Heart of Dankness Read online

  I stepped back into the parking lot and looked up at the building. It was a modern structure, eight or nine stories high, the kind of building that’s clad in black glass to look imposing and serious like an architectural Darth Vader. The building was dressed to impress.

  There were a few lights still burning in some of the offices—perhaps even the office where I had an appointment.

  I was considering my options—make a call, go home, sit down on the curb and wait—when a lean-looking dude in jeans and a black T-shirt opened the front door. He was wearing cowboy boots.

  “You here for an evaluation?”

  I nodded. He grinned.

  “Take the elevator to six.”

  I’d been reluctant to get my medical marijuana card for a couple of reasons. One was political. I liked claiming the moral high ground when writing letters to the mayor, city council members, and the city attorney, who were trying to shut down the medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles. I could honestly tell them that, although I myself was not a medical marijuana user, I strongly supported the rights of patients to freely and safely access their medicine. I guess I thought my letters might make more of an impact that way.

  The other reason was that I was able to buy perfectly good pot from my local black market dealer, but that was before I went to Amsterdam and got a lungful of dank.

  I had seen the menus of some of the local dispensaries and I knew that they were offering—or claiming to offer—some serious connoisseur-grade cannabis. The kind you might find in Amsterdam. Maybe even better.

  The elevator doors slid open and a large laser-printed sticker—apparently stuck on the wall by someone unconcerned with hanging signage straight or at eye level—announced that I had arrived at my destination: the MMEC, or Medical Marijuana Evaluation Center.

  In 1996, the Health and Safety Code of the State of California was amended. Section 11362.5, known as the Compassionate Use Act of 1996, effectively legalized the use and cultivation of marijuana for patients with a doctor’s recommendation. It had been on the ballot as Proposition 215, and a majority of Californians had approved it. That act was further strengthened in 2003, when Governor Gray Davis signed Senate Bill 420, formally legalizing the right to consume and cultivate marijuana for medical use.

  Californians are an entrepreneurial people. They came to Sutter’s Mill looking for gold, they went to Hollywood hoping to be discovered, and they turned the Internet into the dotcom boom. If there’s a way to make a buck out of nothing, to create an economy from thin air, Californians will be there. It’s common in my neighborhood for enterprising chefs to set up an alfresco restaurant next to a liquor store or a florist’s shop. They unfold a couple of card tables, line them with bowls of homemade salsa, fresh limes, and cilantro, and fire up the grill. If you don’t mind eating standing up, you can get some of the best carne asada and al pastor tacos in the city. More sophisticated operators buy food trucks and leapfrog around town offering Mexican tacos, Korean tacos, Vietnamese tacos, Chinese tacos, ice cream sandwiches, dim sum, and whatever else people can eat quickly from a standing position.

  Residents of the Golden State clearly understand the laws of supply and demand, so it didn’t take long for doctors to open practices specializing in recommendations for medical marijuana, and for marijuana dispensaries to begin springing up to service those recommendations. In 2010, with more than eight hundred medical marijuana dispensaries operating in Los Angeles, the city attorney decided he had to act to control the “Wild West” atmosphere and attempted to shut more than half of them down. The city council backed this effort by rewriting the guidelines for dispensaries. This worked only temporarily. The dispensaries fought back. A judge ruled the council’s actions were unconstitutional, and the dispensaries, for the most part, were back in business a few months later.

  There are people who want to shut down the taco stands, too. And that’s something I just don’t understand.

  I was greeted by a stocky young man as I entered the office. He was friendly and I immediately complimented him on his hair, which had been cropped into a flattop and dyed school bus yellow.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I like that old Orange County punk.”

  He smiled as he handed me a clipboard and a stack of forms.

  “You can fill these out in the waiting room.”

  He pointed to another area where several people—a couple of chubby Latinas in their twenties and a guy with a muscular build and a sunburned face—sat hunched over their clipboards under dim fluorescent lights.

