THE MARIJUANA MACHINE

Taking the High Road With One of OC'S Burgeoning Medical-Marijuana
Delivery Services

The young couple look like they've just woken up from a nap--or
perhaps a more amorous bedroom activity. The girl, slender and pale
with a cute upturned nose, has long curly hair swept over her
shoulder. She wears a pair of tight-fitting, yoga-style gray sweat
pants and an indigo-colored top. Her boyfriend, who is shirtless with
black slacks, is a handsome, tanned kid with a slicked-back blond mane
and an uncanny resemblance to Leonardo DiCaprio. Yoga Girl is a
college student from Los Angeles who grew up in Newport Beach and has
just moved back home for the summer, renting an apartment a few blocks
from the beach. She's counting out $20 bills on a coffee table while
her boyfriend stretches out on a futon.

"Here you go," Yoga Girl says. "That's my ID card. Do you have change
for $200?"

Standing next to the coffee table is someone who prefers, for the
purposes of this story, to be identified only as "Racer X." He's a
short, wiry surfer with a crew cut, tattoos on his arms and a
briefcase full of manila envelopes, each of which contains from one to
six airtight, plastic containers full of medical marijuana. The girl
has just shown him her State of California Medical Marijuana
Identification Card (she'd read her ID number to Racer X's boss over
the phone an hour or so earlier), and Racer X has just handed her an
envelope containing a quarter-ounce of pot, half of which is Lavender
Kush--at $75 per eighth, one of the luxury strains available to
medical marijuana smokers--and half of which is Northern Kush, which
is also $75 per one-eighth ounce.

Racer X is a part-time driver for one of some two dozen cannabis clubs
in Orange County that offer members door-to-door marijuana-delivery
services. His day job involves stocking groceries at a local
supermarket chain. He has been a recreational marijuana smoker for
years, typically toking up early in the morning on his days off before
hitting the waves or in the evenings after work. He bought his pot
from a dealer and fellow surfer, whom we'll call "the Big Kahuna." For
years, the Big Kahuna had made a decent living selling pot to
customers such as Racer X. But as his client base aged, got married,
had kids and smoked less weed, he began to worry about finding a real
job. It didn't help that hundreds of marijuana dispensaries had opened
their doors in Los Angeles, offering high-quality marijuana to anyone
with a doctor's note.

After the Orange County Board of Supervisors voted in July 2007 to
allow county residents to apply for state medical-marijuana ID cards,
the Big Kahuna decided to form a legitimate, nonprofit cooperative
that would supply medical marijuana to members of the club. He
attended classes held by the California branch of the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (better known by its
acronym, NORML) and learned how to operate within the somewhat-fuzzy
boundaries established in state law for the operation of such
collectives. The Big Kahuna created a website for his club--the name
of which he asked not to be revealed--and advertised in both OC Weekly
and on various marijuana websites, such as www.weedmaps.com and
www.weedtracker.com; Yoga Girl found the club through one of the
latter two sites.

"I think it was weedmaps," Yoga Girl says.

"We just looked for the closest one in our ZIP code," adds
Leo.

"Yeah, that's how we found you," Yoga Girl tells Racer X. She says she
learned from a couple of her sorority sisters in Los Angeles how easy
it is to obtain legal marijuana. There was a cannabis dispensary
conveniently located down the street from her dormitory. "Now that I'm
down here for the summer, I didn't want to drive up to LA," she says.
"For safety reasons, too. If you have enough money for a card, having
it delivered to you is definitely the way to go. You know, why not?"

I ask her what symptom she has that allows her to smoke marijuana.
Yoga Girl pauses for a moment. "Uh, migraines?" she finally suggests.
"I use it as a, um, sleep aid. Yeah."

"Does it work?" I ask.

"Oh, yeah; yeah, it does," she says, giggling.

Racer X laughs with delight as he zips up his briefcase and nods at
the door. He's in a rush to make it to his next delivery on schedule.

"Oh, yeah," Racer X exclaims, waving goodbye to Yoga Girl. "Weed
works, baby!"

An hour earlier, I'm sitting with Racer X and the Big Kahuna in a
small room inside a two-bedroom house in Newport Beach. It's the Big
Kahuna's home office, headquarters of his 6-year-old cannabis club,
which he opened up to new members last November. An American flag
hangs on the wall, and stacks of large, airtight plastic bins fill one
of the room's corners, all of them stuffed with 19 strains of
marijuana with gloriously hyperbolic handles and descriptions such as
Skywalker (a "tractor beam to Super Spacey!") and Sour Diesel ("Good
luck shutting up; Ramble alert!"). Two computers take up a wraparound
desk in another corner of the room. Several open containers of
marijuana lie on the few available flat surfaces.

