A Reporter at Large

DR. KUSH

How Medical Marijuana Is Transforming the Pot Industry.

California now has more than two hundred thousand
physician-sanctioned pot users and hundreds of dispensaries.

The Tibetan prayer flags suspended on a string over the sleeping body
of Captain Blue rose and fell in fluttering counterpoint to the
wheezy rhythm of his breath. Lifted by a gentle breeze off the
Pacific Ocean, each swatch of red, white, yellow, or green cotton
bore a paragraph of Asian script. Every time a flag flaps in the
breeze, it is thought, a prayer flies off to Heaven. Blue's mother
says that when her son was an infant he used to sleep until noon,
which is still the time that he wakes up most days, on his platform
bed in a one-bedroom apartment overlooking Venice Beach, a
neighborhood of Los Angeles.

It was now three o'clock in the afternoon, and Captain Blue was
dozing after a copious inhalation of purified marijuana vapor. (His
nickname is an homage to his favorite variety of bud.) His hair was
black and greasy, and was spread across his pillow. On the front of
his purple T-shirt, which had slid up to expose his round belly, were
the words "Big Daddy." With his arm wrapped around a three-foot-long
green bong, he resembled a large, contented baby who has fallen
asleep with his milk bottle.

Captain Blue is a pot broker. More precisely, he helps connect
growers of high-grade marijuana upstate to the retail dispensaries
that sell marijuana legally to Californians on a doctor's
recommendation. Since 1996, when a referendum known as Proposition
215 was approved by California voters, it has been legal, under
California state law, for authorized patients to possess or cultivate
the drug. The proposition also allowed a grower to cultivate
marijuana for a patient, as long as he had been designated a "primary
caregiver" by that patient. Although much of the public discussion
centered on the needs of patients with cancer, AIDS, and other
diseases that are synonymous with extraordinary suffering, the
language of the proposition was intentionally broad, covering any
medical condition for which a licensed physician might judge
marijuana to be an appropriate remedy--insomnia, say, or
attention-deficit disorder.

The inside of Blue's apartment, where he spends most of his time,
measures less than four hundred square feet. It opens onto a huge
wraparound terrace that offers mind-bending views of the ocean and
the Hollywood Hills. The apartment, which is in the vicinity of
Washington Boulevard, used to be occupied by another pot dealer, who
moved out a few years ago, leaving Blue with his crash pad and a list
of about a hundred patients. The building is near Abbot Kinney
Boulevard, the commercial drag in Venice that, in recent years, has
been transformed from a low-rent strip of bars and
secondhand-clothing stores into a destination for well-heeled
shoppers and restaurant-goers. The building retains a funky seventies
vibe, with white wood floors, murky brown walls, and faded Morrison
Hotel-style carpets. The sounds of "Tom and Jerry" episodes blare
through locked doors in the middle of the day.

I recently spent six months, off and on, with Blue--at his apartment,
in private homes, on farms, in pot grow rooms, and in other places
where "medical marijuana" is produced, traded, sold, and consumed in
California. During that time, I saw thousands of Tibetan prayer
flags. The flags identify their owners with serenity and the
conscious path, rather than with the sinister world of urban dope
dealers, who flaunt muscles and guns, and charge exorbitant prices
for mediocre product. For Blue and tens of thousands of like-minded
individuals, Proposition 215 presented an opportunity to participate
in a legally sanctioned experiment in altered living. The people I
met in the high-end ganja business had an affinity for higher modes
of thinking and being, including vegetarianism and eating organic
food, practicing yoga, avoiding prescription drugs in favor of
holistic healing methods, travelling to Indonesia and Thailand,
fasting, and experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs. Many were also
financially savvy, working long hours and making six-figure incomes.

Blue and I have known each other for almost two decades. Our fathers
were both professors of political science, and, starting in the
mid-eighties, we both attended Ivy League colleges in the Northeast,
where we shared a fondness for illegal drugs. After graduation, Blue
spun records and taught nursery school in Manhattan. He left for
California in 1998, not long after the state banned cigarette smoking
in workplaces--Blue is highly allergic to cigarette smoke--and passed
Proposition 215. After working for a while as a bouncer, he began
selling pot full time.

In 2003, the California State Legislature passed Senate Bill 420. The
law was intended to clear up some of the confusion caused by
Proposition 215, which had failed to specify how patients who could
not grow their own pot were expected to obtain the drug, and how much
pot could be cultivated for medical purposes. The law permitted any
Californian with a doctor's note to own up to six mature marijuana
plants, or to possess up to half a pound of processed weed, which
could be obtained from a patients' collective or cooeperative--terms
that were not precisely defined in the statute. It also permitted a
primary caregiver to be paid "reasonable compensation" for services
provided to a qualified patient "to enable that person to use marijuana."

The counties of California were allowed to amend the state
guidelines, and the result was a patchwork of rules and regulations.
Upstate in Humboldt County, the heartland of high-grade marijuana
farming in California, the district attorney, Paul Gallegos, decided
that a resident could grow up to ninety-nine plants at a time, in a
space of a hundred square feet or less, on behalf of a qualified
patient. The limited legal protections afforded to pot growers and
dispensary owners have turned marijuana cultivation and distribution
in California into a classic "gray area" business, like gambling or
strip clubs, which are tolerated or not, to varying degrees,
depending on where you live and on how aggressive your local sheriff
is feeling that afternoon. This summer, Jerry Brown, the state's
attorney general, plans to release a more consistent set of
regulations on medical marijuana, but it is not clear that
California's judges will uphold his effort. In May, the state Court
of Appeal, in Los Angeles, ruled that Senate Bill 420's cap on the
amount of marijuana a patient could possess was unconstitutional,
because voters had not approved the limits.

Most researchers agree that the value of the U.S. marijuana crop has
increased sharply since the mid-nineties, as California and twelve
other states have passed medical-marijuana laws. A drug-policy
analyst named Jon Gettman recently estimated that in 2006
Californians grew more than twenty million pot plants. He reckoned
that between 1981 and 2006 domestic marijuana production increased
tenfold, making pot the leading cash crop in America, displacing
corn. A 2005 State Department report put the country's marijuana crop
at twenty-two million pounds. The street value of California's crop
alone may be as high as fourteen billion dollars.

According to Americans for Safe Access, which lobbies for medical
marijuana, there are now more than two hundred thousand
physician-sanctioned pot users in California. They acquire their
medication from hundreds of dispensaries, collectives that are kept
alive by the financial contributions of their patients, who pay cash
for each quarter or eighth of an ounce of pot. The dispensaries also
buy marijuana from their members, and sometimes directly from
growers, whose crops can also be considered legal, depending on the
size of the crop, the town where the plants are grown, and the
disposition of the judge who hears the case.

