Vanessa Gregoriadis
Appearances
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
That's when I realized that Eddie was driving around with thousands of dollars in cash on him, basically at all times.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
When you have that much cash, you probably also want to keep something on you for protection. Eddie said he was absolutely against guns, but my mind started racing. I began looking at all these cars driving beside us, being like, are they also filled with drugs and cash and maybe guns?
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
Some dispensaries kept millions of dollars in cash or weed in giant safes. And though I didn't see Eddie's, I did see one of these safes. It was insane. It was the size of one of those massive light-colored wood closets you buy at Ikea, stuffed full of vacuum-sealed bags filled with weed. And these safes made the dispensaries a huge target for thieves. Let's say thieves did target your store.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
Who was going to help you? Not the cops, that's for sure. And actually, Eddie told me that at one unlucky dispensary, the robbers dressed up as LAPD officers and pretended to be raiding the store, only to steal everything. Ocean's 420s. That's what people in the scene called those robbers. You know, a combo of Ocean's 11 and 420, police code for weed.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
But the real raids by the DEA, those were worse. Because once again, the sale and possession of marijuana was still federally illegal. And sometimes the feds would raid the shop and they'd just take the inventory. But other times, they'd seize your house, your car, everything. If Eddie got raided by the DEA, he could lose it all.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
And all anyone could talk about was how this new form of medicine was going to help depressed people in therapy finally feel happy or save cancer patients from their nausea. Suddenly, the media wasn't talking about high school burners wasting their lives getting high. They were interviewing patients about using pot as medicine.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
All of his hard work in this brave new world of sort of legal pot would go poof. It was a terrifying thought, so Eddie told me he tried to keep his business as decentralized as possible. He stored weed and cash in safes spread across several locations. He didn't trust an assistant with records, lest they narc on him.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
Plants don't do that, right? Eddie thought there was something peaceful about plants. He actually seemed to me like he wanted to be somebody different. Somebody more carefree. Somebody more like Sam, making marijuana plants from seeds. Plants couldn't stab Eddie in the back. Except there were people out there saying Eddie'd be the one to do the backstabbing.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
You know how sometimes you smoke weed and you just get really paranoid? Like, you start to think your heart is beating really loud, like way, way, way too loud, and everybody else can hear it? And not only can they hear it, but they're staring at you, judging you, and thinking the absolute worst of you? Well, it sort of seems like that happened to Eddie.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
Because of his job, maybe he started to get really, really paranoid. He started getting nervous, thinking he was being watched. And you know what? He was right. Right after I hung out with Eddie, there was a huge raid. I watched the whole thing on the news. It was like a huge number of DEA agents, 120, and they came down hard.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
They went right to Eddie's place on the Sunset Strip, across the street from the Hustler store, which might have sold furry handcuffs and PVC bras, and they just busted in.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
I called Eddie to find out what happened. All in all, from these 11 dispensaries, the DEA seized 5,000 pounds of pot, $200,000 in cash, and several guns. Lots of people protested against this kind of action, but the city said the dispensary scene was going to be over. No one else could open up. And so Eddie's business was under greater risk than ever, but he was determined to survive.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
When I spoke with him, he did talk initially about wanting to leave, to go up to the beautiful world of the North where there were people and plants and it's 3 a.m. and you can just watch something as it blooms and everybody's just got to see it. But he was now adamant that he was going to persevere, that he and the rest of the new pot entrepreneurs were going to stay open.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
But according to court documents, he wouldn't talk to me about this himself, he started cutting corners. And cutting corners is never a good sign in business, especially one that's only sort of legal. The Eddie I met, the weed yuppie with a heart of gold, was the type of guy who, yes, carried thousands of dollars in cash, but also checked in on his assistant while she recovered from surgery.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
