The Golem
Posted on June 17, 2009
The phone rang, and for an instant, it was like calling anyone. The drug dealer’s line rang exactly the same. I don’t know why this came as a shock. What had I expected? Reggae? Actually, I didn’t know what to imagine. A woman picked up on the second ring. She spoke in sober, polished tones—not your traditional maryjane receptionist. I thought of the many Blazed-out-Bettys I’d been talking with in pharmacies lately. I’d been looking for pot work for almost a month, hitting up every smoke shop and co-op from Oceanside to Ocean Beach. Many of my cold calls had played out like this: Blazed-out-Betty answers the phone while coughing up a bong hit. I start to speak, only to hear a Bic flicker and water lowly percolate. “Who are you again?”
Ginger sounded more like a medical receptionist. First, she thanked me for my patronage, then identified the establishment, and then with a felicity that’s fading from the modern day, asked how she might be of service. A place with lucid employees was a twist I hadn’t expected. She wasn’t rubbing Maui Waui from the edges of her words. I heard no Spearhead in the foreground, just the double-jab of a stapler.
Funny the things we learn on the phone. I was learning, most likely, Maurice was not a part-time junior college student, running a collective out of his car. I’d met a number of pot-repeneurs who neatly fit this bill. They were young, enterprising, media savvy, able to quietly run their rackets with a Verizon plan and a Yugo. Theirs were bare-bone, nimble ops, that thanks to the magic of digital technology were able to present themselves in any way they chose.
My favorite was a delivery service where the website evoked a pastoral setting, as though this wasn’t the Mexican border, but the Irish countryside. There were offers for deep tissue massage and new age spiritual counseling. Marijuana and cannabis were not mentioned; the only way to know you had stumbled into a marijuana business were references to health and safety code 11362.5. But who isn’t up on their legal code, right?
There were other clues, if you knew what to look for. Many linked visitors to state Senate Bill 420, and its voter-mandated predecessor, Proposition 215. Back in 1996, California became the first state in America to decriminalize marijuana for the seriously ill. It didn’t come without a fight. Even in pinko California, this was a hotly contested race. Critics called it “backdoor legalization” while supporters trotted out the critically ill. A vote against medical marijuana, they said, was a vote against anyone suffering the scourges of things like cancer and AIDS.
I agreed, but still I couldn’t help notice a cheshire cat grin on some activist faces when I asked if total legalization remained their lattermost goal. I was in college at the time, so clearly weed wasn’t so hard to come by. What did I care if folks wanted to get stoned? What bothered me about “The Compassionate Use Act” was a sense it was dancing around the truth. “If you want legalization, then say it, fool.” There is no such thing as medical marijuana. It isn’t grown in special labs and the term “medical marijuana” refers not to any chemical properties, but to the people who are smoking it.
All marijuana is medical marijuana—if you have a doctor’s note.
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