California's encouragement of a licit market for pot has set off a
low-level civil war with the federal government. Growing, selling,
and smoking marijuana remain strictly illegal under federal law. The
Drug Enforcement Administration, which maintains that marijuana poses
a danger to users on a par with heroin and PCP, has kept up an
energetic presence in the state, busting pot growers and dispensary
owners with the cooeperation of some local police departments.

In the past five years, an unwritten set of rules has emerged to
govern Californians participating in the medical-marijuana trade.
Federal authorities do not generally bother arresting patients or
doctors who write prescriptions. Instead, the D.E.A. pressures
landlords to evict dispensaries and stages periodic raids on them,
either shutting them down or seizing their money and marijuana.
Dispensary owners are rarely arrested, and patient records are
usually left alone. Through trial and error, dispensary owners have
learned how to avoid trouble: Don't advertise in newspapers, on
billboards, or on flyers distributed door to door. Don't sell to
minors or cops. Don't open more than two stores. Any Californian who
is reasonably prudent can live a life centered on the cultivation,
sale, and consumption of marijuana with little fear of being fined or
going to jail.

Captain Blue displays his pot on a shelf by his bed, next to two new
laptop computers and an assemblage of high-end stereo equipment. The
weed is kept in silver Ziploc bags. All the pot that Blue sells is
grown in accordance with California state law, he says, and is
provided only to dispensaries of which Blue is a member, and to
patients for whom he is the primary caregiver.

Blue has a photo I.D. card from the City of Los Angeles confirming
that he is a bona-fide medical-marijuana patient. His malady is
anxiety. On a side table by his bed, he keeps a Volcano, a
German-made vaporizer that resembles a stainless-steel coffeemaker.
The Volcano, which costs five hundred dollars, warms dried marijuana,
releasing vapor into a plastic bag and leaving behind a toasted brown
chaff that smells oddly like popcorn. When Blue uses the Volcano, he
inhales the contents of the plastic bag through a bong, which
purifies the vapor.

While Blue napped, I wandered around his apartment, and counted
nearly a dozen images and carvings of the elephant-headed Hindu god
Ganesha. The proliferation of Ganesha dates back to a well-publicized
federal bust in January, 2007, when the D.E.A. seized the medicine
and cash of eleven pot dispensaries in Los Angeles. The only major
dispensary that wasn't busted had a Ganesha in its window. Now it is
hard to find a karmically inclined ganja dealer in Los Angeles who
doesn't own a herd of lucky figurines.

Blue's cell phone rang several times in succession, rousing him. His
phone rings, on average, once every two and a half minutes between
noon and 2 A.M., and I soon developed a Pavlovian aversion to his
ringtone, a swirling, Middle Eastern-inflected electronica tune
called "Lebanese Blonde." Blue switches phone numbers every six
months or so. Although it is unlikely that the D.E.A. would tap his
phone, he told me, it doesn't hurt to take simple precautions, if
only to reassure his more paranoid clients.

Blue answered the phone, rubbed his eyes, and began rattling off
numbers. "Three hundred fifty? Three-fifty? Three-twenty-five? We
could do three-twenty-five," he said, quoting a final price per
ounce. Assuming a sitting position on his bed, he punched numbers
into a calculator and suggested some designer strains that his
patient might enjoy.

"Try Sour Diesel," he told the client. "Take that and the Bubba
Kush." In addition to Sour Diesel and Bubba Kush, which are grown
indoors, he also had AK Mist, an outdoor strain; Jedi, which is brown
and fuzzy; Purple Urkel, whose hue is suggested by its name; O.G.
Kush and L.A. Confidential, two particularly potent strains; and
Lavender, a fragrant purple grown up North. Modern Kush plants are
derived from a strain that is said to have originated in the Hindu
Kush mountains, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and, according to stoner
lore, was imported to Southern California by some hippie surfers in
the seventies, and then popularized in the late nineties by the Los
Angeles rap group Cypress Hill. Stronger, better-tasting varieties of
pot can sell for more than five thousand dollars per pound, more than
double the price of average weed. The premium paid for designer pot
creates a big incentive for growers and dealers to name their product
for whatever strains happen to be fashionable that year. The variety
of buds being sold as Kush has proliferated to the point where even
the most catholic-minded botanist would be hard pressed to identify a
common plant ancestor.

Only a small percentage of consumer marijuana sales in California
occur within the medical-marijuana market. Even so, the dispensaries,
by serving as a gold standard for producers and consumers, have
fuelled the popularity of high-end strains in much the same way that
the popularity of the Whole Foods grocery chain has brought heirloom
lettuce to ordinary supermarkets. To serve these sophisticated new
consumers, growers in California and elsewhere are producing hundreds
of exotic new strains, whose effects are more varied, subtle, and
powerful than the street-level pot available to tokers in the
nineteen-seventies and eighties.

"Does Terrence have paperwork with him?" Blue asked the customer.
From the living room, I could hear the hum of the Volcano and the
crinkle of the expanding plastic bag. The vapor in the bag was Gush,
a robust mixture of Goo--a lighter, giddier high--and Kush.

Blue's business consists mainly of selling a few pounds a week to
various dispensaries; occasionally, though, a single outlet will buy
five or more pounds at a time. In the course of a month, Blue is
typically in debt to half a dozen people, and in turn holds markers
for twenty to thirty thousand dollars that he is owed by distributors
around town. Because Blue works only with people he trusts, he
usually gets his money back, although it can take as long as two or
three years for some debtors to make good. Understanding the
abstractions of ganja credit and debt is important in the pot
business, where financial success is determined largely by the
velocity of your cash transactions. A practiced flipper like Blue can
make twenty to thirty dollars on an eighth of an ounce of high-grade
pot, which retails for anywhere between fifty and seventy-five
dollars. Last year, Blue made roughly a hundred thousand dollars, and
paid some ten thousand in taxes.

Later in the afternoon, a friend of Blue's, who calls herself Lily,
showed up with a duffelbag. She unzipped the bag and placed on Blue's
kitchen table three black trash bags filled with ganja. Lily is a
courier; she transports pot to Los Angeles from the growing regions
upstate. A witchy Japanese-American girl with a dolphin tattoo on her
right shoulder, she wore large gold hoop earrings, a Lucite cross
necklace, and sunglasses perched on top of her hair. She said that
she got into the business because she suffers from chronic back and
neck pain from a spinal injury, and found that smoking weed helped
her with symptoms such as nausea and a loss of appetite.

Captain Blue encourages the growers he deals with to stay within
legal cultivation limits, and makes sure that the dispensaries he
joins keep the doctor's recommendations of members on file. The only
participants in Blue's transactions whose activities are not strictly
covered by prevailing interpretations of state law are couriers, or
mules, who usually transport marijuana in airtight containers in the
trunk, seats, or tires of a car. Neither Proposition 215 nor Senate
Bill 420 spelled out how medical marijuana should be transported from
rural growers to urban patients, leaving the mules as the least
protected link in the distribution chain. Once the mules reach Los
Angeles, they make the rounds of middlemen like Blue, who can legally
broker their product to dispensaries where they are members. Mules
receive a cut that ranges from five to sixteen per cent of the purchase price.

