Med MJ LA Times: What It's Like to Buy Medical Marijuana

[Expat98]

From the LA Times last week:

http://www.latimes.com/news/columnis...,522132.column

What it's like to buy medical marijuana

April 26, 2008

The advertising flier left no doubt about its pitch: a giant marijuana leaf with a phone number that ended GOT KUSH. A friend's teenage daughter brought it home from last weekend's Earth Day celebration on the Santa Monica Pier.

What else would I expect from a concert held on 4/20 -- a shorthand reference to smoking pot -- that featured reggae artist Ziggy Marley, son of Bob?

"Have you or anyone else experienced an illness [for] which you believe marijuana could provide relief?" the flier read. "If you don't qualify for a recommendation, your visit is free."

I'd seen similar ads before. Walk along the Venice boardwalk and it's hard to not get handed one of those head-shop postcards promising instant approval to smoke marijuana.

I'd dismissed the claim as a marketing gimmick. But it left me wondering: Could you really just walk in off the street and get marijuana?

The West Hollywood clinic took walk-in patients, so I stopped by Wednesday afternoon. I rode the elevator up with a brawny man in a wheelchair and the middle-aged woman accompanying him. We made small talk about the heat wave and the difficulty of finding a place to park.

In the waiting room, I filled out a sheaf of forms, accurately answering questions about my medical history, current symptoms and past use of cannabis.

I gave the polite, tattooed man behind the counter my driver's license, credit card and a coupon giving me a $25 discount on the $175 exam.

Fifteen minutes later, I was greeted by the doctor, a silver-haired man in a white lab coat, his name embroidered across the front. Diplomas lined the wall behind him. On his desk was a collection of family photos.

He looked over my medical forms and asked about the arthritis I'd noted. I told him the truth. Some days my fingers are so stiff it hurts to grip a doorknob or a steering wheel. I'd tried prescription drugs in the past, but stopped because of the side effects.

The doctor inspected my swollen fingers, gently squeezing the tender joints. He checked my pulse and blood pressure, then took a stethoscope and listened to my lungs.

His 10-minute exam was about as thorough as the one I'd received last year from the hand specialist at the orthopedic center, who sent me home with Celebrex.

This new doctor told me marijuana could help. He recommended I not smoke it. Bad for the lungs. Better to use it with a vaporizer. Or ingest it, infused in tea or baked in brownies.

Then he handed me a prescription for marijuana. Good for one year; no refill limits.

Idon't know why I was surprised. I'm the kind of person covered by the state's 1996 Compassionate Use Act, which allows the use of medicinal marijuana in California.

The law allows physicians to recommend marijuana for the treatment of "cancer, anorexia, AIDS, chronic pain, spasticity, glaucoma, arthritis, migraine, or any other illness for which marijuana provides relief."

I was with the 56% of California voters who approved the law 12 years ago. It's not my place to judge an adult who chooses a bong hit over Vicodin.

So why did I feel vaguely criminal as I stuffed my cannabis card -- resembling a tiny passport, embossed with a marijuana leaf -- in my wallet?

Because I'm from a generation in which marijuana was plainly illegal and thus the province of the young -- clandestinely purchased with a wad of singles, smoked with a rowdy crowd of buddies, accompanied by laughter and loud music.

And because I've heard from friends -- and my own teenage daughters -- that getting a cannabis card at 18 has become a rite of passage in some quarters.

Why bother trying to find a dope dealer when you can shop for weed at a place as familiar as a mini-mart?

Iwas buzzed in at the marijuana dispensary across the street from the doctor's office. I handed my prescription to a hand that reached out through a hole in a black-glass window that I couldn't see through. I was buzzed in through a second door and stood dumbstruck in front of a counter with more than a dozen varieties of marijuana on display.

A thin young man with a ponytail explained the different types and their effects on the body and mind, just like those pamphlets I get when I pick up my blood pressure and cholesterol medications from Rite-Aid.

I was struck by how ordinary it all seemed, trying to decide between marijuanas. A sativa or an indica? I felt like I was at the apple bin at Trader Joe's choosing between Fuji and Gala.

I left with a red vial of sweet-smelling Yumbolt, at $55 for an eighth of an ounce. I carried it home in the trunk of my car, convinced that every cop I passed could tell I was transporting marijuana.

At home, I couldn't get the bottle open. My fingers weren't strong enough to pop the top. Which is just as well.

I'm not going to smoke it. The feds don't recognize California's medical marijuana law. The DEA has been raiding dispensaries here; I don't want federal agents knocking on my door.

