The Marijuana Chronicles (24 page)

All the clerks were scantily clad young women showing considerable décolletage, grinning broadly. They jabbered away, gaily advising me about the special deals, like extra-heavy eighths on Tuesdays, free eighths in exchange for referring a new patient, and a ten percent discount for seniors and the disabled. I qualified for the former, but you couldn’t combine it with a first-timer discount. Payment was by cash only, no plastic, checks, or receipts. The weed was bagged in the familiar mortar-and-pestle prescription sack used by regular pharmacies.

The product was outstanding, like the best Maui Wowee, and I was instantly too spoiled to get off on Charlie’s stuff anymore. Since every dispensary offered the twenty percent introductory discount plus “free gift,” I became a first-time patient in each.

With new dispensaries popping up all over town, they soon outnumbered Starbucks. My newbie status lasted a good two years before I had to visit the same one twice. Each had its unique properties, some larger than others, but all of them were fairly hard to see from the street, marked only by initials. The prices were remarkably competitive with one another, almost universal, as was the cash-only/no-receipt payment policy. The quality varied, but I was seldom disappointed. A few of these shops were evidently not playing by the rules. I saw a tall, golden Adonis in tank top and shorts buying three thousand dollars’ worth of bud—there was no specific dosage on the prescription, but the medicine was by law for personal use only—who remarked casually that he was “buying for my collective in Huntington Beach.” One sleazy outfit offered sample hits from a vaporizer on-site,
not
kosher, and one proprietor boasted of a full guarantee: “If you’re not satisfied, bring it back and I’ll replace it,” he crowed. One place actually had a bubble gum machine in its lobby and permitted children to wait there while their parents shopped the showroom. An elderly retired nurse from Orange County ran her own tiny shop, called the Green Nurse, and offered to weigh you and take your blood pressure. A young, bearded stoner guy in torn jeans took the money and put it in his pocket before handing you your purchase.

I finally settled on Quality Discount Caregivers (QDC), one of the busiest dispensaries in town, which had a huge selection of top-grade stuff. The prices weren’t any lower but they featured a kind of “frequent flyer” program. Save the empty plastic vials from twelve eighths, then redeem them for a free one, a baker’s dozen. Zig-Zag papers were gratis. On the fifteenth of the month, everything in the store was twenty-five percent off, and patients lined up on the sidewalk, but even on regular days you always had to wait your turn to get into the vault. The clerks were all mostly bosomy, half-naked chicks, the patients almost all male. I wondered how they got away with hiring only the youngest and most endowed female clerks—wasn’t that a violation of equal opportunity employment or something? The amount of money changing hands was staggering. Security precautions were practically military, with TV monitors everywhere and muscular, young, uniformed security guards with “badges” and guns.

By 2010, Long Beach had become a kushier town than Amsterdam, Bangkok, Maui, Bern, or Lugano. All those places had anti-marijuana laws they simply declined to enforce. Of course the brown cafés of Amsterdam were the most famous, the novelty of being able to walk into a storefront and score your stash over the counter almost unique in the world. But Switzerland, quietly and without controversy, has a similar system—in fact, growing and possessing marijuana has never been against Swiss law, but they cleverly get around it with a loophole; they call it hemp and prohibit its use “for narcotic purposes.” Hah hah hah.

The difference in California is that the storefront dispensaries are legal under state law. The state passed the first medical marijuana initiative in the nation, the famous Proposition 215, way back in ’96, and many attempts to repeal it have been soundly rejected by the electorate. Federal law adamantly forbids pot, but when Obama took office, he very early indicated that his attorney general would not pursue medical marijuana patients. Cities and towns in California adopted their own local ordinances, adding to the confusing miasma of different laws.

How groovy is that? But some upscale towns and better neighborhoods shunned the dispensaries. I found myself in places I wouldn’t frequent after dark. I raced past loitering bums eyeballing every customer who emerged from the store. I parked in conspicuous spots.

While few people would deny medicine to patients with serious illnesses, everyone knew you could get a prescription for nothing worse than a headache, and public objections to blatantly obvious pot stores grew into an uproar. Parents complained about cannabis storefronts located near schools and parks. Neighbors took offense at the late-night shenanigans and clusters of loitering stoners on the street. The Long Beach City Council dickered over the matter, divided into liberals and conservatives like the Supreme Court, and finally crafted a “compromise”—a bizarre lottery system intended to award a limited number of dispensary licenses and thus rein in the explosive growth of the industry. Some rogue dispensaries ignored it entirely and kept opening their doors and raking in cash until the city cops raided and smashed up their shops. A full-scale war was underway by 2011.

Uh-oh. Trouble in Paradise. But every time I asked one of the babes if the dispensary was going to be closed down, she said something like, “Oh, no, it’s all just politics, it’s all about money, we’re staying open, here you go honey, see you next time!”

Eventually the city got the amount of stores down to what it considered a manageable number, but then the federal government filed suit to invalidate the local ordinance, ruling that city law could not supersede federal. The crackdown seemed to contradict Obama’s original promise not to interfere with medical users, and was applied selectively to a few places that were singled out. Total chaos descended by the summer of 2012, with dispensaries vowing to defy the ban and pushing for a popular vote. Medical marijuana doesn’t fail at the ballot box.

This unstable, troubled paradise could not survive indefinitely and after six more months of feverish wrangling, Long Beach closed down its pot shops in August 2012, while LA did the same. Anticipating this tragedy, I’d stocked up in advance. In the last couple of weeks, the store was crammed from opening to closing. I saw all my street buddies. Everyone was worried sick. But we joked about it and the girls winked. I knew the end was near, however, when on my last visit there was only one babe on duty, the others having been replaced by grim-looking hairy men, the bosses.