Being a courier was risky, Lily said, but the pay was good enough to
let her not work for half the year. Her methods of transporting the
pot from Northern California to Blue's apartment were time-tested and
low-tech. You get the largest garbage bags you can find, some food
bags, and a vacuum sealer. Then you double- or triple-bag the pot,
seal it, pack it in garbage bags, put the bags inside some old
newspapers, and stuff the bags into some cheap knapsacks, and then
put three knapsacks each into duffelbags, along with a few hockey
gloves or soccer balls. Then you pack the duffelbags in the back of
the trunk and throw an old blanket over them, and toss on top a few
folding chairs, along with some grocery bags full of fresh organic
apples, to mask the scent of pot.

Blue, having assessed Lily's stash, made his offer for a portion.
"Six thousand," he said.

One day, Blue and I went for a drive up the Pacific Coast Highway, in
his blue hybrid S.U.V. I watched him make more than a thousand
dollars in under an hour, dealing on the phone. "I've got some tasty
L.A. Confidential," he told a customer, motioning me to extract a
disk of trance music from a pile of stale laundry in the back seat.
"It's like O.G. Kush. A pound? I think I can do that." Blue said that
he sells pot solely for medical purposes, although he conceded the
possibility that some clients might break their purchases down into
smaller amounts for the street trade. Asking questions about what
buyers intend to do with their pot is not friendly behavior, Blue
explained with a smile.

We were headed up to Topanga Canyon, in the mountains near Malibu, to
meet a broker who supplies Blue with some of the best weed in the
state. I'll call him Guthrie. A lifelong resident of Humboldt County,
he funds a number of growing operations, ranging from a large
underground bunker to smaller outdoor plots of fewer than a hundred
plants. He also uses a fat bankroll to buy product from other
producers, which he takes to Los Angeles two or three times a month.
The house in Topanga, an old hippie enclave, belonged to a friend who
let Guthrie sleep outside in a blue-and-green tent that resembled one
of Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes. I ducked to avoid a string of
Tibetan prayer flags that hung over the entrance.

Guthrie was a lean, healthy-looking, brown-eyed man in his
mid-thirties. "We have a list of all the pot growers in Humboldt
County," he said, repeating an old Northern joke for my benefit.
"It's called the Yellow Pages." He reached beneath a table and handed
Blue a large black trash bag. Blue untied the bag and stuck his head
inside, as the rich aroma of Purple Kush filled the interior of the tent.

"Mmm," Blue said, inhaling. Purple Kush smells like a mixture of
cardamom and cloves, with a darker, earthier undertone of dried peat
moss, and an acidic top note evoking freshly ground coffee. The two
men agreed on a figure of forty-four hundred dollars a pound; the
price had eased somewhat since its peak, in 2005. A large number of
new growers entering the market had nudged prices down.

Guthrie's parents had been hippies. Growing up in Humboldt, he and
his siblings got used to fleeing their house in the middle of the
night when D.E.A. helicopters raided his family's growing patch.
Perhaps a quarter of the kids in his class had parents involved in
the marijuana trade. "You'd say, 'My dad, he fixes our house a lot,'" Guthrie recalled with a laugh, as he offered me a loaded pipe. By
the end of the summer, the family was usually broke. In October, the
harvest would come, and the family would sell their crop and have a
great Christmas; by the next summer, they'd be back in a jam.

Guthrie stayed out of the family business until he was twenty-seven.
Then he obtained a trucker's license and began hauling propane. Since
truckers who transport hazardous materials are professional drivers
who must go through background checks, the police generally leave
them alone once they show their license, whether they are driving a
truck or not. Guthrie's trucker's license gave his family a free pass
through the "gantlet"--a stretch of Highway 101 between Humboldt and
Santa Rosa where state police routinely search cars for pot.

Guthrie said that the quasi-legal status of smaller growing
arrangements, combined with consumers' preference for potent,
high-maintenance weed, has shifted the balance of the pot business
away from large-scale farms. "There's a lot more people doing little
scenes," he said. The welter of laws pertaining to medical marijuana
in California has offered careful operators like Guthrie the best of
both worlds: prosecution for growing and selling has become much less
likely, while federal busts and seizures keep prices high. Guthrie
sells about ten per cent of his product to dispensaries and
collectives. Starting up a sophisticated indoor farming operation
costs about three hundred thousand dollars, he said, including the
cost of making a building airtight--to lock in the humidity, and to
keep passersby from smelling the pot and calling the cops--and
fitting it with thousand-watt grow lights.

Guthrie grows his plants in octagons, a hydroponic arrangement that
allows producers to maximize the number of plants in a confined
space. The cost of a piece of property upstate can run an additional
three hundred thousand to one and a half million dollars, he said.
After a few years, if you know what you are doing, you can make your
investment back, and then you can pay a sharecropper to run your
operation and spend your time travelling. Guthrie told Blue that he
would soon be heading to Indonesia. "It's amazing over there," he
said. The last time he was in Java, he recalled, he stayed in a
Muslim village near the beach, and found the people generally relaxed
and welcoming, if somewhat hostile to the Western habit of lying in
the sun without clothing.

Life was good, he said; the only problem was that too many other
people wanted the same life. Most people who moved up North to become
pot entrepreneurs fucked it up, he said. Their failures, however, did
nothing to diminish the potency of the dream.

One of Captain Blue's regular marijuana customers was a dispensary in
Venice Beach. The store, which has cement floors, a glass display
case, and a couch the color of aluminum, looks like a cross between a
photographer's loft and a Kiehl's boutique. When I last visited,
large Mason jars in the display case were filled with designer
strains of weed selected by the owner, Cindy 99, whose nickname
refers to a variety of designer pot. In a refrigerator, and marked
"For medicinal use only," were treats such as marijuana granola and
marijuana milk chocolate with crispy wafers. Above the counter hung a
notice: "To our valued patients: in accordance with California law,
we are required to add 8.25% sales tax."

Cindy 99's employees included a receptionist, a full-time counter
girl, a part-time counter girl, and a bonded security guard--a former
Green Beret--who is licensed to carry a weapon. Dr. Dean, a local
physician, saw aspiring patients at the dispensary once a week. As
long as they had a California state I.D., those who received
recommendations for marijuana could buy some immediately from the
dispensary's stock. Cindy told me that when she opened her shop, in
2007, she needed the same licenses that she would have needed to open
a newsstand on the Santa Monica Pier: a commercial lease, a seller's
permit, a federal tax I.D. number, and a tobacco license (for selling
rolling papers and pipes). She estimated that forty per cent of her
clients suffer from serious illnesses such as cancer, AIDS, glaucoma,
epilepsy, and M.S. The rest have ailments like anxiety,
sleeplessness, A.D.D., and assorted pains.