So what happened next was unexpected, to say the least. Before we get into Eddie's story, let me just explain something. In some dispensaries, perhaps to facilitate easy purchasing, there was an ATM. And ATMs are the perfect way to wash dirty cash. Sam, who sold seeds, told me about this.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
Now, the feds alleged that Eddie was doing this and, in fact, that he'd taken pot out of state to sell to the Carolinas. This was verboten. It had to be California and California only. And yet, if you look at why people in California were going out of state to sell at that time, it was just simple economics.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
New medical marijuana laws in California were meant to help these patients. They were meant to just allow them to grow some weed and share it with each other. That's really what was being legalized. Lawmakers never meant for this to become a massive business. But medical marijuana was a great way to make money. Or, as the joke went at the time, turns out money does really grow on trees.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
It was supply and demand. There was too much supply. Filmmaker Kevin Booth again.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
Kevin and others told me that people started driving weed to the east, where they could get better prices.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
It wasn't just that the market was flooded with too much weed. There were also way too many dispensaries. It was almost a joke how out of control everything got.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
Peter Hecht is a journalist who wrote a book about this time called Weedland.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
To Peter, this is not what the medical marijuana revolution was supposed to be about.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
For Eddie, as the pressure started to build on the business, things got really nuts. Now, this part is not silly or funny at all. According to court documents that I dug up, even the medical pot and clawed cat oasis neighborhood, West Hollywood, got sick of having so many medical marijuana dispensaries there that they passed a moratorium on any new ones opening.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
This triggered a dispute between Eddie and his landlord, and his landlord said he had to buy the building or move his store near the Viper Room elsewhere, which sounds like it led Eddie to take measures that were not legal, even in the slightest. In this spiraling feud, his landlord's family was attacked, majorly. On one occasion, four guys broke in and hit his wife in the head with a metal bar.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
Their home was set on fire twice. Another of their properties was set on fire. Two Molotov cocktails were thrown on the route of his rival dispensary. Eddie would not talk to me about these specifics. He spent six years in LA County Jail without bail, which is its own horrific story, and then pled guilty to conspiracy to commit home invasion robbery, stalking, and five counts of arson.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
Eventually, he was sentenced to 16 years in prison for a slew of charges, some related to selling pot in the Carolinas, some related to the landlord dispute. It's a very long rap sheet and a sentence as long as fuck. We have exchanged letters from prison. In the first one, he wrote, Wonderful to hear from you. Quite unexpected. Thank you for the pleasant surprise. Yep, I'm in San Quentin.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
Also unexpected. LOL. It was the charming weed Yuppie Eddie I'd met all those years ago. He talked about how thrilling it was to be alive back then, how each strain he brought to market was like being a naturalist discovering a previously unknown species. He also wanted to talk about time credit for the time he thought he should have taken off his sentence from being in the L.A.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
County Jail and was organizing other men in prison who had failed to get credits as well. Could I maybe get in touch with someone important to help him? Because Eddie's power was now gone, really stripped fully, and it's still hard for me to reconcile the man with what he may have done, as his business and his life spiraled out of control.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
In this case, it was plants. So just like whiskey after Prohibition, or OnlyFans after Craigslist Personals shut down, people couldn't get into the business fast enough.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
King for a day no longer, this was the end of Eddie's story. But it wasn't the end of Weeds. Back in the 1800s, many of the California prospecting boom towns became ghost towns when prospectors failed to find the precious metal they'd been panning for. And you have to wonder, where did all the people like Eddie end up? The ones who were involved in that first green nugget rush?
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
The first blush of a medical quasi-legal market? Because California's weed rush of the 2000s, it turned out, was no different than those prospecting boom towns. Many of the people who were active in it, like Eddie, who had that initial capitalist dream, are sort of gone today.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
We called around to tons of people who had active businesses, and they either weren't answering their phones or didn't seem to want to be found.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
Or in prison, says Kevin Booth. Like Sam, the guy from the North, who got himself locked up for years, too. When the Fed's helicopters would strife up North, sometimes growers would run out with their medical marijuana printouts. Just like the one I had for the doctor. But that didn't stop anything. They got prosecuted anyway.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
And in the end, all these kings of wishful thinking in California didn't even get to legalize recreational marijuana first.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
But you know what's fascinating? Everything Eddie said would happen has happened. Pot is totally capitalist today and sort of legal.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
Eddie and Sam were just the first part of a crazy wave that has kept crashing and crashing.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
Today, in the city of freeways and palm trees and dreams, there are dispensaries all over Los Angeles, and they're fully legal. They advertise 420 puns on billboards. They deliver edibles to your house. They showcase their wares in sleek glass-walled stores.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
Turns out these kings of wishful thinking, these weed yuppies, were actually visionaries. Turns out that even though Eddie may be in prison, in some ways, he was right. Marijuana is a capitalist dream. It just took a lot longer for the smoke to clear.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
Kevin Booth was there when this green rush started, and he chronicled it in a documentary named How Weed Won the West. He got to know a lot of the early marijuana entrepreneurs.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
Now, Kevin was friends with Joe Rogan and lots of other anti-government folks who were like, yes, man, this medical thing is exactly the kind of revolution we've been waiting for. So Kevin got access to one of the very first dispensaries, which is basically the legalese-ish name for a weed store. Dispensaries were the most visible changes in LA in the late 2000s.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
Suddenly, there were all these stores with green crosses that you see now over a lot of American downtowns. But back then, no one had ever been in one.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
Now, I live near Silver Lake on the east side of L.A., but I had a car. To be super L.A. about it, I had leased a Beamer. It was a Beamer coupe, and it was also seafoam green. And now I was in my coupe driving down Sunset Boulevard to go to a weed store in West Hollywood, which was the gooey green center of this white-hot wave.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
I pulled up to a weed store, dispensary, right near the Viper Room, which is where River Phoenix died and 90 Stars hung out, and out walked the proprietor. This was still a time of mom-and-pop pot shops. You could meet the owner when you came in. I'm going to call him Eddie. This is audio from my recorder back then, so it is pretty rough.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
If I wanted to know more about this brave new world of weed, Eddie was the guy to learn from. Because of all the people working in this milieu in West Hollywood, there was none that felt bigger than Eddie. He ran a lot of the most popular pot shops in the city, and he was a friendly guy. He had brown hair that was cut short and big, doe-ish brown eyes.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
Like, really big brown eyes that were emotional. even though the way he talked was not emotional at all. The whole thing was very Andrew McCarthy, circa Less Than Zero. As we chatted, I learned that Eddie was from the valley where air-conditioned malls and blow-dried hair rain, where there's a million tanning salons, but also the kind of sun outside that shrivels and orange.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
And he liked to use phrases like, in this industry, we're just Americans using good Yankee know-how. Eddie was a fascinating mix of earnest and also hardcore capitalist. He liked saying things like, the biggest risk to the weed business is the stoner mentality. Meaning laziness, I guess. He was kind of a weed yuppie.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
And his entrepreneurial spirit, his energy, his excitement about the business, it was almost infectious. You couldn't help but get excited right along with him. So we talked for a while outside, but then when I went to go into the store, he said no. I could not come into his store because I needed a card. He didn't want to take my money here and then like any drug dealer.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
Not without a medical marijuana card, which was some sort of permit to smoke pot. This whole little episode, it reinforced to me that he was a straight on the level guy because he was adamant about it. So I seriously had to get into the Beamer yet again.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
and head over to some doctor's office, which I recall as being very white, with a few people hanging out, like a low-rent real estate office in a mini mall, but also smelling a lot like burning incense. Here's Kevin Booth, the documentary filmmaker, again.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
The whole thing was kind of a joke. I mean, medical marijuana? Come on. But it worked. I got my prescription, which was a piece of paper printed out from Microsoft Word, because doctors back then were scared to use their regular prescription pads for medical marijuana. And I hightailed it back to the shop and back to Eddie, who finally walked me into his store.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