So, on Friday, I brought the bottle into my office and my editor watched me flush it down the toilet.

The experience left me with so much to think about, it's best I'm clear-headed while I work through it.

sandy.banks@latimes.com

And a followup article this week:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...4694379.column

Medical marijuana as a 'wonder drug'

May 3, 2008

I've taken plenty of heat from readers about my column last week describing how easy it was for me to legally buy marijuana.

Most chastised me for flushing my pot down the toilet before trying it, calling it a cowardly cop-out, a threat to the safety of the region's water supply and a missed opportunity to let others know what kind of pain relief marijuana actually provides.

"Flushing good medicine down the toilet was a silly, wasteful gesture," e-mailed Michael Levitt, a 52-year-old who uses marijuana to treat his diabetes and high blood pressure and ran a dispensary in Canoga Park until the feds forced him to shut down last year.

I dumped the pot for legal reasons and because I'd accomplished my journalistic mission by buying it. As a columnist and a parent, I was more interested in seeing how easy it was to get it than discovering the effect of marijuana on my arthritic hands.

But I've learned enough from readers this week to understand why some consider it a wonder drug: The registered nurse crippled by a genetic joint disease who was able to toss her Vicodin and use her hands again. The disabled veteran with kidney failure who was vomiting every day until he began smoking marijuana. The single dad confined to a wheelchair after a traffic accident who is now able to climb a flight of stairs.

And I was surprised that I could have learned how easy the process of buying marijuana is by hanging around the mall, talking to 18-year-olds.

In the 12 years since California became the first state in the nation to legalize marijuana for medical use, the drug's distribution network has grown from a small collective of cannabis clubs to a sprawling network of unregulated dispensaries -- some with their own prescribing physicians.

Their competition plays out bluntly online and in ads like these in LA Weekly: Free delivery. Medical Cannabis to your door! Bonus gifts. Free joint for every new patient. Instant medical approval. If you don't qualify, your visit is free! Money-saving coupons. Discounts for Medi-Cal/Medicare.

In the week since my column ran, I've talked with more than a dozen high school and college students -- honor students and chronic truants, the kids of corporate lawyers and immigrant housecleaners, everyday smokers and teens who've never even seen it. Everyone said they have friends who have used marijuana, and they're not the loser potheads of my youth:

The Catholic school cheerleader who brings weed-laced brownies to the team parties. The Yale-bound student body president who hits a joint three or four times a week. The soccer star who gets high on weekends to enhance the buzz of nature specials on TV.

None of them would let me use their names in this column, though several proudly displayed their cannabis cards to me.

"It's not even, like, a drug to us," one high school senior --headed for UC San Diego -- told me. He "got legal" at a Sherman Oaks dispensary the day he turned 18. In his Porter Ranch neighborhood, he said, a cannabis card is considered a convenient passport to harmless fun, like buying a season pass to Magic Mountain.

A senior at a Santa Monica private school -- who doesn't have a card but smokes occasionally -- told me he doesn't think having access to medical marijuana makes a teen more likely to use. "It's not like once they turn 18, that's when they start smoking weed. It happens much earlier than that."

None of his friends with cards have medical ailments, he said. "They just look online and find a place, call and make an appointment. It's the safe way" to get marijuana.

What's the unsafe way?

He laughed. "It's not like you go in a bad neighborhood, meet in a dark alley, there's a guy in a hooded sweat shirt, you slip him a $20, he gives you a bag of whatever.

"There are kids you know who sell weed," he said. "Sometimes they're your friends. . . . It's going to his house, saying 'Hi' to his mom, going up to his bedroom, and he gives you the marijuana."

If NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) had the lobbying power of the pharmaceutical industry, we could fill our pot prescriptions at neighborhood drugstores and flush the Vicodin and Valium instead. That would sit just fine with me.

But I don't think teenagers should smoke marijuana.

Yes, it can ease stress, erase anxiety, help you stop worrying about why the boy you like didn't text back or how you'll do on the upcoming AP exams. But learning to manage those feelings is part of growing up.

Marijuana is a comfortable escape from a necessary struggle; it can too easily become a habit that saps energy and turns a motivated kid into a slacker.

Yet, under the law, an 18-year-old has the same right as a 50-year-old to purchase and use marijuana legally.

The problem is unscrupulous providers who aim their marketing at healthy young people, and physicians who hand out prescriptions (legally considered "recommendations") without examining patients or inspecting their IDs.

