Hollywood Reefer

Posted on February 6, 2009

I haven’t been sure what to do with this space. Whether it should be a blog, or more like journalism, or something else altogether. Today, it feels more like a confessional. I’m struggling with the marijuana business. Struggling more than my pride would care to admit. It wasn’t supposed to be so hard, but now I feel the space between perception and real life. I’m sure the marijuana folk are reading on with wry eyes, thinking to themselves, “No shit.” Who said it would be like a walk in the park? What business ever is? I started this project as a novice, knowing how marijuana got to my bong about as well as I know the finer points of cottage cheese production. There are cows and machines. There are plants, bags and trucks. The invisible hand delivers it to me. I never thought of the hand’s day to day. Its careful balancing of dreams with the mortal load.

My dad told me last spring that ninety percent of new businesses fail. In most cases, they do because they’re underfunded or the entrepreneur lacks proper training in the given field. Dad was a theater major in school who chose sales as his stage. Everything that he knows about business comes from personal experience, so I didn’t doubt the veracity of what he was trying to convey. Businesses fail because they lack essential resources; either the money to brace the learning curve, or the expertise to shorten it. This applies to all marketplaces facing the winds of competition, including medical marijuana. If we were going to have a chance at success, I would somehow have to find my way behind somebody’s counter.

When a job magically fell in my lap, it felt almost like divine intervention. Maybe this is peculiar sentiment—thanking providence for the chance to mule medical maryjane from Fallbrook to the Mexican border. It wasn’t a gig that most drivers approached with any degree of enthusiasm. My forerunners largely were tweakers and drunks, willing to hustle for low to no pay. My boss didn’t seem to care so much who he sent to patient’s houses, so long as his money got back to him and stock weighed out at the end of the day. A friendly, funny, well-spoken driver who came on time and did smooth work was so unheard of to his biz that soon he paid me double.

Eventually I did all of the driving (more than 15,000 miles over the course of many months) my urge to show up daily and not steal from the company coffers viewed as an organizational breakthrough.

And me? I was stoked! Not only was I making what amounted to decent pay, but a small window had opened; one allowing me to see how a medical marijuana “non-profit” worked from the inside. This one had been around a few years and built a steady practice of patients. Copies of doctor’s recommendations filled whole file cabinet drawers. For what they wanted to become (and what they wanted to avoid) my boss was happy with their standing. Big enough to pay the bills, but small enough to stay under the radar. The phone would ring and boss would hoot as he counted out the daily totals. One-thousand. Two-thousand. Three thousand sometimes. All from a single Internet listing. He didn’t feel a need to advertise.

Now I’m a journalist by training, so I knew I wouldn’t be handled gently if my background was discovered. I treated each day on the job as my last, wondering what might do me in? Would it be the hand that fed me? Or the black and whites that flanked me? Or something looming in left field? The extra ‘n’  in my byline made me Google-proof, at least. Still, I had to get everything down in a hurry. There wasn’t time to mess around. Mom was setting up the non-profit, working months ahead of schedule. But that was a matter of paperwork. To run Artists Collective, to do it, first I’d have to ace deliveries.

I went into school mode, took cram notes. I hid a little tape recorder in the cove beneath my driver’s seat, pulling it out when I was alone so I could recapture the haze of my day. I had my own livelihood to consider. While writing stories is well and good, I’m not equipped with a dilettante’s dowry. My boss, unbeknownst to himself, was dictating a training manual, boasting it to me little by little: Infrastructure, pricing, working with vendors, verification protocol, tactics to guard against unlawful seizure. His plans ran on and on everyday, and the prouder he was of the schemes that he hatched, the harder it was to keep them a secret.

But no complaints from a former reporter. I smiled at my lucky fortune and stretched out in my catbird seat. Yet boss couldn’t teach me everything I needed; like seeing patients as people rather than walking pocketbooks. Some were paying six hundred an ounce, which seemed like highway robbery. Yet here I was with my hand outstretched, counting up their money. I thought at least I could answer their questions. Smile, ask how their day was going. Inquire about their health. Know which strains were good for sleep and which worked best for chronic pain. And what could thoroughly murder a headache and make them want to clean their house.

I learned the business one day at a time. The practical aspects from my boss, the human parts self-taught. When the job went away, I was ready to move on. I had no funding, but at least I knew what I hadn’t known before. I was surprised by all there was to learn, and realized I would have been courting disaster had I opened helter skelter. The biggest adjustment would be moving to LA. I was leaving San Diego deliveries, perilous in their own regard, to return to a county where the number of medical marijuana businesses was twenty times as much.

As moving day approached, and the economy hit a death spiral, I watched the evening news with my parents. The experts discussed arcane indicators, as though it was a riveting puzzle that posed them no immediate threat. Then B-roll of Bush on the colonnade, looking confused and even remorseful—to the point you might feel bad for the man if he wasn’t destroying your life. My parents had lost their whole life savings thanks to a culture of deregulation. “Fucking son of a bitch,” mom grumbled. She’d learned how to swear from her Marine father and perfected it into her own dark art.

Dad just stared at the screen impassively, tiredly shaking his head. It was crazy to open a business now. Even a medical marijuana service. Not even weed was a guaranteed savior when people were being tossed out of their houses. If the experts really wanted to know how desperate things were on the street, maybe they should interview medical marijuana providers. I’ve talked with a few and the news isn’t good. Business is generally headed down. We’ve been open ten weeks and are barely surviving. All I can do is hit my mark. The phone rings and I make a delivery, and more often than not they’ll call back again. I tell myself that’s something to celebrate. At least, I tell myself, it’s a start.

We’re struggling, but I won’t quit. The hardest part, from day to day, is waiting on the phone. Where I made ten deliveries before, now I’m lucky to make two. This fills my mind with all sorts of questions, like how can I raise money for the arts if I can’t afford to pay myself? But for now, I plow ahead without answers. We have a new website and now accept credit cards. We’ve bought advertising in a trade newspaper and five thousand flyer cards came this week. Once I finish writing this entry, I’m off to trudge through the winter rain to scatter piles around town.

This gig ain’t easy. It’s a sharp sprint down a narrow road, the longest, most desperate race of my life. But I’m trying to find hope here. Hope that beauty can rise from the dirt and that all of this work can become something meaningful.

On days when it feels like it’s too much, I try to remember more worthwhile moments. The thankful look on a woman’s face as she walks me to her door. The quiet respect of a man’s firm handshake. The sight of my first cancer patient, pale and drawn, at a hospice near the ocean. He looked at me with graying eyes when I walked in with his dozen brownies, then whispered in half a voice, “God Bless You.”

I remember the subtle magic of gratitude, its shy transformative power. And I force myself to keep going, the words like wind on the back of my neck. “Keep doing what you know is right. You’re a secret waiting to be discovered. All you deserve is around that next corner. One more turn to make just ahead.”

Hollywood Reefer is Dann’s medical marijuana delivery driver blog. More coming soon.

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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