Hollywood Reefer

Posted on December 7, 2008

I’m home alone on a Saturday evening, my laptop warm on the kitchen table, at least five ounces of marijuana set on the tabletop around me, stored in airtight jars. The jars to my left are half full. One has a sweet and sleepy bouquet, while the other is sharp like smelling salts. Four others stand in review to my right, a corner lamp brightening their golden-tipped lids. Their names evoke exotic locations, colors, animals, automobiles. One is grown by a white-bearded farmer who’s raised the same strain for thirty years. These buds, they say, are his Venus De Milo—and they’re in demand in many places. Yet here I sit on a Saturday evening, my telephone silent, nowhere to go. Nothing to do but write.

Who’d think it would be so difficult delivering marijuana? Two weeks open and just four calls. I’d done as suggested, I’m listed online. The phone was supposed to start ringing, right? I remember the words of a free-slinging friend. “Dann,” she said, a big grin on her lips, “this shit has a way of moving itself.” I wonder if that still is true? Maybe when breaking the law outright: If I sold to my friends, and soon to their friends, until I made one sale too many, and found myself in a little room with a hard wood bench and a low metal toilet, hunkered down for the night. But where was the revelation in this? This is, after all, a journalism project; a means toward trying to understand what happens when somebody plays the game straight?

I hadn’t gone in unprepared: Months of training in San Diego, the need for connections, the need for stock. But also, I wanted to understand the law. Our attorney general has issued a lengthy set of guidelines for medical marijuana caregivers; a rulebook, if you will. It wasn’t something that everyone was interested in following. Some got bud and passed out a number, gambled they’d thrive as little fish. But I wanted to do things right. I went to the Secretary of State, filled out all the official forms, wrote a check for $30, and Yahtzee! State non-profit!! Of course, behaving like one is something else altogether. And finding patients in a city with hundreds of legal and illegal alternatives is something trickier yet. Triplicate was the easy part.

I was in a coffee house in Studio City the other day when I saw a large, colorful magazine piled high in a metal rack. At the top in white letters: The Los Angeles Journal for Education on Medical Marijuana. It had a staid and scholarly feel, though the masthead below took a turn toward splashy. LA JEMM, it read in brief, dressed in lime and canary gold. I picked up a copy and thumbed through the pages. Many had flashy, full-page ads for medical marijuana distributors. Like me, some were non-profits, meaning they’d filled out the same sets of forms. When it came to substance, some were good citizens, offering help to the seriously ill, while others took a shriller demeanor, boastful slogans set over fine print. A few were baldly cavalier, right down to the slant of their slickly-tuned logos, pot spots with names like Hollyweed and KushMart. “Just like in Amsterdam,” a vendor says, when I marvel at all of my competition. “Soon, everyone’ll be hustling around with a big old bag of weed.”

What do I do? I’m learning that competition is fierce. Some co-ops offer free samples, while others are holding daily raffles. There are places specializing only in clones, and others catering only in Kushes. Some have discount shopping cards, while others have hash bars and vapor lounges. And still others hawk cannabis ice cream or other cannabis treats for the holidays. Everyone seems to have a shtick. Right down to the guy who’s pushing his 420 energy drink, along with a hemp-fortified assortment of shampoos, body oils and skin cremes.

It’s the kind of portrait that makes you wonder exactly where you are? This isn’t the state that I grew up in, or even the place it was five years ago. On the bright side, at least one American industry is thriving through a plummeting Dow. The question is: Can I compete? Me? An itty-bitty caregiver, trying to start a creative non-profit and stay on the right side of the law? Can I compete with Big Kush? Good service? Fair prices? Free delivery? Money creating artistic grants? Does anyone even care anymore if the weed man knows their name? And as a non-profit, is it even my role to fight for business? Do the Red Cross and Salvation Army rumble for your donation dollars?

But I don’t have the luxury of reflection. I somehow have to make this work, even if I don’t know how. My parents are in trouble. My mother cries almost everyday as dad struggles to plug the holes. Their savings have been wiped out and their travel business is foundering. My whole family is headed toward bankruptcy—aunts, uncles, cousins, all of them. Yet, few who we know seem to care. At the moment, it’s tempting, here in front of my computer, to take a lighter to sweet/sleepy, and hibernate for the winter. To escape from the pain and disappointment, the loneliness and uncertainty. To leave it all behind. But my family is drowning, and it’s not like writing is paying the bills. (Every year, my confidence slips. Maybe I’ll never be a writer.)

I look at the jars on my kitchen table. Are they my future? Do I have a future? Will I be alive in five years? How am I supposed to save my family? How am I supposed to save myself?

Next Week: David vs. Goliath

Artists Collective is Walkabout Jones’ social action project, a medical marijuana non-profit that will dedicate a considerable percentage of proceeds toward creating opportunity grants for deserving artists. For more information about Artists Collective, go to www.artistsforaccess.org

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