Not every store complied, of course, but the rogue operations seemed doomed to violent police raids.

Sob. The
GOT KUSH?
billboards are gone now and it appears that the golden era of freewheeling liberation is behind us, but the horse got out of the barn and won’t go back. I shopped at one of the several dispensaries who refused to shut, and they were welcoming new customers by the score with a twenty-five percent discount. The scene there resembled rush hour on the freeway, with slow-moving lanes of potheads.

Even the owners forced to shut down now make the dubious claim that they can still deliver kush to your home quite legally as long as you have the doctor’s letter, and certainly these home deliveries will be more difficult to regulate than public stores, since they are essentially invisible. There’s no risk of running out of medicine.

But in five years it’s come full circle in Kush City. I wonder if Charlie has branched into the “legal” home delivery business. I wish I hadn’t lost his number. But the babe slipped hers into the bag.

R
ACHEL
S
HTEIR
is the author of three nonfiction books, most recently
The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting
. She has written for many magazines and newspapers, including the
New York Times
and the
New Republic
. During the 2011 Chicago mayoral election, she wrote a weekly column for
Tablet
magazine about Rahm Emanuel called “The Rahm Report.” She is the recipient of many awards for her writing, and has taught at many universities.

julie falco goes west: illinois poster girl for legalizing medicinal cannabis leaves town

by rachel shteir

I
first met Julie Falco in September of 2012, after she had decided to go to California. I was looking for a person involved in the fight to make medical marijuana legal in Illinois. Everyone mentioned Julie.

When she greets me at the door of her nearly bare one-bedroom apartment, one of the first stories she tells me is how three years ago, she flew to DC to attend the Marijuana Policy Project’s fifteenth-anniversary gala—fifteen states in fifteen years. The event was held at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill. The MPP was honoring her, Cheech and Chong—who received a Trailblazer Award—and Joseph McSherry, a physician who helped pass medical marijuana laws in Vermont.

Julie is telling me this because despite her efforts, and the efforts of many others, IL House Bill 30, which would make medical marijuana legal in Illinois, has yet to pass. Julie herself is less active in the movement than she used to be, but she remains the best-known patient advocate in the state, a rock star of the movement, albeit one who often had to sleep on the floor of the hotel room because the beds were too soft for someone with multiple sclerosis.

Recalling that night, Julie says she didn’t know three hundred people would show up at the MPP gala to support her. Nor did she plan to bring up one of her biggest irritations—the word “marijuana,” or as she sometimes says, “the M word”—which she stopped using around 2005 when she concluded that it prevented legislators from taking the plant’s medicinal uses seriously. Since then, she has always “thought in cannabinoid.” When she took the podium that night in DC to give her speech, the plea for changing the word to cannabis just tumbled out. Later, she was gratified to see Tommy Chong agree that the government uses the word marijuana to demonize pot. It was a golden evening and Julie could not have imagined that six months later, her dedication to cannabinoid science would take another shape—that she would begin to dream of California.

Today, pursuing that dream is how Julie spends most of her time. She is forty-seven, but she could be mistaken for ten years younger despite needing a walker to move around inside her apartment. She has an open, unlined face, brown hair, and brown eyes. The day I visit, she is wearing a peach-colored T-shirt with sequins splattered around the front, light-colored jeans, and a thin silver ring on her thumb. She arranges her hair in the style of Dorothy Hamill and is quick to smile.

Julie has had MS since 1986 when she was a communications major at Illinois State University in Normal, 133 miles from Chicago, and a girl guitarist in an alternative rock band, which went by various names but ended up as Zero Balance. Home for spring break to attend her mother’s second wedding, she first noticed her foot dragging in the supermarket parking lot. Before she had time to worry about the foot, it cleared up. She went back to school.

Two years later, Julie relapsed with totally different symptoms. Now she couldn’t see. The disease “hit her optic nerve.” There was no cure. She was told to go home and rest. Instead, she tried to live her life. She got a job at Design Lab Chicago, a theatrical lighting firm, and then went to Europe for a month. She backpacked, limping through France and Switzerland. She stayed with her grandfather’s sister in Germany in his 500-year-old house. She went to Amsterdam, she says, although she does not elaborate on the obvious—the legality of marijuana in Holland. From that time until 2004, she tried maybe forty different treatments—acupuncture, hydrotherapy, Zanaflex, Valium, BETASERON. She was “debilitated, lethargic, one big ball of symptoms.” She walked with a cane, and then two canes, and then a walker. (Now she uses her walker indoors and outdoors a power scooter or a wheelchair.)

Julie was scared. She had many different symptoms, including facial paralysis. She moved back to Chicago. She wanted to be near her family and moved into a small apartment on the second floor, above her grandmother’s, in Beverly, on Chicago’s South Side.

Twenty-six years later, Julie is tired. No one understands her dedication to cannabis, not even her mother, who told her she understands that it is her only medicine but that she hopes Julie keeps an open mind. What about Big Pharma, why don’t they keep an open mind? Julie asked.

She is tired of reading about drugs that suppress symptoms. She wishes for a drug that will eliminate symptoms. Most of the new ones are focused on newly diagnosed people, she complains. And when you read the side effects, when you get down to risk of death, “Let’s eliminate that one right off the bat,” she jokes. She is often joking.

These days when Julie wants to leave the apartment, which she does no more than ten times a month, she has to call the fire department. She could have built a ramp but ultimately decided against it. She now lives on the first floor in a typical one-bedroom on the northside, a little down at the heels, probably built in the 1930s, with a fake fireplace. There is a large massage table folded up in its cover by one wall and boxes piled by the window. She has been in this apartment for over twenty years. So, when she recently donated, gave away, and threw out around eighty percent of her possessions, it was a big job.