Inside The Emerald Triangle; Pt. II, Area 101

 

Starting around Ukiah, the signs and billboards for garden centers start to grow out of the landscape, each advertisement trying to trump the other in offering the best for the grower’s needs! Blooming Solutions! Cheapest Pre-fab Growhouses! Soil Delivered! Anywhere!! Biggest Yield Ever with Bumper Crop Deluxe 2015!! Now Organic!!!!

I’d say that for every fourth billboard had something to do with growing the best, prize-winning, blue-ribbon, and champion something…And that’s where it gets a little hazy. The billboards illustrate comically prize-winning blue ribbons with the number ones pinned to the side of a bushel-basket or on the quarter-panel of a full pick-up going to market, but what kind of crop it exactly is, whether it is tomatoes, roses or corn, that part is left off. The billboards are vague on what is being grown except it guarantees to deliver your biggest crop ever, never saying exactly what that crop is, but you get the idea…

That is the feeling I get from being in the Triangle that Dope is all around you but you never see. It’s like having drinks in an exclusive country-club with the exceedingly rich; the last thing one does is talk about money, yet the state of the dollar or the value of their stock is never that far from their mind.  American dollars is the above-the-counter- form of currency that you see, but I really get the sense it is Dope that makes the World go around, at least in the Triangle.

First of all, everyone grows. That is it. End of story. If your mother lived here, she’d grow. That person you don’t like who always votes the wrong way, they grow. I’m sure all sons and daughters of law enforcement up here grow. Everyone grows. That’s why no one talks about it. It isn’t a dirty little secret if everyone’s doing it.

Last December while I was investigating various domestic Cannabis Cups that had been happening as of late, there was one Cup that caught my eye. This particular Cup had been going on for about nine years, officially, just a mere three hours north from me.

I knew the area from my travels there some twenty-five years ago when I was young trimmer and driver. But I literally hadn’t been back since I was in my twenties as a young swashbuckler and adventurer for hire. Thinking I was familiar with the area, I decided to give the host of the Cannabis Cup a jingle. That is when I was invited into the coolest clubhouse since Spanky and Our Gang’s ‘He Man Women Haters Club,’ (sorry, it was my first.) This is when I first heard of Area 101.

It was on my drive up there noticing the billboards that used to advertise property for sale and other real estate deals, car dealerships, phone plans, and Internet providers were all gone and replaced with signs advertising everything from soil-enriching solutions to tractors and trailers for harvest.

Last time I was here you had to hide from the Man. Now I could tell there was a new boss.

Tim Blake is the owner of Area 101. After that initial call we spoke every so often. Tim is a hard man to catch. He doesn’t sit still for too long because of his on-going concerns from the environment, the importance of Organic Living and being kind to Mother Earth and for what I there was there to talk to him about.

Every time we spoke, Tim’s passion and energies radiates over the phone. Rolling Stone magazine did a small piece on him while doing a story about the business of Pot in California. He always has something in the works and something he’s just finishing up.

Area 101 is his ‘new’ baby.

Ten miles north of Laytonville, California, is the coolest clubhouse ever, Area 101. I pulled up in my rental car having very little idea of what to expect. During one of our conversations over the phone when I asked Tim to explain what he is trying to do with Area 101, he’d just answer “yes” to my questions.

Is it a coffee house? Yes.

Do you do shows? Yes.

Is it a retreat? Yes.

Is it really 160 acres? Yes.

Do people hang out there during the day? Yes.

Do you put on town-hall meetings with the DEA, local police and growers to start a dialogue going? Yes.

Do you have a Cannabis Cup there? Yes.

Do you hold spiritual and different religious retreats of various denominations throughout the year? Yes.

Are you having one of the biggest Techno-Trance-Dance music festivals with International D.J.’s to be held outside of Europe? Yes.

Do people just show up looking for guidance and a spiritual touchstone? Yes.

Do people come in from different countries and continents thinking you sell dope? Yes.

They don’t. But they do everything else you’d expect from a spiritual/resource center/clubhouse keeping the flame alive in the heart of Mendocino County, and the Emerald Triangle…

More Tomorrow…



The Emerald Triangle Pt. One -Outdoor vs. Indoor Smackdown.

