Here's a link to my expose' on the medical marijuana movement as it appears in the Jan/Feb '07 issue of DETAILS. However, I thought I'd use my website to publish the uncut version of the story. This includes my experience as a card carrying member of the pot club.
"The New California Gold Rush"
Every afternoon at 4:20 sharp, "Steve" leaves his office in San Francisco's financial district. After a day spent shuffling multimillion-dollar investments, many of his firm's ace financial planners scurry to join the sexy clientele at the nearby W Hotel's swanky XYZ Bar. But Steve, who's 35, doesn't join them. He doesn't drink. And with his 24-year-old "Hawaiian Tropic-hot" wife waiting at home, he's not on the prowl. Instead, to revitalize his mind and body, he slips in his iPod earbuds and walks 30 minutes to his favorite cannabis club.
Decked out in bachelor-pad chic, the subterranean lounge is populated by a menagerie of regulars nodding lazily to the dub reggae pumping through the speakers. Steve approaches the fluorescent-lit glass counter and buys a gram of Purple Urkel. He hands over 15 bucks and sinks into a plush red velvet couch, tossing his Gucci jacket into a crumpled ball. From his briefcase, he pulls out clear cellulose rolling papers he brought back from Brazil, and he twists up a joint.
Steve doesn't have glaucoma, AIDS, cancer, or any of the ailments commonly associated with medical marijuana. But two years ago, he sought out a "pot doc" to sidestep the "harsh side effects" of the Valium his shrink had prescribed for his anxiety.
Obviously, scoring weed in San Francisco is about as challenging as finding a hippie on Haight Street, but a prescription grants access to the state's 300 cannabis club. The best of them offer dozens of strains of sativas and indicas, concentrates like hash and kief, and edibles like caramels and krispies and lollipops. And with the keys to the candy store in hand, pot connoisseurs across the state are rushing to the clubs. One writer in Los Angeles notes, "It's the difference between buying a six-pack of Coors Light at your local 7-Eleven and selecting a fine pinot noir from an expert staffer at a snooty wine shop." "John," a jetsetting 29-year-old entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, says his local weed emporium sells "the most amazing selection of the sickest fucking nuggets you can find anywhere on God's green earth." His eyes are radiant enough to power a grow room and his voice takes on a fiery staccato: "It's like Amsterdam, only better!" he cackles. "Because you don't have to visit the Anne Frank house, and pretend you're sad and stuff."
It's now 5 o'clock, and Steve sparks his translucent spliff. "This right here keeps me sane," he says. "I need something to pop the thought bubble after work, or I'll be riddled with stress and anxiety." Already, he seems looser and lighter, his hands languidly slicing the smoke-choked air. But as 6 o'clock approaches, he's frowning at his heavy gold watch. The thought bubble is filling up again, with whatever elaborate fib he'll tell his wife. Paranoid? "Damn straight," Steve says, squeezing Visine into his eyes. "If my wife knew I came here straight after work every day, she'd fucking kill me."
Steve is hardly the only Californian seeking choice weed to deal with his work stress. In case you haven't seen the smoke rings circling the state's medical marijuana movement, "anxiety" is the new "cancer." For eight years after California passed its 1996 Compassionate Use Act (Proposition 215), the vast majority of the state's 100,000 cannabis patients were gravely ill, using marijuana to ease their suffering from chronic or terminal diseases. But in recent years, with state-level clarifications of Prop 215 (and a landmark federal injunction protecting pot docs) the threat of arrest and jail is receding faster than Al Gore's glaciers. Cue the mad dash of young professionals lining up for consultations about their anxiety and insomnia.
Since 2004, an estimated 250,000 "patients" have suddenly (and discreetly) boarded the brownie bus, many of them pot enthusiasts whose $150 annual prescriptions ostensibly combat such ailments as color blindness, stuttering, and sweaty pits. For high-powered lawyers, ad execs, surgeons, designers, and bankers with careers to protect, the license to ward off the cops (and bypass seedy Haight Street dealers) is plenty of incentive to fork over the cash for a doctor's note. "I'm too old to start a police record," says "Chris," a 35-year-old e-commerce developer for a major global retailer. "Most of my close friends now have the get-out-of-jail-free card."
It's no surprise that California leads the marijuana movement. But 10 other states including Colorado, Montana, Alaska, Maine, and Rhode Island have put pot laws on the books. In contrast to a state like Washington, where doctors can lose their licenses for writing a marijuana prescription to alleviate, say, nightmares, Prop 215 grants California physicians the authority to recommend weed for "any illnesses for which marijuana would provide relief." "It used to be that physicians only wanted the wheelchair patients," says Jean Talleyrand, a renegade pot doc in the Bay Area. "But life catches up to people, plain and simple, and whether it's the stress of a new job or marital strife, the resulting anxiety and loss of sleep can have a negative impact on one's well-being. A surprising number of our patients are highly successful young professionals who would simply rather saddle up to a bong than a bottle."