  I entered the waiting room and stopped. The space was the size of a basketball court. It was massive. And empty. It looked like a crime scene from the economic downturn. The carpet was scarred with ghost traces of cubicles, a monolithic warren of cubbyholes where workers had once clacked on keyboards, processed paperwork, and answered phones.

  Along the far wall were offices with windows, where supervisors once supervised; the opposite wall was bare—the inspirational “Hang in there, Baby!” posters had been torn down—with only a few forlorn and abandoned filing cabinets breaking up the space.

  The air was dusty; the room probably hadn’t been vacuumed since the office had been shuttered and the fresh casualties of capitalism had packed their personal belongings in cardboard boxes—along with a company stapler or two—and shuffled out the door.

  At one end was a large conference room, the kind of executive rah-rah lounge where PowerPoint presentations and teambuilding exercises had once flourished. The table and chairs were still there, poised and hopeful for the economy to revive.

  The waiting area itself consisted of five plastic chairs and a rack of crinkly water-damaged magazines huddled together in a corner.

  The evaluation center was essentially mobile: a computer, a printer, and a doctor; it could be set up anywhere. It reminded me of a hermit crab, an opportunistic crustacean that moves into another creature’s abandoned shell and sets up shop.

  I tapped my pen against the clipboard and heard an echo resonate from the far end of the room. I began filling out the forms and was immediately confronted by a straightforward question that required a complex answer. They wanted to know about my history with drugs.

  One of the main criticisms of marijuana foisted upon the world by nicotine-addicted “drug czars,” twelve-step sober presidents, and members of the law enforcement industry is that marijuana is a “gateway drug.” The idea is that one puff of weed will lead to experimentation with stronger, more dangerous drugs, which ultimately ends with heroin addiction, prostitution, and a violent death in a squalid alley.

  For me, Pabst Blue Ribbon was the gateway drug. It led to early teen experimentation with wine coolers and Canadian whiskey pilfered from our parents’ liquor cabinets, often mixed with whatever was at hand in some kind of harebrained attempt at a cocktail. I still remember the taste of backyard punch made from a pint of Wild Turkey blended with cups of banana liqueur, blue curacao, and Jose Cuervo tequila diluted with a couple of lukewarm cans of Diet Pepsi. While most of us just reeled and unleashed streams of sweet vomit into the bushes, the strength of this concoction compelled one of my high school pals to go home and take a shit in his parents’ bathtub.

  But the gates were open and it wasn’t too long before one of my friends got some pot from his older brother and we scurried down to the creek that ran between our suburban homes to smoke it. Nothing happened that first time, but we felt cool doing it, so we did it again. And again. And then, something happened. I got stoned.

  Over the next ten years I took many drugs, many times, developing a real fondness for psychedelic mushrooms and, later, sauvignon blanc.

  After college it was not uncommon to find my friends and me lounge-lizarding in our thrift store suits, drinking martinis liberally spiked with ecstasy at the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Seattle or sweatily snorting narcotics in the bathrooms of nightclubs.

  At some point cocaine began to demand everyone’s full attention and,
party pooper that it is, ruined everything.

  I stopped taking drugs and underwent what the author Jerry Stahl calls “geographical rehab.” I moved from the Pacific Northwest to Los Angeles to attend graduate school. For fifteen years or so I didn’t take any drugs of any kind until I began to attend dinner parties with my South American friends. At some point, usually after the flan was served, a joint would be passed and I would take a couple of hits in the hopes that it would improve my Spanish. For a long time, I associated smoking pot with eating flan.

  I was unsure if the medical marijuana evaluation form really required this kind of detailed information so I wrote “N/A” in the space provided.

  The next page was a comprehensive list of the various medical conditions that cannabis can help alleviate or cure. There were hundreds. From patients undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatments, to movement disorders, anxiety, arthritis, AIDS, migraines, chronic pain, lupus, fibromyalgia, Osgood-Schlatter disease, sleep apnea, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, motion sickness, chronic fatigue syndrome, and the list goes on and on.

