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Lit_Match

This Bud's For You, and You, and You Too
05-09-08|Los Angeles Times|By Joel Stein

Sometimes I can't believe how Californian California is. Women walk around half-naked, waiters call patrons "dude," and medical marijuana is legal. But I wondered just how legal. Could anyone buy it? Even me, who doesn't have cancer, AIDS, arthritis, glaucoma or even any previous pot-smoking experience?

Medical marijuana isn't really legal -- in 2005, the Supreme Court said federal anti-drug laws trump state laws -- but California and 11 other hippie states have been flipping off Washington for years.

Finding a medical marijuana distributor is shockingly easy, as Times columnist Sandy Banks noted in her recent columns on getting pot to treat arthritis. Sprinkled innocuously around L.A. County are more than 200 dispensaries that look like health food stores or pharmacies -- including three just at the intersection of Fairfax and Santa Monica. To shop at these places, though, you need a doctor's recommendation on an official form. Once you have that, no California cop can arrest you for holding up to eight ounces. That amount, I'm guessing, was based on conservative medical estimates of how much Snoop Dogg would need if he came down with glaucoma at the same time Animal Planet aired a "Meerkat Manor" marathon.

I made an appointment at a medical office recommended by Shirley Halperin, the coauthor of the new book, "Pot Culture: The A-Z to Stoner Language & Life." Halperin chose our particular clinic less for its medical expertise than the fact that it shared a parking lot with a pot dispensary. Stoners are very clearheaded when it comes to avoiding extra effort.

As I sat in the tiny waiting room, filling out my medical history and getting nervous, Halperin assured me that no one she knows had been rejected, which seemed convincing because the only people sitting near me were two healthy looking guys in their 20s. When I got called in, I entered a doctor's office different from any I'd ever been in. It contained only a tiny desk, two chairs, a small TV and two cans of Glade. Also, the doctor wore a Hawaiian shirt.

He took my blood pressure and asked what I was suffering from. "Anxiety," I said. And then "occasional insomnia." And even though he seemed to be moving on, I blurted something about headaches. The only malady that would have made me more similar to every human being throughout history would have been "these painful little pieces of skin that peel up next to my fingernails."

The doctor followed up on my insomnia, however, and asked if I was having work problems or relationship issues as he handed me a photocopy of a handwritten list of psychiatrists. He'd give me a recommendation for medical marijuana for six months, he said, and would extend it to one year if I saw a therapist. The whole thing took about four minutes.

I paid the receptionist $80 -- cash only -- and she gave me a filled-out form that states I am under medical care and supervision for the treatment of a "medical problem." I felt touched that the doctor hadn't just written I was suffering from "stuff."

At the dispensary, a Harley-riding bouncer checked my newly minted medical forms and driver's license and let us inside. The dispensary was like a really nice coffee shop, with paintings on the wall for sale, couches and a drum kit upstairs for live jazz.

A pretty woman behind the counter -- kind of a pot sommelier -- brought out a huge menu, divided into sativa (uppers) and indica (the downers all dealers sell) varieties, with names such as Bluedot Popcorn, Hindu Skunk and Purple Urkel. Like a high-end tea shop, she used chopsticks to procure the buds from glass jars -- all organic and grown in California -- which she had me smell and look at under a microscope. I settled on a gram of Sugar Kush, which sounded appealing until I wondered what kind of breakfast cereal would cure Sugar Kush munchies. Honey Bunches of Fudge? Frosted Mini Frosted Minis? Count Plaqula?

Next, I took the advice of a fellow patient and went to buy some "edibles" at the Farmacy. This is the most famous of the L.A. dispensaries, with three locations, only two of which are right next to a Whole Foods. The Westwood branch is a sleek health food store that also sells vitamins and lots of Goji berries, and, unlike at the doctor's office, all the salespeople wear white lab coats. As a first-timer, I got to spin a wheel to determine my free gift medicine, which was a pot-infused lollipop. I also bought a vegan chocolate-chip cookie medicine and a chocolate bar medicine, and deeply considered the gelato medicine.

