LEAVES OF GRASS

Eureka, Calif. - THE day after voters in California rejected an
initiative to legalize
marijuana, a package arrived at the bookstore I own with my husband:
eight ounces of premium bud. This was not a gift from a grateful
customer, nor was it a new product we'd brought in for the holiday
season. The package came from a grower here in Humboldt County who had
decided it would be amusing to use our bookstore as the return address.

And it might have gone directly to a buyer in Austin, Tex., except
that the grower had used a little too much packaging, pushing it over
the Postal Service's weight limit. Stamped packages weighing more than
13 ounces have to be handed over in person at the post office, not
dropped anonymously in a mailbox. And so the padded envelope and its
aromatic contents were returned to sender - in this case, our
antiquarian bookstore, which is better known for shipping signed first
editions and vintage bird lithographs than Humboldt County's most
famous agricultural product.

At first we couldn't believe our luck. Rare book dealers are in the
business of buying low and selling high, but never had we had the
opportunity to take that phrase quite so literally. Anyone else might
have been inclined to keep the package for personal use, but we're
shopkeepers facing a busy holiday season. We can't afford to let the
next few weeks drift away in a cloud of smoke.

Being retailers, we weren't immune to the temptation to sell our
windfall. One of our regular customers walked in just after we'd
opened the package; he offered us enough cash to cover our rent
through the end of the year. But although medical marijuana laws and a
tolerant attitude by law enforcement make the drug practically legal
here, we weren't quite ready to take the next step and start dealing
from behind the counter. Strangely enough, though, the idea that a
bookstore could keep itself in business by selling marijuana might
explain why someone chose to put our return address on the package to
begin with.

Two months ago, a local weekly, The Arcata Eye, asked if it could run
an excerpt from a novel I had written a few years ago in which digital
books had become so popular that bookstores everywhere were forced to
shut their doors. Only one remained open: a creaky old antiquarian
bookstore in northern California much like my own. The shop, finding
itself in the national spotlight, could no longer hide the fact that
it had been selling something other than books for years.

Soon the story about the bookstore that tucks marijuana between the
pages of old books appeared in The Eye; it was part of a fictionalized
series about life in cannabis country that ran as the state debated
the failed referendum, Proposition 19, which would have allowed
licensed retailers to sell marijuana to people over 21 for
recreational use.

I like to think that pot growers read the newspaper, and read novels,
and enjoy contemplating the fine line between fiction and fact. I
envisioned one packing the week's shipments and facing the persistent
conundrum of what imaginary return address to print on the envelope.
In a moment of inspiration, he or she must have realized that it would
take only a few strokes of the pen to bring my novel to life. And so
it was that our bookstore - at least according to the fiction written
across a padded envelope weighing slightly over 13 ounces - made its
first shipment of marijuana.

We hope this will also be the last shipment. In the end, we didn't
smoke it or sell it or give it to our employees as a holiday bonus. We
called the police and asked them to come pick it up. This is a
laughable move in Humboldt - it was difficult to persuade the officer
to bother making the trip down to the store at all - but we realized
that we needed to establish some sort of plausible deniability before
a drug-sniffing dog got a whiff of another package with our address on
it.

Besides, the voters of California have made it clear they aren't ready
for a bookstore that sells pot - for now.

Amy Stewart is the author, most recently, of "Wicked Plants: The Weed
That Killed Lincoln's Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities."