THE GREAT CALIFORNIA WEED RUSH

How Medical Marijuana Is Turning L.A. Pot Dealers into Semilegit
Businessmen - No Beeper Required

THC BREATH STRIPS. That's what Daniel is thinking about -- taking
some of those gelatinous Scotch-tape thingies that Listermint makes
and putting oil made from marijuana trim in them. There's a guy who's
good at producing marijuana concentrates, and he figured out how to
bind oil to pullulan, the same carbohydrate gel that Listermint uses
for its strips.

Now a bunch of people are selling the things, in plastic baggies with
a sticker reading for medical use only for five or six dollars a strip.

Most people recommend taking only one, even though they don't kick in
for a long time, because two will knock your dick in the dirt for six
to eight hours.

"Everything in America is controlled by big corporations now," says
Daniel, breezing down the Los Angeles 405 freeway, the controlled
climate inside the car the same balmy seventy degrees as it is
outside. "But in my industry we can still get individuals together
and innovate with good, old-fashioned Yankee know-how, like we did at
the beginning of the history of this country." He checks the rearview
mirror. "It's a beautiful thing."

The industry that Daniel is talking about is medical marijuana, the
great new frontier that has opened up in California in recent years
(because some of how Daniel operates may be illegal, his name and
other details have been changed to conceal his identity). Contrary to
popular belief, medical marijuana is not only for AIDS and cancer
patients: The health statute associated with Prop 215, the
groundbreaking law passed ten years ago, legitimizes weed for those
with any "illness for which marijuana provides relief." There are a
lot of people who fall into this category, and business is good for
those who make a living by serving them: compassionate caregivers,
freedom fighters, botanists in love with the art of growing, Long
Beach homeys, Valley boys, Oakland thugs and even one savvy gal who
wants her girlfriends to sell medical marijuana while wearing
pasties. But as in any drug business, a criminal element persists --
storage lockers of product, safes of cash, hustlers trying to rob
those lockers and safes, guns to protect one from the hustlers, and
the constant risk of arrest.

Today, the word "pot" is no longer PC -- marijuana is "medicine."
Schwag is "low-grade medicine," and chronic is "high-grade medicine."
Growers are "vendors." Nor is Daniel a drug dealer -- he is a
"medical-marijuana provider." In December, there was even a
medical-marijuana "cannabis cup" (a weed-tasting competition) in a
Hollywood warehouse across from Amoeba Records. As Cypress Hill's
B-Real performed, patients got stoned the healthy way, with 100
percent natural cellulose rolling papers and herbal pipes filled with
products like bubble hash, made by extracting resin via ice. At one
booth, a NorCal "vendor" sold eighths of Kush, two dead bobcats
splayed on the table next to his cash register; at another, a
mustached guy in green hospital scrubs hawked pizza slices with a
gram of weed inside, and "medicated BBQ chicken breast" for ten
dollars each. "I've been astonished by the way medical marijuana has
become a commercial business," says Dale Gieringer, director of
California NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana
Laws) and a Prop 215 author. "The energy is in medical marijuana for
the younger generation, and there's an actual economy of it."

Daniel is proud of his business, which has branched into franchises
as well as supply-side endeavors like a grow house. "Look at Ford, or
every company out there," he says. "Just because there's a stigma
attached to pot doesn't mean that we shouldn't be able to run our
business in an intelligent fashion." Never a street dealer himself,
he started out with a $50,000 loan from his parents, and after that,
he put the next $50,000 he made aside for future attorney fees. In
his late twenties, he has a university degree and worked in the
business world before deciding against corporate life. Articulate and
kind, with a mathematical mind, he dresses conservatively so as not
to attract unwanted attention from the authorities, and the effect is
very Andrew McCarthy circa Less Than Zero.

"I always say, 'Never compare yourself to the mediocre -- use the
entrepreneurial drive to bring yourself to a higher level,' " says
Daniel. "The biggest problem facing this industry right now is the
stoner mentality."

The 405 is now choked with traffic.

He checks his cell: His assistant got her boobs done today, and she's
calling because she's in a lot of pain. He's thinking again.

He's dreaming about buying the kind of commercial pullulan-making
machine that Listermint uses to make zillions of breath strips.