Ultimately, the medical marijuana delivery process relies on patient and physician integrity. Some folks are going to game the system for a legal high. And some will credit it with making their lives worth living.

Beverly Hills physician Craig Cohen has turned down enough "24-year-olds with insomnia who haven't seen a doctor" to make him wonder about his role in recommending marijuana: "Am I just the candy man? That's in the back of my mind," he said in an interview last week.

But his other patients keep him going. "People with strokes, muscle spasticity, peripheral neuropathy. . . . The people I see are amazingly sick," he said.

"The state has provided a way for them to get relief. What's needed now is tolerance. And recognition that these people and their pain are real."

sandy.banks@latimes.com

[ejbot]

swim wishes he lived in california ^_^

[entheogensmurf]

Sexy articles. I hope it enlighten and awakens at the very least a few minds.

It's painfully amusing that someone must state:

What's needed now is tolerance. And recognition that these people and their pain are real.

I have a large amount of empathy towards the feeling generated from:

I'm not going to smoke it. The feds don't recognize California's medical marijuana law. The DEA has been raiding dispensaries here; I don't want federal agents knocking on my door.

The DEA ruins the lives of many of whom I would consider decent people, expanding beyond medicinal marijuana users. I associate them with an Islamic country that preaches peace and an air of tolerance to all but snatch you from your abode if you are not Muslim, gifting with multiple lashes or execution

I've read about and watched opposer's of marijuana and medical marijuana specifically; their eyes, ears and minds are open to anything but valid medical research, critical thinking and pro-marijuana citizen opinion. Not that this is anything new to most but I felt like babbling as usual.

[nEone]

The fight for Medical MJ in CA is really an amazing thing.

Dispensaries are wildly variable experiences. Some are very clearly just extensions of long established drug cartels - shady gruff folks behind slapped together wooden counters with cash on their mind. Russian mobsters, South Central hoods, collegiate dealers.

There are other dispensaries that are rooted in the 60's - beaded curtains, leafy clones, and long wooden bars decorated with Greatful Dead ticket stubs, hosts talking about compassion.

And then there are the Medical oriented co-ops - with staff in lab coats, and clean class counters and bright fluorescent lighting. Crystalline buds magnified with giant lenses - every gram in its own glass vial.

Regardless of variation in themes though - one thing remains constant - every employee, every vendor, every grower, and every patient with their name on file is standing up and showing the world that there is a different way to treat marijuana - and it's working.

Reputation Comments on this post:

	Interesting, thanks!
	right on

[Expat98]

These articles are an eye opener for me. I didn't realize how easy it is to get medical marijuana in California.

Here's another one from the LA Times by a different author:

This bud's for you, and you, and you too

How I got my hands on some marijuana -- the legal (and easy) way.

May 9, 2008
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.

jstein@latimescolumnists.com

[beentheredonethatagain]

NIK has a medical marijuana card , although now expiered, he just has to pay another $150 or so dollars to get a new one.

and yes it is that easy to buy the smoke once you have the card, just go to the dispensory and show them your I.D. and card, they buzz open a door , you enter , look and examine all the different strains available and make the purchase in cash no check no debit card no credit card, cash only.

although most dispensories have an atm machine on site.

after leaving with the store, usually outside , I have been asked by people if I would smoke them out, they hang around like panhandlers askin for change, but these stoners want to smoke. I decline their request. the rules inside on the wall state that you won't share with others and don't smoke outside the store. edit they also ask you not to bring anyone with you waiting in the car, and yes they do have a guard looking and scanning the parking lot .

[Shampoo]

Getting a license to procure medicinal marijuana in California is that ubiquitous, however there seem to be some misconceptions about how 'easy' it is. A very close friend of mine, swim, has been running a medicinal marijuana clinic with another close friend for quite some time now, and keeping their heads above water has been less than a simple task. Places like those described in the articles above are being raided on a weekly basis. I hear about doctors and clinics having fed-letters dropped in their mailboxes as often as I hear about them opening. There is a constant flux of scene and context, while only the content (the meds) stays consistent. The people benefiting most are the growers. The close, clinic-running friend has wonderful, positive relationships with a myriad of happy growers, legally turning a state-taxed profit on the production of high-quality medication for the masses. He tells me the breading and growing innovations occurring in the med-scene right now are amazing. There is so much more to the medicinal marijuana movement than grabbing a card, running to the 'farmacy' and buying some cannabis-gelato. There is a deeply intricate, personal world of rational medical treatment for ailments from anxiety and insomnia to nerve-damage pain-mediation, brimming with success. I hope more articles like this get written, with a bit more journalistic vigor and dedication, or swim might have to write one himself...