The area of Northern California where most of the OUTDOOR Pot is grown in California is called the Emerald Triangle. The word was coined by law enforcement officials when they swooped down for a big Marijuana bust trying to shut down operations years ago.

For many years, this is where America got its Pot before someone found out that you didn’t need the sun, or dirt, or anything else natural to grow pot and make money. Yes, starting with Ukiah, and going north to the end of the state, this is where the domestic dope trade began in earnest. If you ever smoke WEED without seeds in the late Seventies, then the Eighties, up to the mid or late Nineties, your WEED probably came from some remote spot in mountainous Northern California territory. Without the Emerald Triangle growers, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

Wouldn’t it be weird if the person who drove us to the dance might not be asked to come in?

The Emerald Triangle is all abuzz these days with issues, ideas, and like Godfather III, just when they get their shit together, the business pulls them back in.

Right now the biggest issue is Indoor Pot versus Outdoor Pot.

A small primer:

When you grow outdoors, your crop is left up to nature. You can add some beautiful chicken shit and other natural supplements, grow your plants in rich, fecund soil, but it is left up the Weather Gods. An early frost or weeks of rain will literally wash some crystals or resin off. There are thefts. A lot of stuff can go wrong growing outdoors.

The benefits; the best Pot, hands down, grown outdoors, is cultivated in Emerald Triangle. Yes, there are places like Olympia with its hidden forests, a small swatch along the Hudson River, a rich river bed in San Antonio, where good
Pot is being developed. You can grow Pot anywhere, IT’S A WEED. But to grow the best, year in and year out, there is no other place like the Triangle on Earth, for now.

Plus, most of the all Weed grown in the Triangle is organic. I can’t stress that enough. That means, the WEED you smoke, only contains natural chemicals; nothing artificial has been added that is supposed to replace dirt and sun.

The WEED you get from the Triangle is mostly organic and here’s the second part that is just as important as the first, the WEED you got from the Triangle, hasn’t decimated the Earth.

Much like your smart Iowa farmer, your Triangle grower respects the Earth (why not, it’s usually on their land or close to it) and they grow their WEED in balance with the land.

What is happening now is the Mexican Mafia is setting up guerilla growers deep into the forests of the Triangle with seeds, tortillas, beans and rice, machine guns and a big old mother fucka of a diesel generator. What is happening is diesel fuel is leeching into the water systems of Northern California from this land abuse. There is violence in the woods. Because of the amount of money in play now with growing, there will be others following the Mexican Mafia’s business plan. Local law-abiding Hispanics, who have lived in the area for generations, are given the stink eye by the town folk. An air of suspicion follows anyone the growers are unsure of.

But back to Indoor versus Outdoor.

Here’s the real deal with Indoor-It is better than outdoor. There I said it.

I identify with the outdoor growers but I understand the whole indoor thang.

Yes, you can control EVERYTHING with bridled growing. The weather, the amount of water the plants get. The Ph balance and having the perfect amount of nitrogen and other bloomin’ chemicals that will make your crop shine and stand-up like the Radio City Rockettes at Christmas time. You can get really fancy growing indoors.

Now when everyone is clamoring for purple bud, the indoor grower can introduce CO2 into the system, which depletes oxygen in the environment, which causes the plants to gasp for air, thus stressing them out, giving the outer leaves a purple hue. That’s marketing, and it doesn’t stop there. (Please realize that the dispensaries are the game changer. The need for WEED has never been greater because of the dispensaries having almost a 12/7 market weekly.) The buyers in Dispensaries also want anything that has Kush in the title. (There is no such thing as Kush, another day about that.)

So the indoor grower can recreate any environment needed to grow a certain strain. Think about where you live. What kind of tomato grows best there? The same with WEED, only growing indoors, you don’t have any limitations.

Indoor growing does market research. Indoor growing is responsive to the market and laws of supply and demand. You can place orders with the indoor growers.

It is like the Triangle growers are driving a Chevy truck with a couple of hundred thousand miles on it. It is dependable and on most days, can drive itself to the patch because of the countless hours of sweat equity that the grower has put into honing his or her’s craft. But the indoor grower is like a high performance machine. And right now, the indoor grower is beating the brown dirt farmer by laps.