The machine is $50,000. He can afford it.

THE first step to securing medical pot is getting a doctor's
recommendation, which is usually a Word document printed out from a
computer (because marijuana is a controlled substance, doctors are
hesitant to write scripts on their regular pads). More than fifty
pot-friendly physicians in California are easily found on the Web at
addresses like Ganja Grocer.com or by phone at 888-POT-DOCS, as well
as on MySpace, Max Racks postcards, radio stations and
medical-cannabis giveaway newspapers. The doctor's visit costs about
$150 and is usually good for one year. Doctors prefer that patients
provide medical records for their ailments, but a lack of paperwork
is not a deal breaker (the state does not keep complete records on
the number of medical-marijuana patients, but advocates put the
number around 250,000). The visit is not covered by insurance,
although some doctors have a money-back guarantee -- if they don't
approve you for medical marijuana, it's free!

Those who want to maximize their returns in medical marijuana often
invest in doctors' offices, paying willing M.D.s about fifty percent
of each patient's visit, which is only fair, since medical advisory
boards have threatened some with suspending their licenses.

The day I was at a Hollywood office, pretty much everyone was getting
approved, about thirty patients per day (a $4,500 haul). The phones
were ringing off the hook, and the owner had to grab some calls
because the girl in the front couldn't get them all: the Better
Business Bureau hoping to sign them up for a database, a district
attorney curious about the specific nature of the ailment of a
patient in legal trouble, and two stoned people asking for directions
to the office. "We spend a lot of time giving directions," he said, irritated.

A doctor's note is the gateway to the wonderful world of pot clubs,
which in the new lingo are called "dispensaries." In California --
unlike the eleven other states with medical-cannabis laws -- there's
some vague legal protection for Amsterdam-style shops selling medical
marijuana. Usually named something like "Compassionate Caregivers,"
"Earth Healers" or, less obscurely, "Kush Mart," these stores are
like dying and going to stoner heaven.

They look like old-timey apothecaries, with glass cases of
prescription bottles with twenty to thirty different kinds of bud,
nearly all of exceptionally high quality, ranging from $35 an eighth
to $100 for OG Kush. Any self-respecting dispensary owner also sells
hash, kief, jellies, infusions, cones, clones, pot lollipops
("Hydropops"), pot candy bars, pot peanut butter, pot ice cream and
at least a half-dozen flavors of pot sodas -- sometimes sold out of a
vending machine.

One store owner told me excitedly that when Nevada OKs dispensaries,
he's opening a club on the Vegas Strip. We were talking in a parking
lot, and when he drove away he forgot a can of soda on the roof of his car.

The legal basis for these businesses hangs by the barest thread: In
California, the law is mum on wholesale marijuana distribution (it is
legal, however, for patients to possess a half-pound of weed). More
importantly, the federal government still considers the possession
and sale of marijuana 100 percent illegal, whether it's sold from a
dispensary on Santa Monica Boulevard or by a sketchy guy in a
junior-high-school alley. "We don't differentiate between those who
use state law to dispense marijuana and those who traffic in
marijuana on the street," says Special Agent Sarah Pullen of the Los
Angeles DEA. "Marijuana is marijuana is marijuana." Only a handful of
DEA agents usually focus on medical marijuana in Los Angeles, though,
no match for the commercial instinct of Americans. San Francisco
regulates their clubs, and San Diego all but invited the feds to shut
down theirs, but L.A. has been a free-for-all. Around 200 clubs have
opened in L.A. County since a 2004 State Senate bill gave some
protection to the clubs, up from less than a dozen in 2005.

On a recent Saturday night, patients are filling the waiting room of
Daniel's most popular shop. He has a stake in several Los Angeles
dispensaries. They're all open seven days a week. He wants to help
sick people, and waives fees for those who cannot afford their
"meds." Some stores deliver, but Daniel doesn't think it's worth it,
once you figure in car insurance and gas; some stores also pay sales
tax, but he doesn't, yet, on the principle that medicine should not be taxed.

He is proud to say that he has the best weed selection of any store
in L.A., with dozens of strains up on the dry-erase board every day,
a nice color-coded selection of indicas, sativas and hybrids, with
lots of Purps and many, many Kushes, the spicy-sweet, lemony-diesel,
aggro-lethargic bud that is all the rage in the L.A. ganja-connoisseur scene.