Like many other dispensary owners I spoke with, Cindy derives
particular satisfaction from providing medication to people who
suffer from chronic diseases. Although she suspects that there is
nothing seriously wrong with many of the young men who come in to buy
an eighth of L.A. Confidential, she doesn't regard marijuana as a
harmful drug when compared with Xanax, Valium, Prozac, and other
pills that are commonly prescribed by physicians to treat vague
complaints of anxiety or dysphoria. It was easy to see why the
dispensary was so popular with young men: there was good pot, and
Cindy 99, who is in her thirties, looks like an adolescent boy's
fantasy of his best friend's hot older sister. The day I was there,
she wore a tight sleeveless blue T-shirt with a gilt-winged emblem of
a flying horse.

The first customer of the day was a Hispanic guy with three tattoos,
the biggest one of which read "Angeles del Inferno." He had a
doctor's note on file. After a short discussion, Cindy recommended
two strains, which cost sixty-five dollars for an eighth. "These two
have sativa in them," she said. "They're really good for daytime
use." All strains of pot sold in the United States are derived from
two varieties of the plant--indica and sativa--which have discernibly
different effects on the user. Indica is a heavier, numbing drug;
sativa is better for doing creative work or listening to music. Cindy
refers to a popular book called "The Big Book of Buds" to determine
the precise balance of indica and sativa in the strains she sells.
Purple Urkel, Cindy explained, was mostly indica, making it better
for alleviating pain. "The percentages are arbitrary, because of all
the cross-breeding," Cindy admitted to me. "You take a Blueberry and
you cross it with a Kush and you go back into Trainwreck, and how do
you get a percentage from that?"

A young white man, barely out of his teens, with lace-up black boots,
a nubby backpack, and a goatee, came in and bought an eighth of
Trainwreck. He selected a chocolate turtle from the edibles case
while gazing shyly at Cindy. "Don't eat it all at once if you have
anything to do," she warned him.

Cindy has been in the ganja business for seventeen years, her entire
adult life. Both of her parents grow pot. She began selling weed in
high school, in British Columbia, where enforcement of anti-marijuana
laws was famously lax. One day, a friend asked her if she would help
distribute what his mom had grown. Within six weeks, they had doubled
their money. "We started bringing it from Canada down to California,"
she recalled. "And then we moved to snowmobiles and then
hollow-panelled speedboats on trailers, and then semis and
shadow-planes. A plane would go up in the States and another plane
would go up in Canada, and they'd fly around as if they were
sightseeing, and you're allowed to switch airspace as long as you
don't land. And then they would land in each other's countries
looking like each other, same serial number, same everything."

A patio in back of the shop had been set up with a white plastic
table with a batik tablecloth and two plastic chairs, in preparation
for Dr. Dean's weekly visit. Each prospective patient pays the Doctor
a hundred and fifty dollars, in cash, for a diagnostic interview. Dr.
Dean's full name is Dr. Dean Hillel Weiss. Forty years old, he is one
of a few dozen doctors in Los Angeles who regularly write
medical-marijuana recommendations. In the past few years, he said, he
had written several thousand such letters, none of which had been
successfully challenged in court.

I told Dean that I wanted a doctor's recommendation that would allow
me to legally smoke pot. He began a fifteen-minute interview, asking
me about my reasons for wanting the drug. "How long have you been
under the care of a psychiatrist?" he asked me, writing down the
answer on a notepad. I provided him with a bill from my psychiatrist
in New York, along with proof that I was currently living in
California. He then quizzed me about my brief and unsatisfactory
experiences with prescription medications for anxiety and depression,
and my history of illegal drug use. Deciding that I was a suitable
candidate for a medical marijuana recommendation, Dr. Dean took my
money and provided me with a quick tutorial on strains of pot--indica
offered a "body high," whereas sativa was "more heady and
abstract"--along with a signed letter certifying that I was a patient
under his care. The letter was good for a year, after which I could
renew it, for a hundred dollars.

So far that day, Dr. Dean had seen seven patients, including a former
doorman at a Manhattan night club, a musician working on a Bob Marley
tribute album, and a young woman named Cassandra who was in the
publishing business and came armed with a purse full of prescription
medications for anxiety and depression. The vast majority of his
referrals, he said, were by word of mouth. Though he was always
careful to observe the letter of California state law, he said, "My
personal belief is that marijuana is a useful and relatively harmless
substance and that adults should be free to choose whether they want
to use it or not."

Dean graduated from Columbia University and SUNY Downstate Medical
Center, and began an orthopedics residency in his home town of
Detroit before moving to Los Angeles, in 1998, and becoming an
emergency-room doctor at Martin Luther King, Jr./Drew Medical
Center--known to locals as Killer King. By 2005, he was burned out.
One day, a friend invited him over to his house to sample some
marijuana that he had obtained from his fiancee's boss, who had a
recommendation for pot. "My friend said, 'I've got six strains you've
got to try. I've got lollipops, I've got brownies,' " Dr. Dean
recalled. "I went over. It was like being in Amsterdam. At the end of
the night, he turned to me and said, 'You know, you hate working in
the emergency room. Maybe you should look into this.' "

Cassandra, the publishing employee, was interviewed by Dr. Dean after
I was. Emerging from the patio, she said, "That was amazing! That was
fantastic!" She went over to the display case.

"What's the best in terms of social life, having other people
around?" she asked. As Cindy discussed the relative merits of the
various sativa strains, Cassandra noticed some small hash pipes in
the glass case.

"It's a great little travel device that you can take to the beach,"
Cindy explained.

"No way! Cool! I love it!" Cassandra said. She bought one.

As Cindy weighed out Cassandra's marijuana purchases, which totalled
a hundred and ten dollars, she commiserated with her new customer
about the unattractive names of some popular strains. "Cat Piss?" she
said. "Dog Shit? If it's going to be legal, the stoners can't still
be making up the names."

The Farmacy, which has outlets in West Hollywood, Venice, and
Westwood, made Cindy 99's dispensary look like a mom-and-pop
operation. Famous for the "Very Open" neon sign in the window of the
West Hollywood location, the Farmacy has the carefully art-designed
"natural" aesthetic of an Aveda boutique. The reigning concept is
that pot is simply another benign medicinal herb, like echinacea or
ginkgo biloba. The Farmacy is the brainchild of Michael, an elusive
hippie who doesn't give out his last name and whose defiant nature
and marketing prowess have made him a celebrity on the
medical-marijuana scene. His success has begun to irritate the
authorities: the D.E.A. recently forced the Farmacy's landlord to
close a fourth outlet, in Santa Monica.