[beentheredonethatagain]

Originally Posted by Shampoo

Getting a license to procure medicinal marijuana in California is that ubiquitous, however there seem to be some misconceptions about how 'easy' it is. A very close friend of mine, swim, has been running a medicinal marijuana clinic with another close friend for quite some time now, and keeping their heads above water has been less than a simple task. Places like those described in the articles above are being raided on a weekly basis. I hear about doctors and clinics having fed-letters dropped in their mailboxes as often as I hear about them opening. There is a constant flux of scene and context, while only the content (the meds) stays consistent. The people benefiting most are the growers. The close, clinic-running friend has wonderful, positive relationships with a myriad of happy growers, legally turning a state-taxed profit on the production of high-quality medication for the masses. He tells me the breading and growing innovations occurring in the med-scene right now are amazing. There is so much more to the medicinal marijuana movement than grabbing a card, running to the 'farmacy' and buying some cannabis-gelato. There is a deeply intricate, personal world of rational medical treatment for ailments from anxiety and insomnia to nerve-damage pain-mediation, brimming with success. I hope more articles like this get written, with a bit more journalistic vigor and dedication, or swim might have to write one himself...

I am a lil lost on this reply , are you saying marijuana is the next cure all drug ? or are you saying medical cannibis is really just a joke?

[Shampoo]

Originally Posted by beentheredonethatagain

I am a lil lost on this reply , are you saying marijuana is the next cure all drug ? or are you saying medical cannibis is really just a joke?

I didnt really mean to place an opinion on the legitimacy of medicinal cannabis, which I think has both its merits in pharmacology, social remedy, and recreation, but rather to clarify what seems like a relatively narrow perspective on what med-marijuana has to offer. I'll try to make a little more sense of myself:

A very close friend of mine, swim, has been running a medicinal marijuana clinic with another close friend for quite some time now, and keeping their heads above water has been less than a simple task. Places like those described in the articles above are being raided on a weekly basis. I hear about doctors and clinics having fed-letters dropped in their mailboxes as often as I hear about them opening. There is a constant flux of scene and context, while only the content (the meds) stays consistent.

There is so much more to the medicinal marijuana movement than grabbing a card, running to the 'farmacy' and buying some cannabis-gelato. There is a deeply intricate, personal world of rational medical treatment for ailments from anxiety and insomnia to nerve-damage pain-mediation, brimming with success.

Here, I meant to clarify that though there are flamboyant, neon pot-leaf barring, dyed in the wool legal excuses for a drug dealer, these clinics are few, since they are shut down nearly every weekend. Some clinics have hip-hop music, rasta's with natty dreadlocks and all organic herbs, Grateful Dead posters and the like, and are not afraid to express their support for the recreational use of cannabis. These are the clinics getting raided weekly, being shut down for things like tax evasion, profiteering...etc. Their ostentatious attitude almost always comes back to bite them in the ass. On the other hand, there are some clinics that have been around for 3-4 years, with technicians in lab coats, consistent meds in accurate doses, and discreet parking. These clinics tend to cater to a slightly different crowd, many of the terminally ill, placing an emphasis on non-recreational ingestion of cannabinoids. Most of them will not sell the full, legal-limit in a single visit, partially to discourage dealers from using the clinic as a primary source. These clinics include on-staff doctors that develop true doctor-patient relationships that aid in the progression of healthy dosing. There is simply a far greater range of clinics than those most commonly described as 'legal-dealers' and easy marks for buying 'drugs'. Most dispensaries, despite what seems to be a relatively common conception, do not include a spinning-wheel giveaway from stoned practitioners.

Reputation Comments on this post:

good info

[beentheredonethatagain]

the clinics , or I really mean the dispensories sell there product at such a premium that for a dealer to use it as a connection is pretty much a no profit making proposition. there is no profit margin to be had from buying at a dispensory.

[Shampoo]

Originally Posted by beentheredonethatagain

the clinics , or I really mean the dispensories sell there product at such a premium that for a dealer to use it as a connection is pretty much a no profit making proposition. there is no profit margin to be had from buying at a dispensory.

This is moreso true now than it was 2 years ago. A few years back, swim knew more than a few dealers buying their quarter-pounds directly from dispensaries, making a nice profit on primo-ganja. More recently, more respectable dispensaries have been cutting down on the breaks they give at 1/2-ounce and ounce prices, making buying in bulk a barely more efficient purchase than buying in 1/8ths.