A woman in an electric-blue sweat suit buzzes him through three
levels of security: an armed guard, a man trap and two alarmed doors.
The security's not for the cops -- it's the robbers that Daniel's
worried about.

He's been robbed more than once, but he notes with a touch of pride
that he's never had a "takeover robbery." That's when thieves dress
up as LAPD and pretend they're raiding the store, then hogtie the
clientele and steal everything in sight (in the biz, they're called
"Ocean 420s"). When a friend of Daniel's had a takeover robbery, the
friend called the cops, and the cops arrested him.

The back room is slightly hazy with pot smoke, with Nine Inch Nails
booming from the stereo and a stack of video screens documenting the
street, waiting room and apothecary. On one wall, there are several
six-foot-tall, 3,500-pound gun safes, each with a digital keypad and
a gold wheel, like the safe in the grow house on Weeds. The safes,
which are bolted to the ground, hold dozens of pounds of pot, a
fraction of the real inventory, the remainder of which Daniel says is
stored in a secret location off-site. When he opens the safes, I
start to laugh -- shocked, nervous, titillated -- because I have
never, ever seen this much pot, even on TV.

In the apothecary, there's the usual mix of patients: Hollywood types
in designer jeans, an older woman who has pulled out her glasses to
read the dry-erase board and a lanky dude gabbing excitedly about his
real estate scheme in Pacific Palisades, where he's living in the
garage of a $2.6 million house he wants to flip except the foundation
is cracked.

There are sick people here, and celebrities: Daniel even met a famous
rapper once, after the rapper got medical. (It seems he suffers from
anxiety and stress.) In a corner, there's a few cute stoner girls,
whom Daniel calls "shoppies," like the blondes from a small town down
South ("probably a swamp") who introduced him to Tommy Lee at a
restaurant one night -- he gave Tommy a breath strip, and Tommy
couldn't believe that there was weed in the thing!

He got Tommy Lee stoned!

At the counter, a guy in a USC shirt is talking to the goateed clerk
(Daniel's employees are paid approximately twenty dollars per hour,
plus a free gram per day). With all the options, the customer -- er,
patient -- doesn't know what to buy.

"The muffins look nice," he says.

"They're about a gram and a half of hash, which is pretty good," says
the clerk.

Then he points to the goo -- superpotent powdery hash mixed with
honey. "This is what you want," he says. "This will definitely get
you medicated."

FOR all the fun of this business, Daniel is not having a very good
time. As in any covert industry, there's no one he can trust except
himself, particularly when it comes to buying pot. The vendors can be
a real pain in the ass, and he's up all night sometimes waiting for
them to drive down from Sonoma County or their Inland Empire
warehouses. (Vendors usually carry one or two strains of pot, as
growing conditions are easiest to manage with the same crop.) His
cousin used to do the buying -- she's got an amazing nose, and can
even smell mold in a nug in the bottom of the bag -- but they had a
falling out, and his brother can't seem to smell right.

Smelling pot, the first step to identifying good herb, is like being
able to roll your tongue, says Daniel. Even he is at a bit of a
disadvantage, because he no longer smokes pot, and you really need to
smoke weed to buy and sell weed. In college, he smoked a couple of
times a week, but he is sick to death of the smell.

Daniel's dream is that his businesses could operate like franchises,
and he tries to require that each store buy marijuana exclusively
from him, taking a markup on each deal. "Look at McDonald's or
Starbucks -- the only way to control franchises is to control the
supply," he says. "Still, cash flow is very difficult.

There is no way for me to properly franchise this, to the point where
I'm taking a percentage in profits, kicking back and making money."
He cannot keep detailed records, he says, because of the possibility
of a DEA raid, and he couldn't entrust an assistant to keep records,
because of the possibility that he might turn out to be an informant.

The narcs -- they're such a nuisance.

Last year, they raided one of his shops, and he lost more than
$100,000 in the process.

