The event was the March 22 town hall at the Arts Council hosted by one of the people who hopes to apply for a dispensary license if the town passes an ordinance allowing them. Abigail Kalmbach, the organizer of the meeting, is another remarkable part of the cannabis-in-Princeton story. If you have an image of a hippie, pot head, stoner, air head, doper, or any other slang descriptor, it is not the image of Kalmbach.
Princeton’s most visible cannabis proponent is a Princeton resident and mother of two young children who earned a degree in electrical engineering from Princeton in 2000 and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Northwestern University. Her father is a former Princeton University administrator who also earned a masters in divinity from the Princeton Theological Seminary. Her mother taught eighth grade science at the former John Witherspoon Middle School.
Kalmbach’s more pertinent credential is that she has been a marijuana user since her college days at Princeton University, Class of 2000. She knows first hand the racial inequity surrounding marijuana use. “As a white woman I know there were times when police walked right by us,” Kalmbach says, acknowledging that a similar group of black kids might have been treated differently.