The Marijuana Chronicles

Looking up, I couldn’t believe it—I could clearly see the Big Dipper and some other constellations whose names I should have known but could not recall. “Wow! You can’t see any of this down in the city. The city lights wash out everything.” Even the crusty, textured surface of the moon was vaguely visible. “I’m sorry I was such a failure at getting high,” I said to my companions as another cat climbed up and settled down, in a sphinx position, with its front paws turned in, on my chest, facing me.

“You’re no failure,” Claire consoled, as she took my right hand in hers and, on her right side, found B.’s hand floating above her kaftan and gave it a squeeze. We lay there in silence for a long time, with two cats purring, and cicadas buzzing in the bushes. The sky sparkled, and the moon glowed.

“There are many ways to get that feeling of being high, you know,” Claire said, peering into the night’s vast ocean of unfathomably far-away, intoxicating eternal light. Taking my hand in hers and lifting it up above our heads like a teacher’s pointer as we lay there on the grass, she turned to me and whispered, as though revealing a long-kept secret known only to the members of an ancient tribe: “All you really have to do, if you’re looking for it on a night like this, is lie back, look up, reach up, and touch the stars.”

PaRT IV

GOOD & BaD meDICIne

R

AYMOND

M

UNGO

is the author of

Famous Long Ago, Total Loss Farm, Palm Springs Babylon

, and many other books. An original founder of Liberation News Service in Washington, DC in 1967, he has published articles on the 1960s counterculture in periodicals and anthologies.

Famous Long Ago

was recently reissued in paperback as a college textbook in American history. Mungo lives in Southern California, where he is also a social worker tending primarily to AIDS patients and the severely mentally ill.

kush city

by raymond mungo

GOT KUSH? screamed the green billboard adorned with a sparkling crystallized bud, Humboldt quality, looming over Pacific Coast Highway and Cherry Avenue in Long Beach, California, a thousand miles south of grass country. A bold black 1-800 number was prominently advertised. That was it, no explanation, a freaking ad for reefer, as big as the Ritz. I damn near crashed the Honda hatchback into the car ahead of me. The nation was swirling down the 2008 rabbit hole of depression, panic was in the air, and some old Republican Vietnam War POW who thought marijuana was a gateway drug to heroin was ru

I had plenty of pot, but no “kush.” Smoking grass daily since 1963, I used it as a tool for writing, but in fifty years of herbal appreciation never called it kush, and the stuff I got from Charlie was definitely not in that exalted category. Charlie home-delivered rather ordinary shit, but he was reliable, affordable, and always ready. As a fifty-five-year-old sometime jazz musician, he needed the extra green, but he sold the brown. Charlie carried only one variety at a time. The price never changed, but if he thought something was extraordinary, he’d recommend buying ahead. He dispensed professionally sealed packets for fifty bucks. No dickering, no discounts, no scales. Looked like a quarter, but he called it a lid.

Charlie was a nice guy, and I was glad to be free of the lifelong pursuit of fickle dealers, hanging around squalid apartments waiting for delivery, now that I’m an old fart. If the neighbors thought anything of the gray ponytailed beatnik visitor who showed up with some regularity but never stayed more than five minutes, they didn’t comment on it. The pungent aroma of the Mexican rag weed seeped from my front door into the hallway, but I wasn’t the only head in the building. The evangelical Christian on the floor below, who began and ended every conversation with invocations to the deity, more or less smoked all day long and never seemed to go to work. He drove a silver Beemer and had a trophy girlfriend.

“Hey, Charlie, what’s with all these GOT KUSH? billboards popping up everywhere around town?” I ventured.

He just groaned. “It’s driving me out of business, man. All my best customers in Silver Lake have gone legal.” He lived in LA.

“Legal?” What a concept.

“As in medical. You know, with a doctor’s prescription. The dispensaries are everywhere now.”

“They are?” I hadn’t noticed a single one in Long Beach, and anyway, who ever heard of a pot dispensary? “But that’s only for people with AIDS or cancer or some other horrible disease.”

“Nah, man, anybody can get a prescription. You can claim insomnia, migraines, appetite problems, mental stuff, anything, man. You pay the doctor’s fee and you get the prescription. Nobody gets turned down.”

Holy kush. Charlie was either giving our friendship a higher value than his business acumen, or had figured that my loyalty to him would dissuade me from trying this legal maneuver. Probably the latter, although in fact I was just a customer, not particularly a close friend. I was already scheming to get some of this stuff. What did I have to lose? The doctor might find me too goddamn healthy to qualify.

“Mental stuff” reminded me that I had vials of antidepressants and anxiety pills with my name on them, prescribed by my regular physician at the HMO. Never mind that both vials were badly outdated. Mental illness had been documented. I used the antidepressants exactly one day, then ditched ’em because they gave me a strong desire to kill myself. The doc offered to replace them with some other kind of antidepressant but I said, no, I’d rather be a little depressed than suicidal. The anxiety pills came in handy during a six-month stint in France, where pot was hard to find, and they actually helped me tolerate the dreaded ca

Coughing is one thing, and actually considered a good sign, but choking is another.

I set up an appointment with the pot doctor at a Medi-Ca

Medi-Ca

The Mayo Clinic this was not, but it might be the Mungo Clinic. Unlike any doctor’s office I’d ever seen, it had no magazines or medical brochures, but rather stacks of advertisements for Long Beach pot dispensaries and specialty marijuana publications, mostly from Northern California, with dispensary advertising from all over the state. Postcards touted twenty percent discounts for new patients, “free” joints, pipes, grams of hash, and rolling papers with a minimum “donation” and “membership.” I crammed a bunch of these into my briefcase and sat down with a Julian Barnes novel from the library.