SAN DIEGO REACTION TO PROP. 19 LOSS A MIXED BAG

On the day after California voters rejected the legalization of
marijuana, the editor and co-founder of NUG magazine was too busy
working to grieve. News on the marijuana front was bad, but business
for "San Diego's original cannabis publication" was booming.

"I'm collecting money and selling ads," Dion Markgraaff said on
Wednesday. "The beat goes on."

Serving San Diego's cannabis community since July of 2009, the
Santee-based NUG (which stands for nuggets of pot and nuggets of
information) is the rare expansion story in the ever-shrinking
print-media universe. It is also the ad-filled and shadow-plagued
reflection of the conflicted portrait that is San Diego's pot profile.

In San Diego, NUG and other purveyors of the cannabis-friendly
lifestyle face a splintered civic personality that can't decide if it
wants to join them for a Creamsicle Spiked Shake (recipe in the
August 2010 issue) or send them and their hydroponics off to greener
pastures in other parts of the state.

"It's a mesh of personalities here," said the 41-year-old Markgraaff,
who grew up in Oceanside and attended Vista High School and San Diego
State University. "We have our lovable qualities, but we've got a
hard edge. We're like a mutt that has all these different traits."

Long before San Diego voted to legalize marijuana for medical use in
the state 14 years ago, we were open to the idea of different strokes
for different folks. The utopian-minded Universal Brotherhood and
Theosophical Society settled in Point Loma in late 1896, the
pioneering Golden Door Spa began welcoming sun-worshippers and
fitness nuts in 1958, and the UFO-watching members of the Unarius
Academy of Science have been doing their cosmic thing in El Cajon since 1954.

"The notion of alternative therapies, alternative approaches to
health, that is deep in our history," said UCSD sociologist Mary
Walshok. "Chinese herbal medicine, massage, acupuncture and
meditation, all of that has a long history in San Diego."

Then again, we are also a community with deep military roots and a
long history of conservative voting patterns. So while we were
progressive enough to become the largest city in the country to adopt
medical-marijuana guidelines in 2003, we were not quite comfy enough
to support the legalization of small amounts of recreational
marijuana earlier this week.

At NUG, the natural-remedy-embracing,
alternative-lifestyle-appreciating side of San Diego is alive and
well and loving its organic marijuana, edible marijuana and water
pipes. All of this interest from medical-marijuana patients and -
let's not kid ourselves - enterprising recreational smokers has
turned NUG into a totally ad-supported success story.

In less than two years, it has grown from a 48-page bimonthly
distributed in clinics and dispensaries to a 98-page monthly magazine
that is also available for free at local 7-Eleven stores.

"What this says about San Diego is there is a huge cannabis community
here and there is a huge market that is unaddressed by society,"
Markgraaff said during a break from sales calls, which he makes
wearing shorts, flip-flops and a NUG T-shirt. "Our biggest problem is
we don't print enough copies."

Actually, their problems are bigger than that. Because the other side
of San Diego's public consciousness - the side with the serious
border-related drug worries and the staunchly anti-marijuana District
Attorney's office - is also living large at NUG.

It was there in the first issue, which was dedicated to longtime
local medical-marijuana activist Steven McWilliams, who committed
suicide in 2005. It is there in the ads the magazine lost when the
Kush Lounge dispensary was raided last July. And it is there in the
masthead, where many of the staffers don't use their real names. That
includes publisher and medical-marijuana patient Ben G. Rowen, a
native San Diegan who became an activist after his home was raided by
federal authorities two years ago.

Then again, that masthead is also on the latest issue of NUG, in all
its fat, healthy glory. With his San Diego cannabis magazine growing,
editor Markgraaff is letting his hopes grow, too.

"Did you see the exit numbers for Prop. 19?," Markgraaff said via
e-mail yesterday. "San Diego voted Yes at 47 percent, which was as
big as L.A., the state average, and most of Northern California. I
think that shows the cannabis community and NUG magazine are doing a
good job in helping people evolve here in San Diego."