I met Michael one afternoon at the Venice store, a large retail space
on Abbot Kinney. In the front of the shop, Asian handicrafts are for
sale. Saint-John's-wort and various Chinese herbs are stocked in jars
behind the main counter; a forty-two-inch plasma TV screen displays
Tao symbols and other karmic imagery. An extensive selection of
organic soaps and shampoos is available in the back of the store,
near a children's-medicine section. The main sign that the Farmacy is
not, in fact, a Body Shop is a large color portrait on the wall of
Bob Marley, smiling broadly while toking on a fat spliff.

Customers with a valid doctor's letter may request one of the
bamboo-bound menus kept behind the counter, which list available
strains of pot, some of them requiring a "donation" of seventy-five
dollars per gram. There is also a gelato bar, which offers a variety
of flavors laced with marijuana and other herbs.

Michael, a sixty-year-old man with a gray ponytail, was wearing
jeans, a faded navy T-shirt, a yellow flannel shirt, and a battered
fleece vest. Shifting impatiently from one foot to the other, he read
from a poster on the wall stating that words and phrases like "weed,"
"dope," and "getting stoned" were used to "devalue, disempower, and
criminalize people who choose to use medical cannabis." Recently, he
noted, characters on "Desperate Housewives" had used the words
"medicine" and "medicating" while referring to cannabis consumption.
The culture was changing. "We see cannabis as a gateway herb," he said.

Upstairs, he showed me a light-filled waiting room with a grand piano
and handcrafted wood chairs and couches. Someday soon, he said, the
room would be filled with patients waiting to meet with therapists
practicing massage, acupuncture, and other healing arts. Licensed
professionals would be available to consult about medication, diet,
and exercise. The waiting room was even equipped with children's
toys, so that mothers could bring their kids to appointments. As we
spoke, he trimmed some long-stemmed flowers that were in a vase on
top of the piano. He then sat down and played a passage of Brahms.

Michael had trouble sitting in one place for any length of time, a
legacy, in part, of five and a half years he says he spent in San
Quentin for various pot-related offenses. (Spending years in a small,
cramped prison cell had made him antsy, he said.) Michael has been
involved in the marijuana business since he was eighteen years old.
His first big deal, with an Arab partner, was smuggling into
California two hundred pounds of hash from Lebanon. In the early
seventies, he attended a pot-legalization rally in Washington, D.C.
While in the city, he did some research on cannabis at the Library of
Congress. He found a trove of cannabis studies from the early
twentieth century; botanists at the time had studied the plant
extensively. According to a paper from 1903, the internal clock that
tells a marijuana plant whether to flower or not could be turned on
or off by varying its exposure to light. By lengthening the "day" to
sixteen or eighteen hours, growers could speed up the initial growth
of the plants; later in the growing cycle, they could cut back on
light exposure, causing female plants to flower. The useless male
plants, which produce pollen rather than smokable buds, could then be
thrown away.

By speeding up the growing cycle and getting rid of the males, you
could produce three or four times the amount of pot indoors. In the
winter of 1973, Michael, who was living in Mendocino County, put
together a slide show for upstate growers based on what he had
learned about manipulating the growing cycle. "Nobody ever grew males
again," he boasted.

Michael said that he served two stints in San Quentin. After he was
discharged the second time, in 1999, he grew tomatoes for Whole Foods
and worked for a seed bank. After the passage of Senate Bill 420, a
friend told him about the dispensary scene and loaned him a 1987 BMW.
Michael placed an ad in the newspaper saying that he would deliver
cannabis right to a customer's door. He opened the first Farmacy in 2005.

I asked Michael if being involved in the dispensary business was a
wise choice for a two-time drug offender. "I've got two strikes
around my neck, and, yes, I've been anxious," he said. He noted that
he had ten children from various wives and girlfriends, all of whom
were supported by the income from his stores. He declined to reveal
how much money he made.

Michael jumped off the couch and bounded downstairs to take care of
some business, leaving me with JoAnna LaForce, who helps run the
business side of the Farmacy. A cheerful woman in her fifties, she
believes that she is the only pharmacist in the United States who
actively participates in a medical-cannabis dispensary. Though
doctors are protected under California state law, she explained,
pharmacists are not, which means that she is theoretically subject to
arrest, although the D.E.A. generally avoids entanglements with
medical professionals.

LaForce told me that she had once been married to Michael; they did
not have children. "I met him in San Diego in February, 1993, through
a mutual friend," she said. "At the time, he was on the lam. We were
together for a year before the feds took him away." When he got out
of prison, they were together for two more years, and then he went to
Mexico, to live on the beach and surf. When Michael decided to open
the Farmacy, she was happy to help.

LaForce spent fifteen years working in a hospice with dying patients.
"I saw the value of alternative medicine, particularly cannabis, in
helping with appetite, pain management, and anxiety," she said. "I
found that I could use cannabis to decrease the pain medication,
which in turn made patients able to spend their last days talking to
their friends, spouses, to share good times." The upcoming pot
harvest, she said, was set to be the largest in the state's history,
adding, "There is a gold rush going on with cannabis in the state of
California."

The dispensary owners of Los Angeles hold a meeting once a month in
an anonymous office building in the shadow of Cedars-Sinai hospital.
At a recent gathering, a sign on the wall said "Stop Arresting
Medical Marijuana Patients." The shades were drawn. There were
twenty-five people in attendance, and most of them were either in
their mid-twenties or in their mid-forties. A few--such as a muscular
man in biker gear and a woman in glittery flip-flops and not much
else--looked like refugees from the porn industry.

The meeting began with a "raid update," delivered by Chris Fusco, a
young field cooerdinator for Americans for Safe Access. In the past
month alone, ten dispensaries had been raided in Los Angeles by the
D.E.A. "Raids suck," Fusco said.

"I think things will get worse before they get better," said Don
Duncan, the owner of the California Patients Group, a large
dispensary that was raided by the D.E.A., and then shut down, in the
summer of 2007. He owns another dispensary, the Los Angeles
Caregivers and Patients Group, which was raided a few months later
but has subsequently reopened, despite the rumored seizure of close
to a million dollars in marijuana. (Duncan puts the figure at
thirteen thousand dollars' worth of cannabis-based products.)

Several of the top dispensary owners had recently attended meetings
with the city planning department, the city attorney, and the
L.A.P.D. The meetings were intended to help draft a set of legal
guidelines to govern the conduct of the dispensaries. Despite the
dispensary owners' willingness to cooperate with the city, Duncan
said, everyone who attended the meetings had either had his
dispensary raided by the D.E.A. or received a letter from his
landlord asking him to give up his lease, owing to threats from
federal authorities that the property would be seized.

"What is the information that the D.E.A. wants from the people they
detain in these raids?" a man asked.

"They want to know who is in charge and where the medicine comes
from," Duncan answered. "They want growers." Patient records were
untouched. "They left all the concentrates," he added, describing the
aftermath of the raid on the Los Angeles Caregivers and Patients
Group. "That's how we reopened the vapor bar."