It is my belief that the Marijuana Industry is being define and refined by the large amount of dollars involved. There is a slow rush to establish yourself before the music stops.

More to my point; your average Northern Californian grower made roughly around $3500 for a pound of grade ‘A’ WEED. Now they’re getting around $2,000-2,400, depending. Yet, your indoor grower can get up to almost $3,000-5,000 for their boutique brands and carefully marketed orders.

Okay, I don’t know if you appreciate this aspect but the other complaint about indoor growing-It’s bad for the environment. Really bad.

Beyond growing WEED, the average outdoor grower is a small town consumer, but in a very Nor Cal way. Most everyone I hang with is totally organic in their lifestyle. They drink milk from Ball jars that the dairy-people down the mountain traded with them for some Weed or money. All the breads and grains are nature’s own, very little store bought items. The meat eaters get their organic chickens and grass fed steaks from another family, mostly all done through a barter system.

They walk the walk and talk the talk when it comes to organic, spiritual, in-harmony with Mother Earth lifestyle.

Your average Northern California grower is aware of their carbon footprint and their entropic value. They always try to leave nothing behind and always strive to be in balance with the land where they and their family will spend the rest of their days. It’s all about making real roots, not temporary stations.

Indoor growers steal power. They over-tax an already strained electrical grid. They use chemicals instead of the healing powers of the Sun. They take over warehouses growing hundreds of plants, then leave. The perception is that indoor growers are not in harmony with the Universe the way outdoor growers.

But it gets back to the money. With outdoor growing, you get one magnificent harvest per season. Indoor growers can have up to three to six in a season, not counting stagnated growth. That’s where one crop follows another, ad infinitum.

You might say one crop is grown under the watchful eyes of the Gods and another is under the watchful eyes of the bankers.

This sounds harsh but this is the changing markets that are happening right in front of our eyes. At least, right in front of the eye’s of the growers who for the past fifty years, have been bringing us our Dope, and now, is almost relegated to watching from the sidelines.

Marijuana is a billion dollar industry, in California. The pie is being cut and slices are being divided. There is enough pie for everyone but the lure of cash is turning some from compassion to the bright light of a bull market that is crashing the good china of the North while giving a wide berth to the indoor grower. (Not that the indoor grower is immune from thefts, power-outages, bugs, mites, and the Man.)

Don’t get me wrong, dispensaries are still buying from the outdoor growers, just not at their price and the appreciation isn’t there too. The days of bringing your crop to town and having it bought almost sight unseen are over. Working all year for the harvest and being sure you’ll make your money for your family and having a little something leftover is gone.

That’s why Northern California, the Emerald Triangle will have to change the way they did business.

Next up: The Change.

The War on Drugs Marches On

Here in beautiful San Francisco one of our local newspaper, The Examiner, (once really good, now Republican.) is running a story about how our inner city kids have to walk by drug dealers to get to their school. The drugs being sold? Percodan, OxyContin, Vicodin, and for some of the older kids being held back, Viagra. That’s right, pharmaceuticals. Mommy’s and Daddy’s little helpers have made it to the streets, and how. And the City doesn’t know what to do? That sounds like a drug problem. I have six nephews under the age 20. Three of them are on some form of so-called legal drugs. Prescribed for them by their parents, no less. It’s amazing.

I know the kids these days are very hip to pills but my lord, there are so many different kinds and names. In my day we had about four or five pills to choose from and we were happy to have a choice between Tuinols and Sopars (Quaaludes). Today you have to a PDR in your Hello Kitty backpack to tell the little guys apart. Good Luck Kids!

This column has been missing in action due my recent trip to the Emerald Triangle. I am going to be doing this more and more. It was in that area that I learned my craft and the industry when I participated in the trade, back in the Eighties. As the WEED industry changes daily with new dispensaries opening up in California and elsewhere, and the demand becomes greater for product, we can’t forget the players who brought us to the dance in the first place. Everything happening today we owe to the pioneers in Northern California who took on the law, the weather and coaxed a black market business out of the shadows, creating what we have now. A society on the verge of Legalization.

While I was gone, an article I wrote was quoted by the SF Weekly concerning people I knew who were boycotting High Times Cannabis Cup that was held here a couple of weekends ago. The gist of my article was that by holding a Cannabis Cup in June, this prevents your outdoor grower from competing. While this competition did make my Emerald Triangle friends slightly perturb, it mostly, in my words, hurt their collective feelings. They felt really left out.