As usual, the Big Kahuna is sitting shirtless in his chair, flexing
his large forearms around a giant glass bong. He takes a deep hit from
the device and exhales powerfully into a 1-inch-thick plastic tube
that he has rigged to a spot in the wall near an air-conditioning
unit. "That stuff can go outside," he explains, nodding at the smoke.
"I don't care. It's legal."

Just then, his cell phone rings. The Big Kahuna spends the next 20
minutes explaining the various benefits of different strains of
marijuana to a repeat customer who agrees to buy a quarter ounce of a
sativa strain. "There are two major groups of cannabis: indica and
sativa," he tells me after hanging up. "Most of the weed coming into
California and being grown in California in the past 20 years was all
indica because people wanted to get stoned and sit on the couch. But
if you give that indica to patients who are in pain, in misery,
already in a bad place, it takes them down and makes them depressed
and suicidal. Sativa is an upper, like coffee. It kills the pain and
leaves the patient awake and aware and motivated instead of mellow."

The person who just called has ordered a few eighths of a sativa
strain, the Big Kahuna explains. "This guy has a metal rod inserted in
his back, and it's fused to his spine,'" he says. "He's been on
painkillers for 10 years and is trying to get off them. He's a regular
customer; this is his third or fourth time. He orders from us every
couple of weeks."

A former pot dealer who spent time in jail after being set up by a
customer, the Big Kahuna is an expert in what is legal and what is
not-so-legal when it comes to medical marijuana. He's determined to
stay on the legal side of things--unlike, he asserts, the hundreds of
LA cannabis dispensaries that have opened in the past several years,
many of which have been subjected to raids by both state and federal
law-enforcement authorities. "These dispensaries offer everything," he
explains. "Food, drink, tinctures, concentrates like hashish, and all
that stuff isn't outlined in the law."

The law in question, State Bill 420, which was enacted last year to
regulate medical marijuana, only allows dispensaries and clubs to grow
and provide to their members dried cannabis. For that reason, the Big
Kahuna can only obtain marijuana from members of his club, all of whom
must live in Orange County. He can't buy pot from growers, say, in Los
Angeles or Northern California. He can deliver the locally grown pot
to as many members of the club who live in Orange County as he wishes,
so long as he has each member sign a form designating him as their
primary caregiver. According to California NORML's website
(www.canorml.com), there are nearly 150 delivery services throughout
the state, most of them in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Orange County
is home to 24 delivery services, as well as about a dozen walk-in
dispensaries, according to NORML.

The Big Kahuna complains that the big LA dispensaries are also
delivering marijuana to customers in Orange County, despite SB420
stating that designated caregivers can't cross county lines. "It's the
Wild West up in LA," the Big Kahuna says. "They are getting busted
because they are bringing 5 pounds of weed in the back door and
selling it out the front door, whereas we don't do more than an ounce,
which is what a person could truly consume." While the Big Kahuna
acknowledges that half of his club's members "just want to get high,"
he says the other half are legitimate patients.

Racer X drives a beat-up truck with a satellite-powered
global-positioning device mounted on his dashboard. The GPS beeps
every few seconds and provides a constant stream of directions. "Turn
right, then turn left," it might say, or "Now arriving at
destination." When Racer X misses a turn, usually because he's too
busy talking, the machine alerts him to his error with the word
"Recalculating." "That's the last word I want to hear," he says. That
word means he's getting lost and losing time, and time is money.

He delivers weed for the Big Kahuna three days a week, in shifts that
last from 3 to 8 p.m. His busiest days are Fridays, when he can make
as many as eight deliveries and earn up to $200. For each eighth of an
ounce he delivers, Racer X earns a $10 commission. Sometimes, people
tip him $20. Once, a pretty girl ran after him with a $20 bill that
he'd mistakenly given her when counting out her change. "This is
yours," she said. "I was going to keep it, but you're the last person
I want to piss off."

Today, Racer X is eager to stay on schedule because a few days
earlier, he missed an entire shift--seven deliveries, a lot for a
Wednesday--because the springs in his garage door broke. He's grateful
that we reach the day's first customer--the man with the metal rod in
his back--in just a few minutes.

Unlike Yoga Girl and Leo (who will be Racer X's next customers), this
customer isn't willing to be interviewed on tape. He happily takes off
his Hawaiian shirt to reveal a back brace, which he also removes. A
nasty scar stretches from the nape of his neck to his tailbone;
another traces a curve along the left side of his ribcage. He broke
his back on the job several years ago and is trying to kick an
OxyContin addiction. He smokes marijuana to relieve the constant pain
in his back. It relaxes him enough that he can play his guitar. He's
clearly lonely; for someone who doesn't want to be interviewed, he has
a lot to say. He follows Racer X all the way to his truck in the
parking lot of the condominium complex and reluctantly waves goodbye.

