The Golem

Posted on November 19, 2008

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. Read more

Will Work for Bud

Posted on August 16, 2008

Maurice was a man who could tear apart phonebooks, a big, menacing, mean motherfucker. I could tell this even over the phone. He had one of those booming auditorium voices, grandiose like a professional wrestler’s. But Maurice was young, he couldn’t be much past twenty-five, and while his roar was thick and imposing, his rumble was presently cloaked in despair. For the hundredth time in recent months, Maurice had lost his driver. Now he wanted to discuss delivering medical marijuana, a career with good pay and excellent perks, if I could follow orders. But first, questions, character inquiries, all delivered in the hard-restrained voice of a special forces operative. “You should always answer me truthfully,” he said, the timbre of his words giving them an added urgency. “Because Dann, I’ll know. One way or another, I’ll find out. So save us both the trouble, guy, and give it to me straight.”

“Ask whatever you want,” I said.

My last interview was with Ernst & Young. Their office was in downtown LA, seven blocks from my apartment. They’d had an opening for a writer, something stable, if not fun. I’d taken a hard shot at it: pressed suits, haircut, wind sprints through their company gauntlet—but like every classic losing streak, I was destined to go down. This time I lacked corporate writing experience, and H.R. feared I might get bored with earning a steady paycheck. All of which was true, I guess. I wasn’t a teenaged blushing bride nosing the Ernst & Young bouquet; I was a grifter after their health insurance.

Sickness, like addiction, can lead to places of desperation; settings like Maurice’s chain link fenced driveway. For me this was an unlikely career. I’m in my mid-thirties, feeling my age, and the thrall of fast cars and easy women seem better left to younger men, boys uncertain of who they are and still dependent upon their accessories. Running green wasn’t a plea for acceptance. It was a cold, financial calculation; a finger-in-the-wind of a failing economy; a conviction my health might not improve unless I escaped my HMO.

Fate had brought me to Maurice, impelled that I consider rogue options. I saw two doorways, one heading downward, the other leading out. Which way was I going to go? Read more

Californicating

Posted on July 18, 2008

Fate is like a smart-mouthed waitress, hovering over, glaring down. I imagine her saying, Kiss my grits. “You think someone is gonna solve your problems? Sugar, let me tell you something. God helps those who help themself.” Yup. That’s how it runs sometime. Pray all you like, but don’t expect an intervention. And should your full-of-faith friends invoke the above rationale as reason not to stick out their necks, that really narrows your options. You can either pray for the existence of a benevolent deity or solve the whole damn thing yourself. Are you fucked? Not completely. But you’re treading water wearing handcuffs.

I remember my last day safely tucked in a corporate cubicle: September 2000. I was an account exec at a Santa Monica ad firm. The office was lousy, the job sucked, though they’d enticed me with verbal photographs of afternoons playing beach volleyball. Never take a job based on extracurriculars, but then again, I was twenty-five and living in Los Angeles. This can be hazardous to your health in any number of ways.

As a firm, we lived in eternal hot water. We marveled at our clients’ apparent stupidity on an almost daily basis. Why did they keep us? We wouldn’t. We would have fired us long ago. We serviced high-technology companies. Not the cool ones—we were the last place that those outfits turned. Our clients made things like semiconductors, and required awesomely dull campaigns targeting very specific nerds. We persisted on ever-dwindling profits, even when Nasdaq was running strong. And when the dot.com’s suddenly flatlined, our group—hardly an industry leader in any brand of sunny adjective, was one of the first to commence shedding weight.

One afternoon, my manager called me into the small conference room, gave me a miniature bottle of water, and told me they were laying me off. “Downsizing,” he shrugged. I sat doe eyed, staring at the table grain. I’d never been fired from anything before. A flood of questions ran through my mind. How much notice would I get? Would there be a severance package? I wondered why my boss wasn’t delivering the news. Bart was outside at his desk. His desk was twenty feet from my desk. It wasn’t like this was General Electric. I could see the idiot shuffling papers, wearing his usual shit-eating grin. Read more

Behind the Green Door

Posted on June 28, 2008

At this one place, you open the door and there’s a long wooden bar. It’s a bar like in a tavern: blushed mahogany wrapping around, a tidy service area behind, about three-and-a-half foot high, tall enough to either stand or zenly chill at a barstool. Casey’s Irish Tavern it ain’t—no spirits or pints of stout—but there is plenty of green. Cannabis leaves adorn the countertop, chiseled in the wood, and the pictures on the walls are of men like Jefferson, Marley, and Lennon: a veritable toker’s hall of fame. The budtender wears a pressed black shirt. He’s tall, trim, has conservative hair, sideburns edged at tight right angles. He might be a game show host someday, or a senator, or sell used cars. He’s chatting with a sorority girl who’s come in for her weekly medicinals. My eyes fall onto the tasting menu—a calligraphic sonata to the cannabisly inclined. Prices are tendered by the eighth, the ounce, or by the bowl. I nod at the budtender who ditches Buffy and stands over his tip jar. “What can I getcha?” “A periodic table for your menu.” He snickers and shepherds a fat apothecary jar off of a wooden sideboard; it’s filled with soft, green, popcorn-sized nugs. “Try this one,” he says. I check the label and it reads Purple Urkle. “Kind of a chill after work strain. Relaxing like a glass of vino, perfect for taking the edge off. It’s part of our ‘Double Happy Hour’—just two bucks a bowl.”