In the next couple of blogs, I am going to go into details about my trip north. The people I know and the ones I met for the first time. What is happening up there and of course, what they think their position will be after Legalization.  

I think you can tell my heart is with the outdoor growers up north. I shall not hide that. I am a patient and purchase my medication from a dispensary. I am not against indoor growing. Indoor growing is saving Detroit and most of Northern California. While state and city budgets get sliced like roasted lamb on a spit, some smaller towns up north are being totaling subsidize indirectly, if not directly by growers.

We are in very heady times. The lure of cash and the chance to land on Boardwalk is very real for some Marihooey Merchants out there. As I’ve said before, the gold miners didn’t make any money. The storeowners did.

In some places we need to take baby-steps. In other areas we need to bust on down the doors of perception and show the straight world that heads can be responsible. Like getting high without running everyone off the road.

Also, many occasions in this column I fault Los Gangaleses for screwing it up for us in Northern California. Yesterday two dispensary workers were murdered in robberies. The close proximity of the two dispensaries and the same M.O. for both robberies makes me think they were done by the same people. D’uh. I feel really bad for the Marijuana Industry Workers who died, but I’m kinda hoping this is an isolated event. Not something we’re going to see more of in the future. Because L.A. is so expansive it is a different game down there, I get it. But L.A. is greedy and feels they deserve everything that they can get their little tinsel-tainted hands on. This makes it harder on the players that are trying to bring this issue in without too much blowback.

Violence can never be tolerated. We have to come together and make sure security is in place and that the dispensary is legal. Too many Pot Shops are invitation for trouble.

I don’t know how Tom Ammiano does it.

Finally I like to take this time to thank all my readers. I started with two, then it went to three and four, and the other day I broke a hundred for the first time. Please feel free to comment and tell me what interest you.

Once again thanks to all those in the Triangle in made my stay so perfect. Peace.

More Later.

Boycotting the High Times Cannabis Cup

High Times’ Cannabis Cup is here in San Francisco. After decades of holding the smoke-a-thon in Amsterdam, Frissy has been tag as the first official sanctioned Cannabis Cup in America. As it would happen, it’s like the second or third Cup that we’ve hosted here in the Bay Area in the last year, but it is High Times first.  Last November there was a locally produced Cannabis Cup, and in April of this year, the incredibly Cannabis and Hemp Expo, also had a tasting event, plus a few others that light up the Bay.

What I thought would be just a weekend of Peace and Love with incredibly smoke and wares to be displayed, actually had some grumblings going on in the shadows. In the last couple of weeks, the WEED wire has been cackling with gossip and opinions and feelings concerning High Times foray into the Bay Area.

And you thought that the Platters had problems with other groups claiming their name. Or how about all those wrestling associations and boxing federations claiming their titles are the real deal and only their sanctioned championship fights should count in the record books.

Why do different entities fight for sponsorship and the all-important branding name above the title?

Because the pie is that big and filling.

I like the guys at High Times. I met some of these cats once while securing rooms for a party they had in Vegas some years back. During that experience I met a couple of the Big Shots of H.T’s. They all seemed very dedicated to the cause. High Time’s was almost like Mad Magazine for a lot of us growing up. It was literally the first connection I had to POT and I would never disparage these guys. To me, that would be almost sacrilegious. But the whispers and scuttleBud following the Cup is interesting to note, at least for me. I think it is indicative of what is happening here in the Bay Area.

As I’ve said many times, in terms of Legalization and commercialism- as go San Francisco, so goes the nation. Get ready for the same sponsorship battles coming to your town in the near future. It may be a grass roots movement, but this is the greenest industry out there right now in terms of Money. That is where the battlefield lies right now. Wining the hearts and minds of local heads everywhere is what’s at stake.

What we are seeing in the infancy of the WEED industry is probably what Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey went through until they realized they were stronger together than trying to outdo each other.

But this is what I find amusing about the whole deal. Here in San Francisco, we take everything and twist it until we’ve wrung all the good intentions out of any idea that floats our way. Point in fact, we bay citizens are allowed to get MM cards and buy POT legally. Then we have trade shows and Cannabis Cups every couple months or so now, where the best of the best is displayed and ingested. Life couldn’t be any better? Not here. Not when every aspect of Life can be distilled politically, by our own people, ironically.