"Did they take computers?" another person asked.

"They planted some tracking software that records user names and
passwords which was transmitting to an I.P. address in Virginia,"
Duncan said. "Our computer guy found it right away."

After the meeting, I paid a visit to Allison Margolin, who calls
herself "L.A.'s dopest attorney." Her trade is a sort of family
business--her father, the lawyer Bruce Margolin, is the author of the
Margolin Guide, which enumerates the legal penalties for the sale and
possession of pot in each of the fifty states. She works in a
black-glass office tower on Wilshire Boulevard owned by Larry Flynt,
the publisher of Hustler. On the walls in her office, a Harvard Law
School degree is juxtaposed with a pictorial layout from the magazine
Skunk, featuring her in a low-cut leopard-print dress. Margolin's
sexpot image is an advantage with clients, who, more often than not,
are socially isolated men. Margolin has a reputation for getting
cases dismissed, and for retrieving marijuana plants that have been
seized by the police.

"The truth is, it's very rare to get plants back," Margolin said. Her
long auburn hair was in a tidy French bun, but a few strands had been
allowed to slip loose. Like many of her clients, she adopted a tone
of adolescent vulnerability and outraged innocence when talking about
the mean grownups who don't like pot. "People are talking about how
it's being over-recommended and abused," she said. "I mean, big
fucking deal. It's not toxic!" I asked her if she had a doctor's
letter, and she nodded vigorously, explaining that she suffers from
an anxiety disorder.

She said that courts are sometimes sympathetic to her arguments about
the relative safety of pot, but most judges and prosecutors seem to
have only a glancing acquaintance with the case law since the passage
of Proposition 215. "I've gone to court, like, several times where
the judge has read only the first half of the case, which talks about
how dispensaries are not legal according to Proposition 215," she
said. "I think it's just intellectual and physical laziness."

A patient whose plants Margolin had recovered, Matt Farrell--known in
the community as Medical Matt--stopped by for some counsel. Medical
Matt was hardly an advertisement for the curative wonders of medical
marijuana, or for the idea that all medical-marijuana patients are
enjoying themselves by gaming the system. His cheeks and chin were
covered in a three-day growth of dark stubble, and his red-rimmed
eyes got wet as he spoke.

"I've always suffered from mental problems," Farrell said, reciting a
long list of prescription drugs that he had taken, including Paxil,
Wellbutrin, Risperdal, and Prozac. He had obtained his first doctor's
letter for pot in late 2001 or early 2002--his memory wasn't clear.
He began growing pot to support his habit, which costs him between
sixty and a hundred dollars a day.

In December, 2005, he said, police officers ransacked his
house--seizing about a hundred and twenty plants and nine grow
lights--even though he showed his doctor's letter, and contended that
the plants were for his own use and the use of the members of the
collective to which he belonged. He was accused of unlawfully
cultivating marijuana; the charge was dismissed in 2006. The police
came back to his house in 2007, he said, once again trashing the
premises and charging him with the unlawful cultivation of marijuana
and the possession of marijuana for sale. They froze his bank
account, which, he said, destroyed his credit rating. The second case
against him is still pending.

Although the police behavior he described may seem excessive, it is
usually forgiven by judges who try to balance the competing demands
of state and federal law. By routinely looking the other way when
law-enforcement officers make "mistakes," the courts have allowed
police departments that don't like current state law to work around
it, and put pressure on people like Farrell.

In the wake of the seizures and the property damage, Farrell said, he
was borrowing money from his parents, and his house was going into
foreclosure. "It's either a joke or I'm delirious," he said, starting
to cry. "I mean, I'm not the smartest person in the world, but I sure
as hell can read something pretty simple and understand it. If the
state, county, city council, and everybody else is saying you can,
how the hell does the L.A.P.D. come in to say you can't?" Spokesmen
and officers of the D.E.A. and the L.A.P.D. told me, off the record,
that the federal laws regulating the possession and distribution of
marijuana took precedence over the laws of the State of California,
and that, until federal law changed, the D.E.A. and the L.A.P.D.
would continue to work together in their fight against the drug trade.

Sitting beneath a willow tree on a breezy day in Sonoma County, you
can see why the idea of leaving the city behind and growing your own
weed exerts such a pull on the holistic health nuts, masseurs, d.j.s,
art-school dropouts, and New Age types who populate the
medical-marijuana scene in Los Angeles. Farming a crop of twenty-five
or thirty plants of killer weed is an updated (and highly profitable)
version of the age-old California dream of an orange tree in every
back yard. For those who can't afford to pay for a prime plot of land
in Humboldt, there is the possibility of renting a small split-level
house in Sonoma or Mendocino and converting the master bedroom into a
grow room, where you can turn around an indoor crop every sixty days.

Captain Blue and I took a five-day excursion to the growing fields up
North. Our guide was an old friend of his, a woman who called herself
the Kid. She had been minding a grow house in Sonoma since being laid
up with a half-dozen broken ribs after a bad motorcycle accident. The
Kid had large eyes, a big nose, and long hair, and a squat, powerful
body covered in black-ink tattoos, which ran across her chest and
arms and up the back of her neck. "There's a lot of women in the bud
scene that are just looking to be with some guy that has some
property and some plants, so that they can sit on their ass and do
nothing," she said, as we sat outside on her porch and watched horses
graze. "There is a large percentage of really fabulous beauties. And
then there's the hard, serious worker girls that dig holes all day."

Blue wiped the sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his loose
plaid shirt. He wasn't used to being outside. He asked for a glass of
water and drank it in a single gulp. Then he wrapped his arms around
his friend and gave her a hug, taking care not to put pressure on her
ribs. They made for a weird, medieval-looking couple; both had long
hair, round bodies, and shoulders strong enough to chop wood. Both
had spent years smoking pot and consuming staggering quantities of
mushrooms, cactus powders, LSD, and other mind-altering substances.

The Kid made her bed by the picture window in the living room, next
to a plaster Buddha and a shelf of books about plants, including
"Marijuana Horticulture," by Jorge Cervantes. The dining room was
occupied by a pool table. If you are selling your own product, she
explained, you can clear as much as seventy-five thousand dollars,
after expenses, on a duffelbag filled with thirty pounds of pot. The
easiest way to make this kind of small indoor scene work is to live
in someone else's house and nurture the plants in exchange for a
third or half the profits, and that is how the Kid would be spending
her time for the next two months.

The Kid's plants, all Sour Diesels, were being raised on a mixture of
nutrients which changed every three to five days, in accordance with
a detailed regimen that had been laid out, in black Magic Marker, in
a battered spiral-bound notebook. The notebook had been bequeathed to
the Kid by a longtime friend. The cost of the nutrients was
approximately six hundred dollars a week.