After dropping off the eighth of Lavender Kush and eighth of Northern
Kush to Yoga Girl and Leo, Racer X delivers half an ounce of weed to a
weathered, middle-aged Latino man who is cooking chicken in his Costa
Mesa apartment and watching a Lakers game. "You guys want some food?"
he asks, but Racer X is eager to move on. He's got one more delivery
to make back in Newport Beach. Then his cell phone rings. It's the Big
Kahuna, telling Racer X that the last customer of the night is about
to leave for dinner. Racer X can't make it to the house in time, so
the Big Kahuna agrees to make this delivery himself, since he's
closer. "Next time, drop off at the houses that are close by first,"
the Big Kahuna says. When Racer X tries to protest, the Big Kahuna
cuts him short. "I'm the chief, and you're the Indian," he says. "Got
it?"

A week later, on another Friday afternoon, I join Racer X again. After
meeting at the Big Kahuna's house to pick up several manila envelopes
for the first few deliveries of the shift, we drive to an apartment
complex just five minutes away in Newport Beach. The only problem: The
apartment is on a street that Racer X's talking GPS device doesn't
recognize. It keeps telling him how to reach a street with a similar
name. Ten confusing minutes and a few dozen screamed epithets later,
Racer X finally finds the complex. He calls the customer's telephone
number three times, but nobody answers. Finally, Racer X realizes he
was calling the wrong number.

After being buzzed in, we walk into the dimly lit apartment of a fat
man watching Fox News. A diploma on the wall identifies him as a
doctor of philosophy. He buys a quarter ounce of weed. The next
delivery is to someone who lives in Huntington Beach. Because
Interstate 405 is jammed with traffic, we take surface streets, which
turn out to be just as congested. (Racer X will later realize that
with me in the car, we could have taken the carpool lane.) At just
after 5 p.m. on a Friday night--the worst time for rush-hour traffic
in coastal Orange County--Racer X starts to lose his patience. Despite
having medicated himself with marijuana earlier in the day, he's
exhibiting clear symptoms of road rage.

"Come on, dude!" he yells at a driver who fails to notice the traffic
light change from red to green. "You don't have to go home, but you
can't stay here!" Finally, the driver begins to roll forward, and
Racer X breathes a deep sigh of relief. "Sometimes, I feel like a taxi
driver," he says. "I've learned how to dodge around in traffic and
avoid the really bad intersections so I don't lose too much time. But
I've also learned how to calm myself down while driving. I need to be
able to do that because I'm driving around in a car full of something
that is still considered a banned substance under federal law, and I
don't want to draw any more attention to myself than I need to."

As we reach the Huntington Beach neighborhood where the next customer
lives, Racer X is busy explaining how he's learned to identify
prostitutes. "You can tell that's what they are because they're always
sitting at the bus stop, but they never get on a bus," he says.

"Sometimes, it really pisses me off," he continues. "Once I saw this
Mexican lady with a kid sitting on the bench waiting for the bus, and
four hours later, she was still there. I just don't get it."

Suddenly, Racer X's GPS device interrupts his rant. "Recalculating,"
it says. "Recalculating. . . . Recalculating."

Racer X has missed his left turn. "You have got to be kidding me," he
says. "How the fuck do I make a U-turn?"

At first glance, the Serial Killer looks like any other young Orange
County skate punk, except he's wearing mirrored sunglasses inside his
tiny, cramped apartment. The glasses, combined with his wool hat and
leering smile, make him look like Richard Ramirez, the infamous Night
Stalker. The only thing scarier than him is his dog, which is about
twice his size. The animal looks like the kind of Belgian attack dog
the South African police might have used to terrify anti-apartheid
protesters at the height of the township rebellions; it's trying to
push down a sliding patio door and eat Racer X.

This is Racer X's second delivery to the Serial Killer in just two
weeks--that's when the Serial Killer moved to this unit--and he's
already buying another five-eighths of an ounce of weed. Today's
transaction takes less than a minute. "Thanks," the Serial Killer
says. "I won't be here next time, just so you know. I'm moving." A few
minutes later, Racer X gets a call from the Big Kahuna, who tells him
that several more orders have just come in. "We're going to head back
and do a pick-up-and-fly-by," Racer X tells me.

We drive back to the Big Kahuna's house. He walks out to the truck and
hands over several manila envelopes.