In addition to draining Daniel's bank accounts, the feds did a
"snatch-and-grab" at the store -- pot, computers, cash, anything not
bolted to the ground -- and even went to the house of one of his
employees. Nevertheless, nothing appears to be happening with the
case. The feds won't touch it, because their attorneys will rarely
prosecute cases unless enormous amounts of pot are involved, and the
local DAs aren't much more likely to press charges.

In fact, not one club owner has been prosecuted by the feds in Los
Angeles in the past two years. Daniel could maybe even get his money
back, but he'd have to pay an asset-forfeiture lawyer a third of his
winnings plus show the feds all sorts of records, and that's the last
thing he wants to do.

So he's stuck driving around day and night, dropping off weed to each
store in bulk. Today, he needs to go to the San Fernando Valley,
considered medical marijuana's Wild West, with dozens of stores being
opened up by kids who were just last year selling pot out of their
mothers' basements.

He's been staying away from the Valley because he heard there might
be raids there this week -- if he pays the right people, he says, he
gets twenty-four-hour notice before a raid. Then, yesterday, one of
the big Valley kahunas was taken down by the feds. The place was all
about low profit margins and high quantity -- it was way sketchier
than Daniel's spots.

Now, Daniel feels safe. We're at his apartment, a modern place on the
west side befitting a well-to-do yuppie, getting ready to move
product. He opens his kitchen cabinets, and there it is with his
extra toilet paper: one pound each of Northern Lights Haze, Afghooey,
Black Sensei, Bubblicious, Blackberry and Green Erkle; a half-pound
of White Widow; two pounds of Cali Orange and two more of Sour OG
Kush; two and a half pounds of Mekong Haze; three pounds of Purple
Haze; 37 grams of Lamb's Breath hash; 125 grams of Master Kush; 189
grams of some grapey flower he doesn't know what to call, and 110
grams of Granddaddy Purple hash.

"I didn't even want the Granddaddy Purp hash," he says. "The vendor
was like, 'By the way, I have a half-pound of hash, do you want it?'
No, I didn't want it. I wanted flower.

But what do growers love? They love coming down, dumping everything
they've got, taking cash upfront and going back really clean.

The last thing they want is to be driving with $60,000 in cash and
getting it seized because they also happen to have a half-pound of hash."

He puts it in his trunk, in four gigantic duffel bags.

The freeway is streaming nicely up the 101 -- Daniel genuinely
believes that outside of rush hour Los Angeles has the best freeway
system in the world, and he tries to locate his businesses within
five minutes of a freeway.

He looks at his cell phone. "Should I call the store?" he worries.
"If I call them, they're going to try to hide something before I get there.

Maybe they've been buying on the side, or they're sitting on the
couch playing PSP, or one of them closed the shop to bang a patient
in the back room. It's definitely happened before."

The shop is calm. A couple of young guys man the counter.

In the back, two blondes in miniskirts and frosted lipstick are
putting blueberry stickers on a mountain of plastic prescription bottles.

A mutt romps by. "No animals in the store -- how many times have I
told you?" fumes Daniel. "It's not medical." He looks around for
something to eat, but all he can find are half-eaten pot Rice
Krispies treats and pot brownies. "Can someone order some food,
please?" he asks, irritated again.

One of the girls gives him the menu for an Italian place in the
neighborhood. "It's really great, because the delivery guys are also
our patients!" she says brightly.

The other girl smiles at Daniel, looking very proud of herself. "I
just sold some Pussy Kush to a patient," she says, coyly, "and I told
the guy, 'You can smell it, but you can't finger the $100 pussy.' "

The weed goes up on the new scale, next to a calendar of hot chicks in bikinis.

Daniel tells the staff to blow out the Sensei and Purple Haze, and
gives his buddy a couple of pounds that he wants him to get rid of --
insofar as the medical-marijuana-compound business is a turnover game
like any other drug business, Daniel makes extra money by selling pot
that he can't move to other stores.

He takes out the 189 grams that doesn't have a name. "I'm not really
sure about this," he says. "I'm not sure if it's Purp." A clear
plastic bag, the kind used for frozen turkeys, goes around. "God,"
says one guy, nose deep in the bag, "in all honesty, it has a skunky
smell, big time."

"What about Grape Ape?" says another guy. "Except High Times had a
big spread of it last month, so people probably know what it looks like."