We entered the darkened bedroom, and were confronted by the fetid
smell of plant life. Without the ventilation system that the Kid had
installed, the temperature would have been about a hundred and ten
degrees in the dark, largely from the stored-up heat of the
lights--seven of them, a thousand watts each. There was a tank of
carbon dioxide in the corner. "The more CO2, the thicker the bud,"
the Kid explained.

It was a relatively small operation: the lights and their
installation had cost about fifteen thousand dollars, and power and
nutrients had cost an additional twelve thousand or so. The array of
nutrients along the walls included specialized growing products such
as Bud Blood ("promotes larger, heavier & denser flowers and fruit")
and Rizotonic (a powerful root stimulant). "Voodoo Juice is going to
go in here, and Scorpion, and it goes on and on," the Kid said. Every
three or four days, she ran purified water through her hydroponic
growing medium for a full day, in order to give the plants a break.
After the full, eight-week growth cycle, the Kid planned to harvest
her crop and clear out.

Up North, the marijuana harvest is known as "trimming season." In
Humboldt and Mendocino, she said, October is a month-long sleepover,
with all the free ganja, beer, and organic food you want. A really
good trimmer can trim two pounds of pot a day, at a rate of two
hundred and fifty dollars per pound, while sitting around a table
with three or four friends. Kids from San Francisco or even Australia
hear about the harvest from friends of friends and show up for the
pot and the cash. The D.E.A. routinely busts a few big scenes each
year, and the local police have been known to stop cars and check the
passengers for telltale scratches on their arms or sticky resin under
their fingernails.

None of this intimidated the Kid. "It's a fucking blast," she said.
"This is crop No. 6 for me this year." After a month of being cooped
up, she was eager to get on the road. I agreed to drive, because her
license had been suspended since the motorcycle accident. Along the
way, she recounted a transformative experience that she had had at
the age of nineteen with the psychedelic drug DMT. While tripping,
she had a vision of herself lying down on a forest floor. She heard a
growling sound and saw a twenty-foot-tall woman guarded by a gigantic
dog. "She was enormous, and definitely not attractive, and I
recognized the look in her eye," the Kid remembered. "I said, 'Oh, my
God, that's me.' And she said, 'Yep, I am you. But I'm very old. My
energy is very big.' I was kind of in shock, but I didn't feel
threatened." The old woman explained that the Kid didn't need to
worry about death anymore. There was no such thing as death, in fact.
Energy returned to its source and then took another form.

The Kid fell silent for a moment. "I only saw her that one time," she
said. Afterward, she recalled, she felt a bit woozy, and a friend sat
her in front of the television and let her watch cartoons.

The Kid, Blue, and I arrived in Arcata, a small, well-kept Northern
town, around dusk. After dinner, we drove to a farm owned by a couple
whom I'll call Nick and Danielle. Nick, who had long brown hair and
Mediterranean features, and Danielle, a yoga-toned blonde, had both
worked as massage therapists in Malibu. One day, a massage client of
Nick's asked him about dispensaries, and he took her to one. "She saw
people spending two thousand dollars at the counter," Nick said, with
a laugh. "She said, 'What kind of business is this?' " Her next
reaction was to suggest that Nick and Danielle could run a
dispensary, and that she could front them the fifty thousand dollars
they would need to get started. They soon opened one, and, after the
business took off, they bought the property up North.

Nick and Danielle's farm was at the end of a long, well-protected
valley surrounded by high mountains. The turnoff was a dirt path
barred by a classic old wooden ranch gate featuring the longest
string of Tibetan prayer flags I saw during my stay in California.

Arriving at the house, we dumped our bags on a wooden deck. Nick, who
was dressed in jeans and a sweaty T-shirt, showed us around the
property. He was already a skilled grower: last year, he told me, he
won second place in the Los Angeles Cannabis Cup, an annual
competition, for a particularly potent strain of marijuana that he
had grown from seeds he ordered through the mail from Amsterdam. But
he did not consider pot his life's calling. He spoke of one day
starting up a healing center on Mt. Shasta, where people could clean
out their systems and go hiking.

The property lacked sufficient water for pot growing, Nick said, but
their neighbor up the mountain helped them out. "He's a great bro,"
he said. "Every few days, he drops two thousand gallons down a pipe."
In exchange, Nick paid the neighbor a minimal fee. "He's an older
guy, he's been up here for forty years. He knows how hard it can be
when you first move somewhere." Nick had about three hundred plants
in the ground on a hill behind his house. On another plot of land, a
few hills over, he had two hundred and fifty plants, as insurance
against a targeted raid on his property.

A perfect half-moon was shining brightly in the twilight. The North
Star was already visible. Nick, Danielle, and some friends had
gathered in the living room, whose focal point was a large homemade
altar, for meditation, surrounded by burning tea candles. At the
kitchen table, a friend of Nick's, Charlie, packed a large water pipe
with the smoke of the day. Next to Charlie was Nick's friend Dylan
Fenster, from Venice, who was spending a few months up North to help
with the harvest. He said that he smoked marijuana primarily to deal
with the pain from a degenerative spinal condition; he carried his
doctor's letter in his back pocket. "Twice in the last six months,
I've been cited for smoking in public," he told me. "Both times I got
the weed back, and both times the judge admonished the cops, 'You
know, this is legal.' "

On the fridge, someone had posted a handwritten sign with the motto
"Today is the day we manifest heaven on earth and godly bliss." Water
pipes were passed around, and everyone got high. After four hits on
Nick's bong, the slogans on the refrigerator started to vibrate with
uncommon significance. I looked over at Blue and saw that he was
dozing off again, this time with a homemade bong resting on his chest.

"I always wanted to heal the world or find the cure for cancer," Nick
told me, with a faith-healer stare. "I have massaged over ten
thousand people, and I hope to massage ten thousand more, and to heal
the world with good medicine that I can grow here and provide on a
compassionate basis to the people who need it."

Danielle started talking with the Kid about her wedding. "It was
three days," she said. The wedding was held in a clearing in a
forest, and a cigar box was passed around containing two hundred
hand-rolled joints of Kush.

I headed out to a swinging bench on the porch and gazed intently at
dozens of bright stars, and thousands of lesser stars. Nick came
outside and offered another hit. "I love it here," he said. "I love
the earth and the sounds and the smells and the sounds at night." The
farm's location at the tip of the valley was particularly sweet.
"There are no cars driving by and no planes flying over and no sirens
going off or any kind of negative frequencies," he said. "It almost
feels like it must have felt for the original pioneers who were first
exploring California."

Every morning, Nick said, he woke up at seven, had a smoothie, and
got in tune with nature. "Then I'll head out to the garden and I'll
do some watering," Nick continued. "Depending on the day of the week,
I'll maybe feed the plants, check in with them. Double-check for
damage from the deer and whatever else has been creeping in through
the cracks. Make sure the praying mantises are on duty." Growing
marijuana outdoors, he felt, emphasized the holistic qualities of the
plant rather than its psychotropic function. Someday, he said, he
wanted to plant cherry trees, and peaches, plums, and apricots.