This is what I mean…

I am going to give you the issues and why some people are calling for a boycott.

Btw, this would really crack me up if it wasn’t so real…

For the weekend of June 19-20^th, High Times is holding a Cannabis Cup in San Francisco. Attendees will pay roughly $50-100 depending on how many days attending. There will be booths and information relating to the Industry. There will be speakers holding symposiums throughout the weekend discussing everything from cultivation to legalization. Along with usual Marijuana get together there is a smoke-down Saturday night-contest when the best Indicas, Sativas, and edibles are decided from a massive selection.

http://hightimes.com/events/ht_admin/6491

(The Schedule)

Seems fun enough, you’d think so…

But the word has gone out through different channels to boycott the event. There are three mains reasons I am hearing. Talking to members of each group asking for the boycott, I could hear the seriousness and even, fear in their tone when discussing the Cup. You can’t please everyone, but I felt each group had a point. I think…

#1 Reason for a boycott:

Okay, this I think I understand...

Some local activist are asking us to boycott the High Time’s Cannabis Cup because insults the Medical Marijuana industry. They are saying that H.T. is treating Marijuana like it was wine with the tastings and pitting vintages and strains against each other vying for the Blue Ribbon of WEED. As we try for Legalization here in Cali, some smokin’ politicos feel this feeds into the other side’s theory that the kids are usually Medical Marijuana as a front for just wanting to get high.

The purists feel that it mocks the very idea of compassion and the need for Marijuana for medicinal use is under enough scrutiny.

As a card-carry Medical Marijuana patient and a person who likes to get high, I’m stuck somewhere in the middle.

#2 Reason for boycott:

This is huge from some of the people I spoke to…

Because of the time of year this event is being held, it caters to the indoor grower. If it was a true Vintner’s Cup, it would be held in October or November, after the OUTDOOR harvest came in.

See, in the Bay Area, because of the HIGH demand for WEED, the traditional growers from up Nort’ the Emerald Triangle Way, are being usurped by the indoor growers who can control…well…most of everything, unlike your Mr. or Ms. Natural grower. And in turn, have many more growing seasons a year. This drives outdoor grower’s nuts.

  The indoor grower can manipulate the weather, the growing time and all external events unlike the outdoor grower who can lose everything to an early frost or too much rain. But most importantly, and I cannot stress this enough, many of the indoor growers are NOT organic. They are able to control their environment as closely and with such delicate manageability, dare I say, with better living through chemistry. When it comes to indoor growing, very little is left to chance.   

There is a huge confrontations waiting to happen between the two different visions on how Dope should be grown.

#3 Reason to boycott:

Okay, this one is personal, for some…

I talked to one of my buddies in the industry concerning how the dispensaries feel about the H.T’s Cannabis Cup and all the politics surrounding it. This person said, “My dispensary will have a presence at the Cup, we’ll be there. We’ve been at all major Cannabis and Hemp related events in the Bay Area since we opened four years ago. I tell you this though, what we won’t be doing…is the Cannabis Cup that they had here last year. The sponsors wanted us to donate…Donate (the person actually did the fingers quotes thing)…a pound of WEED to attend, plus the fee for the booth, get our name and logo out there. The money part sure, but a pound of WEED. That’s kinda weird.”

When I asked this person if they really wanted you guys to pony up a LB of WEED to get in, he said he was “pretty sure.” I didn’t go to the source and asked them to comment so I am not saying that all dispensaries had to give some to get in but that is what my friend told me, and he’s been pretty right on up to this point.

At the right moment, I will pursue that angle…

But what does it all mean?

I don’t know. I could speculate that this is the future of the Industry, factions within not being able to agree on an Industry standard. I could say that because there is so much money involved, it doesn’t matter what a lot of people are thinking or bitching about, the money is going to supersede politics like a tidal wave carrying the passive ones out to sea, leaving the ones who put their stakes down hard still standing. The smart ones who got into the circus early enough to be known as the going concern, the Establishment.  Some will believe that they, their company and logo are the rightful heirs to the throne, as it were.