Daniel thinks. "Fruity names always do well," he says. "What's a
fruit you really enjoy?

Or maybe Skunkenberry?"

"Skunk Fruit!" says the first guy. Everyone laughs, and Daniel writes
it on the bag in black permanent marker.

THE next morning, daniel wakes up at his girlfriend's house, nuzzling
deep in her sheets.

He sleeps the sleep of the just. He really thinks he's doing good.
"This is our life out here -- feds keep their nose out!" he says.
"Washington will never understand California, so they write us off as
liberal, gay, Jewish subversives undermining the value of America.
They don't like us, and I don't like them. This movement is one more
way of saying to D.C., 'Step back.' We will not stand for states'
rights eroded." He is also in favor of pot as an alternative
health-care system: "We have the right to do our own thing, to not
support Pfizer, Eli Lilly and the health-care system just because
they have more powerful lobbyists in Congress than we do," he says.
"If I wanted to smoke pot, I would feel I could. I mean, it's a plant."

There are things that Daniel still does want to do in this business,
like make an affordable vaporizer -- "I made those in shop class in
high school for ten bucks," he fumes -- but he really doesn't want to
have to hide his money somewhere, always afraid that the feds are
going to seize his assets.

He'd like to get a little further into growing -- he started a grow
house, but his growers haven't turned out much, and one of their dogs
had a mess of babies on the upstairs carpet. He's thinking of buying
a farm in Mendocino, near the kush-growing parents of a friend he
knows in Hollywood. Up there, in the mountains, growers exist in a
perfect world of themselves and plants, he thinks.

They call him up sometimes at 3 a.m., to tell him that they've got
some bud blooming, to see if he wants to drive up to take a look.
"They're just incredible American farmers," he says. He wishes his
life could be that quiet, so quiet in a magical medical-marijuana field.

It really is a beautiful thing.

The next time I meet Daniel, it's a couple of weeks later at a hip
vegetarian place on Melrose. He searches his pockets for an Ativan,
but comes up empty -- this is his choice of medicine, which he needs
to take off the stress, much as others need what he sells.

He is nervous today.

There's a new crew of thieves going around who have figured out how
to open safes: He thinks they might be a bunch of ex-dispensary
security guards handy with diamond-bit drills.

Then there's his irritating friend: He wants $50,000 to go up north
and buy weed for them to sell down here. "I get the point, because it
is really annoying that we pay vendors $300 to $400 per pound simply
to drive to L.A. for seven hours," he says. "But I'm taking the risk
that he's going to get stopped and lose $50,000." He tells me one of
his security guards caught a guy photographing license plates in his
parking lot last week -- it's a police investigation, he thinks, but
he doesn't know into what.

We hug on the street, and he goes off to find his Ativan. Two days
later, the nature of the investigation becomes clearer: In the
afternoon, 120 DEA agents, helicopters flying overhead, descend on
eleven Los Angeles dispensaries, detaining nearly two dozen
providers. According to Special Agent Pullen, 5,000 pounds of pot,
163 plants, $200,000 in cash, seven handguns and one shotgun were
seized. Within a week of the raids, L.A. Police Chief Bill Bratton
has pushed through a moratorium on more dispensaries until the city
passes new regulations.

Daniel won't say if any of his places were raided, but he did go to
one that was, and the police weren't even allowing anyone on the same
side of the street. "Given that there are over 100 clubs in the city,
it's a relatively minor action," he said, struggling to put a good
spin on the events. "Dude, it's amazing: The feds didn't even realize
that one of the shops they raided had a second floor!

A couple of guys hid up there, watching the cameras as they were
wheeling out the ATM machine and destroying the place."

His phone was ringing off the hook, with medical-marijuana advocates
organizing a protest at West Hollywood's city hall. Soon the feds
would seize one provider's Ferrari. "This is a political thing," he
says. "Someone is mad that marijuana is out in the open now. It's
just not even close to being hidden." He couldn't bear to visit
anyone's raided stores -- the damage that the DEA did screwing around
in there, he was sure, was worse than a pogrom.

He was focusing on the future, helping people make plans to reopen.
"All eleven stores are going to open their doors again," he says,
"and I can't wait to see the look on their faces when we do."

This movement, he thinks, is too big to stop.