  I wasn’t suffering from any of these conditions. I do, however, have intermittent insomnia and a rash on my face that becomes Gorbachev crimson when I’m stressed out. Because cannabis is one of the best stress relievers available, getting a doctor’s recommendation seemed like a no-brainer.

  The doctor stepped into the waiting room and invited me to follow him to the corner office, where the trappings of a former CEO—or at the very least a regional district manager—still remained. The doctor settled into a deluxe high-backed leather chair and spread my paperwork across a sweeping biomorphic-shaped desk.

  He was older, with kindly Marcus Welby eyes behind thick lenses, and he spoke with a soft New England accent. He gave off a whiff of world weariness, like a retired cop or a college professor who’d been denied tenure. In fact, the only thing that indicated he was a medical professional was the lab coat he wore. Bleached a blinding white and crisply starched, the coat was authoritative and reassuring. It somehow did not strike me as peculiar that, embroidered above the pocket, just under his name, was the word “Gynecology.”

  I wondered what his story was. How did a gynecologist end up in an abandoned office dispensing medical marijuana recommendations? What tragedy did he suffer? Was he running from malpractice? Heartbreak? A late-blooming midlife crisis?

  Given the fly-by-night charm of the enterprise, I expected my consultation with the gynecologist to be a kind of elaborate charade, a brief discussion of my ailments—the subtext being a somewhat cynical understanding that the result was a foregone conclusion—a determination that, indeed, I could benefit from medical cannabis, and I would walk out with a freshly laser printed recommendation.

  But the gynecologist surprised me. He wasn’t interested in playing charades. He looked at my paperwork, then looked at me. He was skeptical.

  “Your dermatologist said your skin condition was caused by stress?”

  I nodded. She had, in fact. But he, apparently, didn’t believe me.

  “There is no evidence that I know of to indicate that stress is a relevant cause of this condition,” he said. And he said it with some authority.

  I wanted to reply that perhaps, because he was used to inspecting the genital areas and reproductive organs of women, he might not be exactly up to speed on skin conditions and their causes, but I didn’t. I did, after all, want something from him.

  “My dermatologist gave me a topical antibiotic.”

  He smiled.

  “That’s the correct course.”

  “But it comes back when I’m stressed and I don’t want to take stronger antibiotics. She’s big on antibiotics.”

  He scoffed at me, clearly annoyed.

  “I’m sure she’s big on them because they’re effective. That’s typically why we doctors are big on things. For example, if you came to me with a stress-related condition, I would probably be big on prescribing Prozac or some other antianxiety medication.”

  I didn’t want to speculate on the chain of circumstances that might somehow lead me to visit a gynecologist for a rash on my face, but I also didn’t want to irritate him further. He seemed genuinely annoyed that I was wasting his time with my feeble and transparent attempt to get a recommendation. As he sat behind the imposing desk glowering at me through his thick lenses, it suddenly occurred to me that this wasn’t an elaborate charade after all. There was a very real chance that I might fail. It also occurred to me that he was waiting for me to say something, so I tried to rally with a reasonable-sounding argument.

  “Why would I take a mind-altering chemical pharmaceutical when I can take a natural herb?” I asked.

  This made him laugh. He looked at me again, really trying to see something, like he had gynecological X-ray vision. I think he was waiting for me to squirm, to blink, to give him some indication that I was a big fat phony. But I didn’t. I sat still and met his gaze and affected a look of vague disinterest.

  This peculiar stare down seemed like it might go on indefinitely and then, suddenly, he said, “I think cannabis can help with your insomnia.”

  And then he began signing the forms.

  Chapter Four

  Retail Weed

  The same California laws that allow doctors to recommend marijuana for a variety of medical uses also allow cooperatives and collectives to sell pot to patients. The actual sale, whether it’s classified as a donation to the co-op or a taxable item, seems to be open to interpretation, but the reality is that you can walk into a storefront dispensary and purchase cannabis without being subject to arrest or prosecution.

