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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 shu
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 ca
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 ru
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 ca
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-a
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 ca
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.