I know who is not happy. The growers up north, that’s who. They are being left out of the process. The idea of having this event now, at this time of year, simply precludes the Emerald Triangle Growers from being there.

BP is putting up 20 billion to the small people to help cover the expenses lost due to the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico. I don’t think that even comes close to what is at stake up north in terms of being cutting out of the pie for the high people.

We are at a point where commerce will dictate. The days that the business of POT only employed cool people are over. Get use to the Greenhouse Keeping Seal of Approval. Get use to money being the only language spoken and heard when it comes to WEED.

There is time though. The High Times Cannabis Cup isn’t the enemy, nor is competition. It is us, as usual. As we move forward, how we get along with each is going to be paramount. I understand that the demand for product is…high out there. We live in glorious times where some of us can partake in legal Cannabis Bacchanals, and get away with it.

Just like when Obama was elected, I get a little misty-eyed thinking about how this country can change. We can do this. We can get Marijuana legalized and stop with all the shakedowns and possibility of jail.

The way I see it, Medical Marijuana has given a business plan and a face to the Marijuana Industry. As dispensaries open in a town near you and crime DOESN’T take over the neighborhood and taxes can be glean, the idea of Legalization becomes easier and easier to accept, for the uninitiated.

We will have to come to terms with the desire to see all those in pain, for whom Marijuana is a welcome relief, get it. But at the same time, as an adult, I would like to say someday, “I would just like to get high and not be busted for it.”

Is that too much to ask? Do I need to dress it up some for public viewing? Or can I just be myself?

But in the mean time, I know me where some good bud is being smoked.

More Later.



Ten Things I miss about a Stay-at-Home Dealer

Of the supposedly 43 million Americans who smoke Marijuana, there is such a small percent of us that are allowed to have safe and easy access to our drug of choice, that to complain seems to be a little elitist and even downright spoiled. Having a Medical Marijuana Card has changed my life for definitely the better and not to be redundant, and it’s made scoring much safer. But if you’re of a certain age and generation, because of the nature of Prohibition, a lot of us had to and still have to, go to someone’s abode in order to score our Pot. As much as I love having a card and going to the Pot Shop, or having it deliver it, I miss the interaction of the old daze.

So…here’s my list of what I miss about seeing my Man (or Woman, as it were) to score.

1)  Old School Etiquette.

Believe it or not, there was an incredible set of manners involved to buying Pot in the old daze. Upon arriving at your Dealer’s pad, you’d never mention why you were there, everyone knew. To ask to see the product was totally uncool, you had to wait ‘till your Man pull out his wares. Then he or she would roll one for consumption. If you decided you wanted to buy, after weighing it out, (more later about this) you would then roll one from your newly purchased lid, (yes, that was what it was called) and seal the deal with another joint.

    To do otherwise was seen as being a capitalist, possible narc, and worse, maybe a person who wouldn’t be allowed back into the hallow grounds.

2)  The Relationship.

When it is my turn at the counter in a dispensary, if I know the Budtender, I trust their judgment or suggestions of what is good and stony, or tasty and stony, and go with that. If I don’t know the person, I go with what looks good. At the finer Pot Shops, there are jeweler’s magnifying loupes and other somewhat high-tech stuff to help you pick out your Durbin Poison.

I have a pretty good relationship with the guys at some of the dispensaries around town but I never forget that after I step away from the counter, they say, “Next,” just like at a deli or the DMV. Dispensaries are great but they are a business.

    In the old daze, the relation between you and your dealer was very special and personal. There was an unspoken code not to piss the other off. Not to do anything stupid or say anything outlandish on the phone. And in return, the Dealer made you feel like you were there only customer. It was very one on one.

                It was like we all had to be more human in those days because of the precarious nature of the business. There was a symbiotic balance to the relationship, we both needed each other.

                That doesn’t exist anymore.

“Next.”

3)  The Big Favor

Okay, to be fair, I’ve heard that if you have a MM card, most dispensaries will lay a bud on you if you don’t have the cash and don’t repeatedly do it every day.

    And for complete transparency, a couple of times, a divine personality will offer me a little something-something to try, but that is it for freebies. And it is only a gram at the most…

    There were many times, many, many times that I was either low on funds or to no fault of my own, a paycheck didn’t come through on a Friday, and I was broke until Monday.