  Frankly, it’s a big relief.

  According to a website called weedmaps.com, I have a dozen medical marijuana dispensaries within a two-mile radius of my house. Some of them are discreetly tucked into strip malls and office buildings without any signage, like speakeasies from the 1930s. They have names such as “Cornerstone Research Collective” or “Medical Caregivers” discreetly placed on small plaques by their doors. Others have names like “Emerald Bliss” or “Hyperion Healing” that make them appear to be day spas or health food supplement stores. Then there are a few that take a more aggressive, in-your-face approach. These are flashy storefronts with large green crosses blinking in bright neon with names such as “The Farmacy” or “Another World Chronics.” Some of these places look like legit, corporate medical establishments, while other ones feature facades festooned with giant murals of hummingbirds and psychedelic flowers with typography borrowed from old Grateful Dead posters. There is, essentially, something for everyone.

  My first experience with one of my local dispensaries was brief and, to be fair, it happened before I had my doctor’s recommendation. But I was curious about dispensaries, how they operated, and what they looked like. Did they look like coffeeshops in Amsterdam?

  The Eagle Rock Herbal Collective was a couple of blocks from my house, stuck between a liquor store and a Laundromat, which—if I had to sit in a Laundromat for a few hours and watch my whites, brights, and darks spin—seemed like a perfect location.

  I opened the mirrored glass door and walked in.

  Inside it was dark and smoky, with a mildewy smell like someone’s basement rec room. A young Latino dude in an L.A. Dodgers replica jersey sat behind the desk, a large dog curled up at his feet. I realized it was the dog that smelled like mildew.

  As I was about to introduce myself, a large man with a shaved head and a scraggly Zapata-style mustache, his gut thrust forward like the grill of a semi and framed by a pair of suspenders, ambled out of the back room and looked at me with what I can only describe as the stink eye. He was, apparently, the boss.

  I extended my hand.

  “I live just up the street and I’m working on a book about cannabis. I was wondering if I could talk to you for a minute about your operation.”

  The stink eye narrowed into a slit of angry suspicion.

  “You got a recommendation?”

>   I shook my head. I hadn’t visited the gynecologist yet.

  “Then get the fuck out of here.”

  “Would you prefer to talk outside?”

  “Get the fuck out of here.” He sucked in some air, perhaps catching his breath from the effort he’d expended telling me to leave, before elaborating.

  “Now.”

  The stink eye gave way to a mad dog glare and, with that, he stepped toward me in a distinctly unfriendly way. The moldy dog that had been curled up on the floor stood, stretched, and began to growl.

  I backed out. I may be foolish, but I am not a fool.

  Now, armed with my doctor’s recommendation, I decided to sample a couple of other, hopefully more friendly, dispensaries in my neighborhood. I wasn’t going back for more stink eye and mildewed pooch; instead I visited a highly regarded collective tucked into a strip mall at the end of my street called American Eagle Collective.

  The collective was located between a chocolate shop and a Thai massage business. It was, in its own little way, the perfect intersection of hedonistic delights stuffed in a seedy looking strip mall. A discreet sign said “AEC,” while a sticker on the door expanded that with “American Eagle.” The front door was mirrored just like the Eagle Rock Herbal Collective, and I wondered if this was some kind of architectural touch typical of marijuana dispensaries.

  I entered to find a cramped waiting area and a bulletproof window. The walls were mostly black, although I detected a kind of Star Wars theme. I’m not sure if that was intentional.

  I slid my recommendation through a slot under the window in exchange for a clipboard with a few forms to fill out.

  As I sat reading the various warnings and cautions, a steady stream of customers came in, showed their IDs, and were buzzed into the main dispensary area. It was two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon and the place was bustling like it was the commuter rush at Grand Central.