Where am I? A psychedelic brownstone-turned-coffeeshop near the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam? A vapor lounge on Burrard Street in Vancouver’s downtown core? If you think I could afford either, kindly pass whatever you’re smoking. No, I’m in LA, somewhere between Beverly Hills and the hood, hiding in an anonymous storefront with security cameras watchful over a worn green door. Welcome to twenty-first century speakeasies, although these are bars of a different ilk. The aesthetic, even so, remains dive. No flash, just ring a bell, and if you have the wares or wiles, into the light you’ll go. In my case, I had a letter from Dr. Feelgood. It was nice knowing there was one club in town where I could go and Kim Kardashian couldn’t. Read more

Going to Dr. Feelgood (part two)

Posted on April 27, 2008

Dr. Feelgood’s office is in Beverly Hills, housed within a sleek medical plaza a stone’s throw from Wilshire Boulevard. It’s a sprawling glass and steel building, accommodating every breed of doctor from clinical psychologist to pediatric pulmonologist to big pimpin’ plastic surgeon. Call it a Noah’s ark of medicine, doctors and surgeons stowed two-by-two, but otherwise it’s nothing special. His practice sits halfway down a long, carpeted hall, each entrance festooned with the same drab door and tidy monochrome nameplate. The joint blends seamlessly (aggressively docile) definitely not the sort of place you’d expect to be a golden arches for medical marijuana. The only difference I see between his entry and the rest is that most of his colleagues have one door while Dr. Feelgood boasts two. 

Getting an appointment was relatively basic. Far easier than booking a consultation with Dr. 90210. Earlier in the day, I’d talked with his assistant, a young girl with an easy way, who offered a friendly lay of the land. The doctor could see me mid-afternoon. I should bring any medications I was currently taking, hospital records if I had them, and a valid state i.d. The first two were suggestions, while the last was non-negotiable. The doctor would ask about my condition, review my health history, and if he believed I had a clinical need for medical marijuana, he’d write what amounted to a prescription. I’d then pay him $150. “It won’t take long, probably fifteen minutes,” his girl said cheerfully.

Eureka. Especially since I wasn’t worried about qualifying. I took hormone shots just to get out of bed, and while the side effects were serious, going without was like falling off a mountain. In the universe’s typically wacked-out way, I understood what it was like to feel eighty-five, and I was barely thirty. It was an insight into growing old that woke me up many nights in a sweat. Even worse since nobody knew how to cure me. I had an endlessly thickening hospital file, gorged with the scribblings of numerous doctors, and so many blood tests you’d think by now I was running on fumes.

I would guess some stoners go to their appointments wondering if they’ll pull it off. Will their reasons for medical marijuana seem veritable and sincere? And if not, will they still owe the money? This would be a double-burn for anyone coasting through the door with no pill bottles or paperwork, just their girl scout’s honor that they really, truly have anxiety. But the truth is, most had nothing to worry about. Patients pay for the prescription, not the consultation. And from this I’m sure you can do the math. Everything I’d been asked to bring had more to do with fulfilling various state legalities than embarking on any exhaustive exercise in modern alternative medicine. I was about to see how the law really worked. How it addressed the needs of thousands of sick people, many in wheelchairs, others with brain injuries, some in the final stages of cancer, while at the same time being straight-up gamed by the savvy, desperate and all-out greedy. Read more

Going to Dr. Feelgood

Posted on March 6, 2008

My experience with medical marijuana began in January 2007. I’d been smoking pot regularly for the past few years, a thick toke coming as a relief from an increasingly complex personal world spiraling around me. I was struggling through an undiagnosed illness that made me want to do nothing but sleep. I was self-employed but too sick to chase work, and all I could do was plaintively sit and watch the floodwaters rise. All of life’s softest corners—balmy personal relationships, money in the bank, even control over my body, were slowly being stripped away and replaced with little but sharpened edges. My family wanted me to fight, but I barely had the strength to load the fucking dishwasher. I sank into deep isolation, contact pared to texts and Myspace. I wondered why I was even here. How had I become god’s cosmic chew toy? Until, finally, fortunately, just as I thought I couldn’t stand another minute, I was hallowed with an immaculate hookup. Her name was Jenny, we’d met online, she was friendly, punctual and in command of quality product. No bammer weed burning a hole down my throat. Jenny got ‘good. And so a respite came into my world, a chance to reflect on my day without terror. Or not reflect. To quit circling those same old roads, eat a pint of Chunky Monkey and watch something bad starring Will Ferrell.

I thought, “What’s the federal case with that?”

There were no seismic shifts to my personality. I didn’t morph into a homicidal maniac like that dude who goes apeshit in Reefer Madness. My brain didn’t molt into soylent green. It was all very dry and anti-climactic. Those dirty hippies had been right. Marijuana offered relief from the daily chemistry of hormone injections and eased the strain of being sick. No, it didn’t solve my problems, but at least it provided a measure of peace. And all was good and right in that world for two years until Jenny retired, weary of the grind. She referred me to an associate but things weren’t the same. Deliveries gave way to late night trips to a bad neighborhood. The new girl was odd. Jenny was all reggae and feng shui, while the new girl seemed to be harboring rage. She was heavily stoned each time I visited—just a hazy smile and a sly non-sequiter. But I’d also heard stories about those who crossed her. Of screaming car chases through South Los Angeles and men hired for Tuesday beat downs.

I asked myself: “If not for bud, would I ever be here in my life?”

Important decisions are sometimes called epiphanies, or seminal moments, but these are really just clever ways of saying, “I finally had enough of that shit.” My doctors all knew that I smoked marijuana. I’d told three primary care physicians, two endocrinologists, a neurologist, a psychiatrist and a partridge in a pear tree. None voiced any reservations, though none could offer a prescription. All they could say on that front was, “Good Luck.” But not saying anything sure implied something. We writers are good at reading between lines, and I’d watched seven doctors roll their eyes, as if to say—whatever. Hmmm.

I never planned to be a marijuana patient. Prescriptions weren’t covered by health insurance, no surprise, and only a small group of doctors wrote them. A doctor’s letter was good for one year and went for between $125 and $200. This wasn’t an unreasonable amount of cash tender, but it wasn’t money I was eager to spend. But I also wasn’t eager to land on the police blotter. All around LA, I saw neon cannabis leafs hanging in pot dispensary windows. I’d gone with two friends who had medical prescriptions (one for migraines, the other for a mood disorder) and while they sniffed through the display case upstairs, I’d chilled downstairs in a Hollywood Starbucks. Yes, a dispensary over a Starbucks. Only in California, yo. While I was contending with parole violators, my friends could pull into a workaday strip mall and twenty minutes later pull out with a tall Café Americano and a fluffy eighth of Trainwreck.

This was one seed in my bag too many. If I wanted to smoke cigarettes and die of lung cancer, as five million do every year, I could pony over to the local Rite-Aid. Same game for booze, chewing tobacco, and any number of prescription drugs of questionable health or efficacy. But for marijuana, a drug that killed nobody, I had to meet strangers in shadow-soaked parking lots, or survey the miniature pawn shop that my current hookup was assembling. I was tired of the cloak and dagger, disgusted how I had to risk bodily harm because some people (zealots, mostly) believed this the appropriate moral price exacted.

I wasn’t going to play their game. I’m grown, hard working, thoughtful, responsible, capable of making tough decisions. I didn’t need a bunch of paternalistic busybodies telling me what to do.

So one morning, I went online and found a list of “pot docs.” I called the first and made an appointment for later that afternoon. The sun hung low in the winter sky as I bumper-bumpered through Beverly Hills. I was driving into a brave new world, one of towering potential and calculated mystery. It was a place I knew very little about. I was about to learn my first lesson.

NEXT: A Trip to Dr. Feelgood—Part Two

Drugs, Me & My Parents — part two

Posted on February 24, 2008

We circled around the kitchen table, the same one where we have breakfast and dinner, and blow out the candles on birthday cakes. Four months we’ve been living together, complements of a perfect shit storm of bad health and worse finances. These aren’t good times for dollars and cents, though in other key ways they’ve been better than expected. My family is finally getting along. It only took us thirty years. Yeah, money is tight, but at least the long knives aren’t being sharpened. Instead, we’re gradually morphing into this hip and funky, 21st century version of the American nuclear family. Two eternally patient parents and two charming filial freeloaders (read: starving adult children) living in peaceful coexistence, Kumbaya, Kumbaya. Never in my life did I think that it was possible. Dad is sixty-one, mom is nebulously in her fifties, and little sis is twenty-six. I’ll admit not being excited at first, for it seemed sadistic to have no choice but to fly home to the family nest. I haven’t lived with my family since I was a teenager. I had no clue what to expect. But my parents’ “golden years home” is surprisingly laissez-faire. My parents are slowly growing accustomed to life in Southern California. All of us keep to our own chill schedules. Dad’s up at four, watching golf and police procedurals. Mom rises with the sun to coo at the dog and play on the computer. My sister and I would sleep until noon if there was any such thing as a loving god. The parents are off to bed by ten, while we’re up into the small digit hours. Music also tells the story. Barbra croons through the speakers each morning. Amy Winehouse pounds at night. I think the dog is going nuts.