    Kidz, before there was a thing called a ‘BFF,’ there was your Dealer. To paraphrase the Freak Brothers, ‘It’s better to have dope in times of no cash, rather than to have cash in times of no dope.’ So to turn that around, there has been many times in the past forty years when the need for WEED was greater than my pocketbook allow and this is where the word, ‘fronted,’ came from.

    One of the best aspects of having your own dealer, is that a bond of trust is formed, but unlike your banker, car dealer or your attorney, whom you may also have a long business relationship with, your dealer actually trusts you. If you’ve been a good boy and buyer, they will front you for a week, a month, and every so often you meet that special Dealer who really never expects you to pay them back. You develop a universal tab that even in making payments; you can never hope to pay back in full. Your Dealer knows that too. But in the Old Daze, that was chocked up to doing business with Hippies. It’s true, sometimes it wasn’t about money.

4)   The Focus

One of the aspects of having a Dealer that I never realized was the actual time we had together. Even if you saw your Dealer every couple of weeks, or every week, looking at you, Bro, it felt real.

There are bars with bartenders that feel like friends because of your frequency to the bar or your tipping habits, but they probably have a lot of friends just like you. There are restaurants where the wait-staff are like long lost relatives who you party with at the Holidays, just like Uncle Ben, they might forget your name, but they act like they know you.

Certain Dealers became good friends, if not great friends. I go back as much as thirty years with a few Dinosaurs from the Day.

Think as WEED as a bottle of wine. In my life, I’ve kicked backed with some very nice people sampling different vintages and ‘grapes’ through the years. That’s called history.

When you get older, it’s nice to be able to look back at the experiences you’re proud of, to have stories to tell.

Hey, I went to the dispensary today and got some Trainwreck, Romulan, and some very tasty Dragon’s Breath. That’s it. End of story. Hey, I also got a good deal on some milk today.

Doesn’t have the teeth of, “Hey dude, I went to see my Man today, and while I was scoring these guys got busted across the street for unpaid traffic fines. Broham, you should have seen our faces when the cops pulled up with the cherries flashing. I thought they were there for us. It was wild!” (Maybe a true story.)

5)   For Good or Bad.

Not everyone is going to understand this but I grew up at a time when there wasn’t any entertainment. True story. Until around Nineteen-eighty-five, the world was lit by candlelight and you had to make your own fun. Once the Internet arrived, it became just a matter of buying the right device that will keep your attention from ever lagging again. Before that, only ten to fifteen movies came out a year, you had to rely mostly on comic books and stories old people told. So you were literally forced to watch crappy movies and shitty TV. Believe if I had the choice, I don’t think I would have watch, ‘The Land of the Lost’ or ‘The Man with Two-Heads,’ two pieces of complete shite, that I could not imagine having not seen as I look back. See, with lack of choice, you’re forced to make due.

    In the old daze, your Dealer might only have a half a pound of something. In those times, it may even have been brown and have seeds. I’m not kidding. But you would get it because…it was the only game in town. No choice.

    It makes you prize the good shit even more. In a way, I feel sorry for the kids who start at the top and will only know ‘down.’

6)   The Weighing out.

I don’t know about you, but when it comes time to weigh out the product, I don’t know where to look. It’s not like I’m at the butcher shop or weighing out veggies to see how much I’m paying per pound. When it comes to Weed, I’m kind of use to my Man throwing in another half of a gram, for either good customer service or the feeling of let’s not squabble over crumbs.

In the dispensaries it is different. It is just like going to the supermarket or feed store, or anywhere else a scale is used for commercial purposes. The guys behind the counter answers to his boss ultimately, not us. The guys at the Pot Shops are good, but there is always someone behind you if you have a problem with the weight.

Having a home-brew Dealer, the weighing out portion of the show is part of the home-spun process. It’s like horse-trading; the haggling over the price is one of the aspects of the business that the old guys like. If your bag looks small, the home dealer might drop a nug in the bag to fluff it out for no reason except to see a smile on the buyer’s face.

In the dispensary, it’s ‘take it or leave it.’ No bitching allowed.  I think that’s my point, there’s no bitching allowed. The human interaction is kept to humble state of gratitude that a place that sells Pot legally is open.  