Wondering if I had an unusually easy time, I called High Times magazine's 2006 Stoner of the Year, Doug Benson, a comedian who just released "Super High Me," a documentary in which he stops smoking pot for 30 days and then, for his next month, is high every waking minute. As part of the documentary, he got his medical marijuana certificate. "I told my doctor I had a weak back. And when he said, 'How long?' I said, 'About a week back.' " He did not get rejected. As a patient or a comedian.

In fact, Benson buys all his pot from a dispensary now. Even with the sales tax, he pays the same price and, he said, gets more consistent quality than he did from a dealer. "I had a dealer who came by my house, but this is more convenient," he said. When I asked him how that could be, he explained: "I used to have to sit there and listen to his stories. Because dealers like to hang out."

I always wondered what would happen if marijuana were legalized for anyone over 18. It seems it already has been, and nothing happened.

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Donation links to NORML (The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) | MPP (Marijuana Policy Project)

 

Trocisp

I laughed a couple of times reading that.

Quite frankly, "Medical only" legalization is a cop-out. It's an unhappy medium in a bigger issue. The fact of the matter is, until the Federal Government decides that people are intelligent enough to choose for themselves what enters their bodies, we're all going to be hung out to dry.

Buzzby

I don't see any problem with "medicinal only" marijuana laws. The problem lies in the recommendation process, which obviously needs to have some controls implemented. I'd say that each case should be reviewed by doctors who don't get paid for each recommendation they issue.

Don't get me wrong. I want to see marijuana legalized for everyone. I just don't want generations of sick people to suffer and die without needed medicine while we wait (most of us totally passively) for full legalization to happen.

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sterbo

I couldn't agree more.

Insofar as the article is concerned - so what? The author found a weak link in the system?
There are weak links with everything. Need a prescription drug? Probably take me all of 10 minutes to find a doctor give me a script.
Under legal drinking age and want to buy alcohol? 5 minutes to lift off.
Cigarettes? 5 minutes if even.

We need to keep our eye on the ball. Every day many thousands of people are suffering from any number of medical conditions whereby marihuana provides quality relief. And the fact that California and all the States that followed in our footsteps have found a means to give them that relief is nothing short of miraculous given the insane hysteria that is perpetuated by the Federal government, the major Pharmaceuticals and their proxy's.

There is not one single credible reason why marihuana should have not been legalized by now, but that's the way it is, like it or not.

As Buzzby so aptly put - until we the people can overcome this prohibition (and it is only a matter of time) then how can we, as advocates of the cause, not fully embrace each and every step in that direction - flawed or not?

A "cop-out"? An "unhappy medium"? It's anything but.
It has been and continues to be an enormous stride forward both in a medical sense as well as a path bringing us ever closer to the goal line of a separate but equally important objective; freedom of the individual to determine what is best for their own body.

And by way of conclusion. You younger folk really need to wake up and take advantage of what so many of us older folk have provided you.
I know you can't remember what it was like not so very long ago, but still before your time.
It was hell. It was seriously painful to those of us who lived through those years of extreme persecution. I kid you not. It bears virtually no resemblance to your current reality no matter how bad you may think it is.

So many of us old codgers have taken the hard chances, lobbied and endured endless ridicule and spent serious amounts of hard earned money to get where we are right now.
You're riding on the back of the momentum we've sacrificed so much for and if you guys don't grab the torch we're handing off I wouldn't be surprised at all if you find yourselves back at square one.

I mean really, what more could you ask for?
So heads up eh. How are you going to feel if, years down the road, you think back to this pivotal moment and realize that it was in your grasp to push over the final hurdle but you were too busy getting high - or whatever...

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Trocisp

I didn't say it wasn't a step forward, sterbo. It is. However, it's only the very first, small step. My intent wasn't to make peoples efforts so far seem small.