Nick said that he hoped to have kids, and he liked the idea of
raising children on a farm. When I asked him whether he worried about
the atmosphere of danger and illegality that came with operating a
gray-area business, he shook his head. "I really feel like my karma's
good," he said. "I'm not doing anything wrong." He owned the
dispensary for which his crop was intended. He had never been
arrested or done time in jail. "We've got a good lawyer, and we pay
state sales tax," he said.

Nick's income from the dispensary last year, he said, was only around
fifty thousand dollars. "That's what I make for all the scary shit I
do," he said, looking up at the constellations. "I'm not making
millions of dollars. I'm a hardworking, compassionate person, and I
spend my time helping people. It makes me feel happy to bring smiles
to the faces of people that have frequented my collective."

The next morning, I woke up on the floor of Nick and Danielle's
living room, a ceiling fan whirring stale air above my head. There
were three other people asleep in the room. As my head cleared, I
perused a nearby bookshelf, which contained various speculative and
esoteric texts, including "The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian
Myth," "Secrets of Shamanism," and "Crop Circles: Signs of Contact."

I wandered outside. Behind the building were two long greenhouses
made of translucent plastic sheeting supported by bent steel ribs,
which sheltered smaller plants until they were ready to be put in the
ground. I ran into Nick, who was already at work, and he led me on a
tour of the slopes at the back of his property. "I planted these at
the end of May," he said. "They're three months old." Outdoors, the
sativa growth cycle is eleven weeks; the indica cycle is seven to
nine. Toward the end of the cycle, the flowering plant loses its lush
green leaves and manifests a shrivelled brown bud. "This is Afghooey
crossed with Maui Wowie," Nick said, pointing to a six-foot plant
with half its leaves missing. So far, he said with equanimity, he had
lost about a quarter of his crop--more than a hundred thousand
dollars' worth--to nibbling deer.

The three hundred or so plants on this part of the mountain were
arranged in a V shape. The arms of the V ascended the mountain and
spread out beneath the shelter of the surrounding forest. Nick
admitted that the plants were not particularly well hidden, and said
that the planting formation was mainly a respectful tip of the hat to
the D.E.A. planes that flew over the valley. "They appreciate it when
you're not growing it in rows, like a cornfield," he explained. Small
planes had been buzzing overhead lately. Last night, one of Nick's
visiting friends had reported that a helicopter had canvassed the
property and shone a light down onto the front porch. The friend
admitted to having been stoned when he saw the searchlight.

Virtually everyone in the valley made a living from growing pot, Nick
said. The signs of their activity were hard to miss. To illustrate
his point, he indicated to the top of a mountain across the way.
"It's quite expensive to put electrical poles up a mountain," he
said. As I followed his gaze, I caught sight of what looked like a
sail. "You're looking at greenhouses," he explained.

With so much pot on the market in California, it paid to
differentiate your crop. Later that day, Nick and Danielle's investor
from Malibu arrived with a lawyer, who was there to inspect the
farm's organic-farming methods. If the farm passed, the pot would be
certified as an organic product. The lawyer was a tall, fit-looking
middle-aged man from San Francisco who wore a gray suit and a white
starched shirt with no tie. He declined to be interviewed about his business.

Captain Blue spent the day outside, roaming the property and taking
photographs with a digital S.L.R. camera. He took pictures of Nick's
friends working the pot fields and tending to the mature mother
plants. And he took closeups of the enormous brown buds on a
fifteen-foot-high pot plant. The physical exertion was hard for Blue.
Beads of sweat collected on his forehead, and his shirt was soon soaking wet.

Blue handed me his camera, and I clicked through his photographs. I
had told Blue many times that if he were slightly more motivated he
could probably have a career as a photographer. My motherly attempts
to lure Blue away from a life centered on pot had created a certain
degree of tension in our friendship, even though he claimed not to
mind. The truth was that Blue's life had never been better. He was
making money. People depended on him. He was a respected member of
his community. He treated the people in his life--growers, suppliers,
patients, customers--in a considerate fashion. He had even figured
out a way to keep his marijuana business within the letter of
California state law.

But it is hard to argue that what Blue does for a living is the kind
of activity that California's medical-marijuana laws were designed to
protect. Though he is not a dangerous criminal, he is not exactly a
hospice worker, either. He is a gray-area entrepreneur, working the
seams of a hidden economy, populated by tens of thousands of people
whose lives and minds and bank accounts it has altered forever, even
as the rest of the country is only beginning to realize that it exists.

After leaving Nick's farm, Blue, the Kid, and I stopped at a diner in
Redway to get a slice of blackberry pie. While we ate, I watched a
long-haired teen-ager guide her stoned father to their car. His hair
was gray, and longer than hers, and when he stepped off the curb and
started to amble toward a black BMW she grabbed his arm. "Dad, this
is not your car," she said sweetly. "Your car is over there."

Humboldt's economy is so heavily dependent on cannabis cultivation
that you can drive for miles on well-kept highways and back roads
without discovering a single legitimate source of income, aside from
honey stands. Heading north, we eventually entered a maze of logging
roads on a private reserve. A bunch of hippies grew pot in the
forest, and the local cops stayed away.

Our destination was a house occupied by a woman who identified
herself as Emily. A wiry marijuana sharecropper who also works as an
environmental activist, she was busy watering her plants. There were
twenty-five plants in all, surrounded by a fence on which hung a
laminated patient's letter, signed by Ken Miller, M.D., stating that
the marijuana was intended for medical purposes. Because marijuana is
a fungible commodity, like soybeans or rice, there is no way to tell
the difference between marijuana that winds up going to patients and
marijuana that winds up on the street. The doctor's letter was,
therefore, halfway between a legal document and a good-luck charm.
Tibetan prayer flags fluttered along the length of the fence.

Emily was thin, with curly hair, and had a solitary, independent air;
she'd been living alone for five months. She wore a gray T-shirt
advertising a club called the Boom-Boom Room, in Cambodia. Her hands
were covered with homemade tattoos of the kind that skater kids draw
on each other.

The Kid and Emily were old friends, and they quickly launched into
the technical details of Emily's growing regimen. "It's a three-day
flip with Penetrator and a carbo load," Emily said, and then I lost them.

After Emily finished her watering, we hiked over the mountain to a
patch of twenty plants, where she went through the same routine. We
sat on a couch that someone had carried up the mountain, and looked
down on the verdant valley below as Emily described her growing
arrangements. The house where we first met was owned by a man in his
fifties, Emily said, who lived on the peak of the next mountain over.
In addition to the two parcels of land that Emily tended, her host
ha