7)   The Weirdness.

Okay, I’m being honest here…Above I spoke about the kind of queasy feeling I get when the stuff gets weighed out. Embarrassing but true, I try not to scrutinize the guy weighing out the product, but my eyes go to the scale to make sure the weight is correct. Not my proudest pronouncement.

    Here’s another one, the lengths I gone to score. I have driven into the deepest darkest spots of strange cities. I have gone to stranger’s home based on a friend of a friend’s okay, to buy an eighth of Mex. I have approached probable heads on the road, musicians, record store workers, and toothless vendors on Venice Beach or in Central Park. Anyone who looked like they got high. Again, embarrassing but true.

If you grew up in a time when there were dope famines, or what we called in the Middle-West, ‘the Summer Bummer.’ Every August and September, before harvest time, it was impossible to get dope until the bales would arrive in October.

I think I even drove to Chicago once.

Am I proud? No. Would I do it again? Yes, unless if I knew there was another way. Back in those days, we didn’t know another way.

8)  The Buzz

If you want to know what was happening, your Dealer was in the mix. For some reason, the various dealers I have associated with over the years, their homes became like the great salons of Paris. Dealers knew the skinny on the busts that went down and who was bringing what into town. Dealers got backstage passes before the rest of us even knew the band was coming to play. Sometimes you even found out what the local family-oriented politician is smoking.

Beyond buying the smoke, you felt wired into a community of people who were just like you. Living part of their lives underground hiding from the Man because of the common theme of, “Gosh, I like to get high.”

9)   The Shared Experience.

Having a stay-at-home dealer, you knock on a door, the door opened, and you were asked in, just like a Vampire, that’s the only way you’re getting in.

In that small, implicit process, agreements are made without even a word spoken. From that moment on, everyone agrees to be cool. Not to talk over the phone about product or bring strange people without advance notice. There is a set of rules and etiquette that have been laid down years ago by the pioneer freaks that learned how to work the Black Market without it working you. There is a reason things are the way they are.

Dispensaries and legalization will change all that. Life will be better. But as I have mentioned before, we should have a National Pot Dealers Day. We should have a day where we honor the unsung heroes of the movement, the procurers. The people who get us our WEED. Doesn’t it seem a little fair? Say maybe April 18^th, before we stock up for our national holiday. Take one day out to honor the people who when busted, pay for all their expensive themselves. Face it, when one dealer goes down, we just find another one. It is time that we give back to those that have been keeping the supply coming all these years.

10)        I Like Being a Criminal.

The greatest day in my life was getting my MM card. Those first few weeks were golden. I had never experienced anything like it in my life. To do something legal that had been illegal for my whole life, was just short of amazing. I did day trips and kept records on vintages and strains that I like. I learned the difference between a Sativa and Indica, or should I say, the difference of passing out at noon and not. Those were heady times, if you know what I mean.

There is something so civil about being able to have the medicine delivered or having it at my disposal within blocks from my house, but the truth is, I do miss being a criminal, a little bit.

    I can only say this because I have something to base it on. If I had to find a stay-at-home dealer every couple of years, like I have been doing, well…I don’t know what I would do? Quit? I don’t think so. Bitch? Yeah, I do that pretty good on a regular basis. So I don’t think that would change.

    See, once you cultivate the identity, it’s hard to give it up. For decades, I learned how to be cool. I learned how to walk with pounds in a duffle bag by the biggest and baddest, on both sides of the law. I moved specifically unnoticed exited buildings and knowing haunts like bandits in the night. I became friends with gangsters and big boys that moved tons when it was all said and done, and sold.

Now, while I am so thankful to have safe access to score, I miss the old days. The crazy shit you do to get high. Isn’t that part of it really? Not getting caught?

Maybe I’m getting old. Y’know when you watch one of your old favorite movies, something that you came upon thinking it was the shit. Then when actually viewing the old flick, you say to yourself, “What the fuck was I thinking? This sucks.” But you remember it as classic.

    Maybe it was so much about the movie itself but what you were doing at the time.

    That’s what I miss. All the other stuff I was doing at the time when I thought the principal objective was to score. It is really about the chase and the journey.

    Luckily, come November, the journey gets better.

More Later.