Seconds later, we're on our way to meet the next customer, a friendly
but serious young man who lives in a surreal-looking neighborhood of
Huntington Beach where all the houses resemble blown-up versions of
structures you'd find at a miniature-golf course, minus the windmills.
He says he works for a surgical-supply company and smokes medical
marijuana to soothe his tension headaches, which he'd been diagnosed
with as a teenager. He buys an eighth of an ounce of weed. "I've had
these headaches since high school," he says. "I've taken Tylenol and
other over-the-counter drugs, but I really don't like them. I smoke
this a couple of times a month," he adds, pointing at the
just-purchased marijuana. "I mean, this will last me quite a long
time, quite frankly."

The following customer is Racer X's favorite client. As we drive to
meet her, he regales me with tales of her physical attributes. "She's,
like, 6-3, 6-4, big-boned and beautiful, like a Nordic Amazon
warrior," he enthuses. "She says she has a boyfriend, but she's really
friendly."

We pull up to a luxury condominium complex where the Nordic Princess
lives. A few minutes later, she bounds down the street. As it turns
out, the Nordic Princess is more like 5-foot-6 and more endearingly
curvaceous than statuesque. She marches up to the truck with a happy
grin on her face and leans in the driver's window. "Hiya!" she says.

Racer X is in love.

During a brief interview, the Nordic Princess freely acknowledges
that her diagnosed medical condition--anxiety--is just a ruse to get
high without breaking the law. She explains that she grew up on the
East Coast and recounts horror stories about trying to find weed. "I
remember the hunts we used to go on back home," she says. "It would
be hours and hours and 20 or 30 phone calls before you'd get lucky.
Hmmm: yeah, anxiety," she adds, laughing at the memories. "Not anymore!"

The final delivery of the day takes place in a parking lot near a
PetCo. For some reason, this customer always insists on meeting at
that lot, something that troubles Racer X. "This guy kind of freaks me
out," Racer X explains. "When I meet him, he's always bobbing his head
around and making it look like a drug deal." A few moments after we
pull into the lot, Racer X calls the customer, a tall middle-aged man
in a tank top and shorts who is actually waiting just a few yards
away. He walks up, putting his cell phone away.

"I can give you 200 bucks if you don't mind, or would you rather I
give you what I owe you?" the man asks nervously.

"Your total is $140," Racer X says. "I can give you a fiver. Here you
go."

The man laughs self-consciously as he puts the money in his wallet. He
glances back and forth. "Ha, ha, ha," he says. "I'm getting used to
this now."

We drive back to the Big Kahuna's house with $520 in cash in Racer X's
briefcase. Today, he estimates that the Big Kahuna has made $1,000,
and that, as a driver, he will receive $200. As we navigate the
rush-hour traffic on Harbor Boulevard for the third or fourth time
that evening, Racer X reflects on his volunteer work with the club.
"This is a really cool job," he says. "The first few times I went out,
I was really nervous. You don't know if you're going to be meeting a
cop or a cowboy who might decide he wants the weed for free and pulls
a gat on you. But that's never happened yet."

So far, his closest call happened at a parking lot where Racer X made
the mistake of getting out of his car to hand an envelope to a
customer in return for a wad of cash. An alert security guard saw the
exchange and pulled up to ask what was going on. "I told him it was a
medical-supply delivery," Racer X says. "He couldn't see what was in
the envelopes and didn't really know what was going on, so he didn't
call the cops."

Even if the guard had done so, Racer X says he's confident that he'd
be protected. "Legally, we're fine," he says. "There is no problem
with what we are doing. If a cop were to pull up in the middle of a
delivery, I have a paper saying the patient has designated the club as
his caregiver. I might run into a problem, but I would just keep my
fucking mouth shut and not say a goddamn thing and see what happens in
the courts."

That anecdote reminds Racer X of a funny story he'd been meaning to
tell me all day. "Remember that cute girl we delivered to last week?"
he asks, referring to Yoga Girl. "Well, her mom got ahold of her cell
phone." According to Racer X, Yoga Girl's mom began dialing all the
unfamiliar numbers on her daughter's phone, which eventually put her
on the line with the Big Kahuna, who always answers the phone by
stating the name of his cannabis club.

"What are you?" the anxious mother asked the Big Kahuna.

"We're a club," he answered.

"Is my daughter in your club?" the woman asked, the alarm in her voice
rising.

The Big Kahuna was about to hang up on her, but then thought better of
it. After all, it wasn't like he was a drug dealer. He was a
legitimate, nonprofit organization.

"Yeah, you know what?" he responded, his voice still friendly and
professional. "I don't think I'm going to answer any more of your
questions. You're not part of the club."