And it was just as Kevin had described. All the pot in little bottles, everything with stamped logos. Eddie led me through this wonderland of Grape Ape and OG Kush, a bunch of women presiding over the whole thing. It really didn't disappoint. And neither did Eddie. As he toured me around, he talked about his past jobs as a teacher and at a consultancy firm.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
Eddie was proactive in his late 20s with a mathematical mind. He wasn't a stoner himself, never sold weed on the street, but now Eddie was a real king for the day. He was approaching his business like a real business because he had dreams that went beyond just making a buck. Eddie was forging a new path in a new frontier, just like the gold rushers who came before him.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
So our story today takes place over 20 years ago. My husband and I were New Yorkers, but we'd just moved to Los Angeles, home to many tall palm trees and a spaghetti mess of freeways. We were newlyweds, Obama was president, and Kim Kardashian, she was just a girl with a sex tape. And L.A. was on the brink of a new gold rush. But this time, the nuggets weren't gold. They were green.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
And just like those gold rushers, this was the Wild West. So what if you occupied a legal gray zone? Eddie was going after the American dream here. He was full of ideas on how to make it, ideas that would increase his sales even more. One of those ideas, he was looking into making THC breath strips.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
I mean, taking those gelatinous scotch tape thingies that Listerine makes and putting oil from marijuana trim on them, then selling it with a sticker reading, for medical use only, which I thought was a pretty clever idea. You could get $5 or $6 a strip. Eddie was full of big dreams. He was here in West Hollywood, the cuddliest, most progressive, gayest neighborhood in all of L.A.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
And it felt safe. Here's a local city councilman in West Hollywood even talking about how the neighborhood was so open to marijuana stores.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
As welcoming as this gay oasis seemed to be to Eddie and some little weed dispensaries, the federal government still considered possessing and selling this medicine 100% illegal, even if it came from a dispensary. And the state government didn't like it too much either. And to be fair, most people still didn't see marijuana as real medicine, even some of the people with prescriptions.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
Here's how the business worked. Most of the medicine was grown up north, in Humboldt County, on these giant farms that stretched towards the Redwoods. These were the wholesalers. The wholesalers, or middlemen, or drivers, would transport the weed down to L.A., about 11 hours, and then dispensary owners, like Eddie, would buy marijuana from them.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
I met one of the guys involved in this. I'll call him Sam. He was the inverse of Eddie's weed-yuppie vibe. Where Eddie was clean-cut and in a button-down and chinos, Sam sort of looked like a wildling from Game of Thrones. He spoke multiple languages. He knew how to make leather bags. He was a great cook. He religiously read The New Yorker.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
And when he'd been in Europe, he'd traveled to Amsterdam, where he bought a bunch of seeds.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
And up north, lots of people were planting seeds, getting started in the business.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
Sam said the pot grown up north, then sold in the south to guys like Eddie with weed stores in L.A., became part of an underground crisscrossing the whole state of California, up and down, because you were not under any circumstances allowed to take the pot grown in California out of California. It had to be sold here, because once it left the state, it wasn't medicine anymore. It was a felony.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
At this point, there was so much demand for this medicine that Eddie, the dispensary owner, had a ton of shops, was making his name around town, and he was always popping into his stores unannounced just to keep his clerks on edge. If he called ahead, he didn't know. Were his clerks sitting on the couch playing video games? Was one of them fooling around with someone in a back room?
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
What was happening? He could have spent all day, every day, driving around town, meeting up with middlemen, visiting his dispensaries. I started accompanying him on some of these drives and meetings.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
And that's when I started to get scared. Because I started to realize that medical marijuana at this time in the late 2000s was hella dangerous. Like a giant game of Frogger. And Eddie had to make sure he didn't go splat. Eddie would be on the 405, weaving in and out of lanes, talking on his cell phone. He was one of those guys who's a hero to everyone, always staying in touch.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
I mean, his assistant had just gotten her boobs done and she was in a lot of pain. So he had to check in on her. And a woman he was dating and he had had a disagreement. And he called her to say, you're more important than a wholesaler. If you want me to cancel... I'll just say something more important came up because you are more important.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
This was the dawn of the great market for semi-legal marijuana, what was then called medical marijuana. Now, if you live on the West Coast, you probably haven't heard that term for years. But back then, California was ushering it in.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
I went with him to meet another wholesaler to buy some weed, basically. We had to wait forever because the guy refused to use his cell phone since he didn't want to be tracked, and we didn't know when he was going to show up. The wholesaler was this sort of scrubby guy, scruffy beard, I mean, playing to type.
Big Time
Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12
And when he showed up, he said even he had a problem on this route of selling weed in L.A. because he couldn't find his original doctor's note, and a bunch of pot stores wouldn't let him in. Regardless, the whole thing was just 100% absolutely a drug deal. And I was witness to it. When we were done, Eddie paid for the whole thing in cash. Because, of course, he had to.