Add in a medical marijuana service and Weeds ain’t got a damn thing on us. Yet how do my baby boomer, semi-teetotaler parents feel about my opening a medical marijuana business? My parents are filled with contradictions, so of course their feelings are decidedly mixed. My parents have smoked half a joint in their life—and that was all my dad. They’ve been married 39 years and are not the type to spend long weekends camped in the forest, dressed in flowing robes of hemp. In Brady Bunch terms, they’re like Jan and Peter—deeply earnest middle children always striving to do right. And then here I am, like Cousin Oliver, fucking up their shit. Who else but their son would launch a website to announce getting sticky icky by the pound? How are they responding? Very calmly. When I ask them why, they say, “Because we trust you.” Read more

Drugs, Me & My Parents

Posted on February 10, 2008

If you’re going to read a story about someone who goes into the medical marijuana business, it’s only right that you know something about them. Truth in advertising, as they say. Because lets face it, there’s a mile of difference between a narrator who’s a friend of Bill W, a narrator whose drug of choice is Jesus, and a narrator who polishes off an eight-ball shortly before sitting down with you. So in the pristine interest of doing shit right, I’m going to open the pilot’s log on my own drug history. There’s just one problem with being so honest, and that’s the people with whom I haven’t been honest. Have I lied? Mostly, no. Have I omitted colorful parts of the narrative? That’s how I’ve avoided lying. In each of these relationships, we’ve followed a sort of protocol, one reminiscent of the military. “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” It’s strange how even talking about drugs remains such a taboo. We can gossip about sex, politics, religion, descend like vultures on Britney Spears, or watch a flick where some poor sap gets his guts pulled out of his ass, but drugs are like the third rail of easy conversation. There’s something seriously fucked up about that. 

Social mores are fine by me, but anything becomes troublesome when it places a muzzle over our honesty. Many drugs fall into this category. All of the illegal ones, to start. Maybe you believe that marijuana should be illegal, but even so, I think we can agree on this much: Any principle that willfully supersedes other principles, like freedom of speech, for example, is maybe one that deserves some revisiting. And not in jingoistic terms, replete with slogans custom written for bumper stickers, but borne out of honest and thoughtful debate. Because whether or not you use drugs, or agree with their use, or would ban cigarettes and alcohol too, I’m sure you agree that families should be able to have honest talks about the subject. That kids and teens often benefit from learning about their parents’ experiences, and that good relationships are fostered, in part, by establishing clear, open and honest lines of communication. When we’re wary about bringing shit up, when other’s experiences are closed down to us, we are essentially left to our own devices. Morality delivers us into the clumsy hands of fate. And dude, nobody wants that.

I feel badly, for example, that I’ve never had a real conversation about drugs with my parents. We can talk about the most combustible subjects, but when it comes to drug use, everyone clams up. I would actually enjoy the occassional sitdown, but it’s one of those things that nobody broaches. My parents don’t ask, and completing the dysfunction cycle, I confess nothing. At thirty-three, I might have thought at some point—conversationally—they might have wondered about the first time I had a drink without their knowing. Or when I was first hung over. Or when I smoked cigarettes—because c’mon everybody tries those. Or any other question they might want answered as people who love me. And likewise, I’ve flamed out in terms of candor about smoking pot, or drinking, or any of my other drug use. Or whether I’ve struggled with addiction, considering it runs in our family. My parents don’t ask, I don’t tell. Why? I’m not sure about the answer on their side. For me, because I don’t want to violate some unspoken trust. I’ve never wanted to assume that my desire to reveal should rise above their desire not to know. My parents have plenty to worry about. I don’t like the thought of adding more.

But now the landscape has shifted and I know that a sit down is necessary. Last month, I was an unemployed writer, recovering from a hormone deficiency, aimlessly wandering CareerBuilder. Today, I’m heading into the world of medical marijuana. And if I’m going to do it right, before you read further, you deserve to know who you’re dealing with. And so do my parents. So I hastily called a family meeting. My parents were inquisitive. They wanted to know what was up. I calculated possible cartoon responses. Maybe their eyes would spring out of their heads. That afternoon, freaking out, I smoked two bowls to keep my wits. It was only then, sitting in the driver’s seat of my car, a silver haze of smoke surrounding me, blues on the dial, that I was able to settle on a plan. I would write this story in two parts. The first you’ve just read.

What follows is one loving, but slightly-dysfunctional family’s talk about it.

Next: Drugs, Me & My Parents, part two

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