Talleyrand, 39, an Ivy League-educated physician, was serving impoverished patients in a public health clinic in San Francisco when he decided two years ago to shift gears. "I just lost all faith in the pill-pushing paradigm," he says, "especially when I knew that marijuana was a safe, homeopathic alternative to Ambien, Valium, and Vicodin." Empowered by his ideals (and impunity from federal prosecution), he opened up his first MediCann evaluation clinic in late 2004 "to provide safe, affordable access to physicians who knew the wide-ranging therapeutic uses of marijuana." Since then, MediCann has grown into a statewide chain of 10 clinics that has already greenlit the ganja for 54,000 patients.
As it happens, I'm one of them. A MediCann ad on the back of the free weekly San Francisco Bay Guardian caught my eye one day in 2005, and I made an appointment. I'd known of marijuana's therapeutic benefits firsthand since college, when I began smoking to treat my, um, writers' cramp. While I was expecting to find hippies in hemp sarongs, in the MediCann waiting room, I was surprised to find two slick yuppies reminiscing over a recent Costa Rica jaunt involving a yacht, models, and shark diving. After they breezed in and out of the doctor's office, it was my turn to play sick. During my audition, I grumbled about headaches, backaches, insomnia, and my loss of appetite. Perhaps I was paranoid, but I sensed her eyeing my gut suspiciously. Yet 10 minutes later, I sauntered through California's legal loophole with a license to toke. My surreptitious smirk on my voluntary photo ID card, issued by the San Francisco Board of Public Health, betrays my sense that I was getting away with murder.
As hundreds of new "patients" seek doctors' notes every day, dispensaries are proliferating rapidly across the Golden State. "Pot clubs are the fastest-growing industry in Southern California," says "Alex," the 37-year-old owner of four cannabis shops. (The number of storefronts in greater Los Angeles alone has skyrocketed from a handful in 2004 to 125 and counting.) Naturally, with such an explosive increase in demand comes a swarm of registered "caregivers," each licensed by California to cultivate as many as 99 plants. While California has no reliable statistics indicating how many people are growing dope, marijuana is by far the state's top cash crop, outpacing grapes and almonds combined. And as the market becomes progressively saturated with better pot, the suppliers are starting to feel squeezed.
"Tyler," a 28-year-old medical marijuana provider, acknowledges the competitive market. "It's all about who has the new hash-extraction method, the new hybrid strain of Sour Diesel, the new shit that nobody else has their paws on," he says. Tyler considers himself a cannabis craftsman. "What I do is every bit as artisan as winemaking," he says. But even as he perfects his potent "Trainwreck" strain, the increasing field of sellers has forced him to slash his price to $3,500 a pound, down from $4,000 a couple of years ago.
Not long ago, Tyler was an East Coast real-estate investor with a six-figure salary, a new house, a girlfriend and a dog. His life was unfolding just as planned until the day a friend phoned from Berkeley offering him a business opportunity. "My first thought was, 'No fucking way am I going to become a drug dealer,'" he says. Nevertheless, he paid a visit, attended a few meetings with powerful activist attorneys, and decided, to his surprise, that it sounded not only legitimate but also lucrative—he could double his income in a year. Within two weeks, Tyler rented out his house, ditched his girlfriend and his career, and headed west in a U-Haul with his dog. "I wanted to stake my claim in the new California gold rush," he says.
Today, he is living well and lives in a spacious loft in downtown San Francisco. As we sit on his balcony overlooking the Bay Bridge, this savvy entrepreneur seems rather at ease considering his career is based on violating federal law. He retains two lawyers and an accountant and steadfastly plays by the legal rules; last year, he filed with the Internal Revenue Service and declared six figures of income. "I didn't hear them bitching about that," he notes.
For now, he has little fear of the IRS, or even the Drug Enforcement Agency. "Do you know what keeps me awake at night?" He pulls a chalky bong hit into his lungs and pauses for effect. "What I'm most afraid is your fucking story." Tyler doesn't want his price to plummet any further as more opportunists learn about California's permissive weed laws. He doesn't want any publicity to inflame Prop 215's critics, like the syndicated right-wing radio host Michael Savage. And he doesn't want the DEA to turn its attention to the West Coast. For Tyler, it's best that the marijuana loophole remain an open secret. Tyler looks me dead in the eyes and exhales in my face. He says, "Don't blow it for all of us."
posted by Scott Keneally @ 3:43 AM