midsection and lifted it toward the steaming pot, it spread its claws and legs, but I dropped it in headfirst. Its tail spasmed three or four times. Its legs twitched. After a minute or two, it was still. I thought the process might have unsettled me more than it did. I’m not eager to repeat it.

“I KNOW THERE’S A LOT OUT THERE ABOUT HOW LOBSTERS DON’T FEEL PAIN,” Gill told me one morning before opening, watching her lobsters skitter over one another in the tank. “But I can testify, from the thousands I’ve cooked, that they definitely feel pain.” She’s seen them try to hold on to the edge of the pot on the way in, try to scramble back out, beat their tails in a manner that seems frantic, and sometimes even jettison their claws, a fight-or-flight response.

Ethicists sometimes evoke what’s known as the “precautionary principle” — basically the notion that it’s better to be safe than sorry, but with a fancy name so that policy-making types can bandy it about. Back in the 1970s, for instance, when people were only pretty sure that carbon dioxide was warming the planet, it might have been smart to err on the side of caution and try to limit emissions, rather than waiting and seeing. Applied to things we eat, the principle suggests that if we don’t know whether an animal can experience pain, we should assume it can.

But the federal Humane Slaughter Act — which requires that animals be “rendered insensible to pain by a single blow or gunshot or an electrical, chemical or other means that is rapid and effective” before butchering — applies only to cows, pigs, and other large four-legged livestock. Maine’s rules are essentially the same.

Gill isn’t alone in thinking that lobsters deserve at least a similar degree of courtesy. Some chefs will stab a lobster between the eyes, trying to hit its tiny brain and quickly incapacitate it. A British company makes a device called the Crustastun, a supposedly humane stainless-steel electrocution box that retails for about $4,000. Gill simply figured pot might do the trick.

By the time she decided to experiment on Roscoe, she says she was a “firm believer in the benefits of cannabis, CBD, any holistic cure we can have to keep our systems balanced,” but she hadn’t always been. She grew up with parents strictly opposed to any use of illicit drugs, and she generally steered clear of her more chemically adventurous peers. “Cannabis was really demonized,” she says, “and I believed all that stuff.”

In high school, she tried weed twice — “doing my rebellious thing” — but didn’t enjoy it. Then, about 10 years ago, she tried it again, and this time, she says, it was life-changing. She had dealt with depression and anxiety for much of her adult life, and she found that cannabis helped assuage it in a way that prescribed medications didn’t. Pretty soon, she was growing her own weed and using it on the regular.

Pot seemed to work for Roscoe too. Gus Young fishes out of Seal Cove and supplies Gill with most of her lobsters. Last summer, every time he dropped off his catch, he noticed the same lobster hanging out unbanded in her tank. “In all of my years of fishing, any time there’s a lobster with no bands on it, it will attack,” he told me one afternoon at the pound. “This one? No aggression. I’d ask Charlotte if she wanted me to put bands on it, and she’d just say nope. Then, when I heard what she was doing with cannabis, I was like, ‘Oh man, that lobster was stoned!’”

Before dosing Roscoe, Gill had read a 2006 study in the peer-reviewed Journal of Evolutionary Biology. The study looked at whether various invertebrates — including southern rock lobsters, evolutionary cousins to Maine’s American lobsters — possess the same cannabinoid receptors as humans and other vertebrates. Those receptors are what THC, the primary psychoactive compound in cannabis, acts on. Without them, smoking a joint would only make you cough.

The study measured how much THC could bind with a sample of freshly harvested brain tissue. In the lobster’s case, a moderate amount of binding indicated that cannabinoid receptors could be there. Once Roscoe had toked up, Gill posted the study on the Charlotte’s Legendary website as scientific justification for her experiment.

I read the study earlier this year and understood very little of it, so I reached out to one of the authors, John McPartland, a doctor who teaches cannabis science at the University of Vermont College of Medicine. He seemed excited to learn that his research was being put toward the cause of animal welfare. “Anything you can do to ease the pain in boiled lobsters sounds good to me,” he wrote in an email. “If cannabis . . . seem[s] to help, go for it!”