[ed. Happy 4/20 Day.]
In November, they basically legalized marijuana. Even if you don't pay attention to ballot initiatives or the like, you probably still possessed a fuzzy picture of where things stood. As of the past election cycle, marijuana is now totally street legal in Colorado and Washington. And possibly Oregon? And you'd been hearing for years about all those other places—there was a new state all the time—where you could buy it for medical purposes. Like California and Washington, D.C., and Connecticut and Rhode Island and, like, maybe New Mexico? Meanwhile, even in states where there is not yet a stipulation for those undergoing chemo to be able to blaze out, isn't it functionally decriminalized? Isn't it more or less okay to smoke weed right in front of a cop in New York City as long as you're not killing someone with a tire iron while simultaneously being young and nonwhite? And conventional wisdom, at least from certain purviews, holds that the social taboo surrounding marijuana is now close to zero, whether you're into older white women in Eileen fisher comfies (see: Steve Martin in It's Complicated) or rap music (see: rap music).We've supposedly been on the cusp of this new world for a long time. And if we haven't arrived at it yet, we are now on the cusp of the cusp of the cusp of the future that stoners, libertarians, and other people you've gotten stuck talking to in bathroom lines at parties have predicted for decades: a time when marijuana becomes a normal commercial commodity. Grown safely by nice people, taxed and regulated. But also packaged and branded! The moment when weed at long last fulfills its vast potential to be one of the great—maybe even the greatest, now that tobacco is passé—American consumer products. Something, like yoga or frozen yogurt, around which distinct lifestyles can be built. Something that, like Rag & Bone blazers and the cheeses of France, can by dint of acquisitional obsession make you forget about everything bad. We may finally be nearing the moment when whether you smoke weed no longer defines you, but maybe where you shop for weedwill. The only question is: What kind of shopping bliss awaits us?
It would seem that certain precincts already know the answer to that question. In cities like Los Angeles and Seattle and Denver, where it's been gray-area legal for years, they've already built the foundations of the commercial-weed ecosystem. To know what the future holds, wouldn't one merely consult an expert in these places?
Step 1
Determine What Kind of Weed Shopper You Are
In the quest to review and systematize the nascent marijuana-shopping experience, the first place GQ's Critical Shopper, Marijuana Division, visited was a medical-marijuana dispensary called Denver Relief, which provides relief for people in Denver by way of getting blazed. (GQ's Critical Shopper, Marijuana Division, heard many phrases for being high while reviewing dispensaries—faded, zooted,blasted, smoked yourself cheese-dicked—but objectively the most awesome is blazed, so you should probably get used to reading it.)
Like a lot of dispensaries, Denver Relief is located somewhere most accurately described as nondescript. Critical Shopper literally does not remember where it is, except that you can see a parking lot out the window. The waiting room is the kind of place where it feels like a hot-stone massage might break out at any moment: leather sofas, oriental rugs, piped-in synthesizer music. Shopper flipped through a back issue of National Geographic and The Cannabible while he waited for the receptionist, in a cozy sweater behind a spotless Plexiglas window, to buzz him into the "bud room" when it was his turn. (...)
Shopper had on this day brought with him another Critical Marijuana Shopper: the weed reviewer for Westword, the Denver alt-weekly, a man who writes under the name William Breathes. Shopper will not physically describe William Breathes, because his important work is possible only as long as he's anonymous. Breathes confirmed Bushwhacker's information. "As far as flower goes?" Breathes said. "The best in Denver are Denver Relief, the Pink House, and the Clinic. The quality is phenomenal." (...)
So that's the first question you need to ask yourself when you start shopping for weed: How serious am I about marijuana? How erudite do I want to get on it? If this answer is "pretty freaking erudite," you should consider a place like those listed above by Breathes in Denver, or Greenworks or Dockside Co-op in Seattle, or Buds & Roses in Los Angeles. What Shopper calls the Connoisseur Class. Or Straight Nerd Spots. They offer their own brand of experience. To wit:
Once in the bud room, Ean Seeb, one of the proprietors, brought out some of his favorite strains to show Shopper. "This is our LA OG," he said, opening a glass canister filled with sculpted buds, all purplish and gnarled. Ean doesn't look like the guy who would sell you a dime bag out of the back of a Saturn Vue. He was that day fully GQ'ed out in a black cowl-neck sweater. His gray wingtips had neon pink laces. "Give it a smell," he said.
Breathes took the canister and inhaled: "That has a really nice baby powder and kind of...mint! Just a wonderful baby-powder nose on it."
"We say it's earthy with a hint of dryer sheets," Ean says.
Normally, Shopper would not be allowed in the bud room without a state-issued red card. But Ean made an exception for journalistic purposes. What was it like? A rectangle not bigger than twenty feet across, with faux-exposed-brick walls. Stretching across one side of the room was a long granite countertop with wooden partitions so no one need eyeball your merch. It called to mind the showroom of a rare-coin dealer. Only, behind the counter, lit lovingly, were thirty-two glass jars on shelves. And in each of these jars were dozens and dozens of grotesquely large, obsessively manicured marijuana blossoms. They had names like Bio-Jesus, Gumbo, Tahoe OG, Bio-Diesel, Dopium, Ghost Train Haze, Hashberry, Headband, Q3. All grown by Denver Relief itself, in its enormous grow house. (In Colorado, dispensaries must grow at least 70 percent of their product.) Having come from one of the states where places like this don't exist, Shopper realized that a pervasive sense of scarcity had always surrounded weed in most parts of society. It's something people kept in old cigar boxes in the backs of underpants drawers, something there was never that much of, and when it ran out, who knew exactly when you could get more? Even without being a particularly avid user, being in one of these rooms for the first time can trigger the same hoarding impulse a Sudanese refugee might feel in a Walmart.
by Devin Friedman, GQ | Read more:
Photo: Maurcicio Alejo
