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