Cherry Pie

Medical marijuana trail trash.

Pet Peeve #3: Stoner asshats who leave their empty “medical marijuana” containers on the trails. I will support medical marijuana when it is sold in real pharmacies and prescribed by real doctors for actual medical conditions. Being a loser stoner who listens to too much Pink Floyd or Snoop Lion is not an actual medical condition. I picked the first vial up with the hope of getting someone’s prescription info so that I might shame them, but unlike any real drug prescription, this being medical marijuana, there is no information on the label other than the name of the blend. Cherry Pie? Seriously?

I do not find discarded Lipitor or Musicinex containers on the trails.

The odds are very great against medical marijuana ever being regulated like a genuine prescription medicine. California’s Medical Marijuana laws are basically just some sort of half-assed end run around the Federal Government’s classification of marijuana as a drug. The California laws allowing medical marijuana are compounded/confused/made foggier by individual city regulations. The regulations in Los Angeles were largely written by a bunch of folks with a vested interest in medical marijuana (growers, in other words). This is why there are 3 medical marijuana dispensaries on the three block stretch of Sunset Blvd in Echo Park surrounding my work, and only one liquor store. Please don’t try to convince me that there are that many more people in Echo Park suffering from glaucoma or anxiety or AIDs than there are people who want to kick back with a cold beer.

Either make marijuana purely medical, and regulate it the same way Prozac or Wellbutrin or other mellow-me-out drugs are regulated, or else make it purely legal, regulate it like booze, tax the crap out of it, and enforce laws against consuming it in public so that we don’t need to be confronted by slacker losers standing outside the donut shop day in and day out, in a cloud of smoke, with their 6-year-old-son who should probably be in school. Pretty much whenever I am accosted by anoyone on the streets, it’s either an drunk looking for a fight or a pothead looking for “money to ride the bus”. I’m never accosted by anyone wanting to give me change for the bus or money for a beer or anything else, really. People who accost me never want to give, but always want to be given to, and drugs or alcohol are almost invariably involved.

I remember my junior high school stoner days, back in 1973, 8th grade, St. Michael’s University School, in Mt. Tolmie Park on the same trail we ran cross country on, a trail we called the Ho Chi Minh Trail, stoned on lids of pot we scored from one of the prefects in Harvey House. Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” had just come out, Steve Miller’s “The Joker” was a big hit on the radio, bands like Yess were making triple albums, and Robin Trower was just starting to make some of the best stoner rock that history will ever hear. It was a great time to be a stoner. We were, however, in my vague memories, respectful – at least of some things. Maybe not authority (I think we should be suspicious of any teens who are not disrespectful to authority, because those are the kids who are genuinely up to something) but nature, yes. We appreciated our little sanctuary on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, where we could sit in our little school uniforms like a bunch of miniature Angus Youngs, passing around a tight, thin (don’t bogart that) joint. It was beautiful up there. We didn’t want to fuck up a good thing by trashing the place.

I don’t know about these new medical marijuana stoners. Are these the same as the @ssholes vandalizing Joshua Tree? Or maybe they are just a bunch of privileged suburban white kids who have about as much respect for the nature they are hanging out, getting high, in as mountain bikers do, which is to say none?

Yeah, wow, man, like, nature. Totally. Whoa. Three words, @sshole: Discovery Channel. Pizza.