In the early 2000s, Los Angeles is on the brink of a new gold rush. But this time, the nuggets aren’t gold…they’re green.Big Time is an Apple Original podcast, produced by Piece of Work Entertainment and Campside Media in association with Olive Productions. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.apple.co/BigTimePod
Chapter 1: What is the story behind California's medical marijuana rise?
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.
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.
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.
A survey five years ago of cancer specialists found that 44% recommended that their patients try marijuana to help with the side effects of chemotherapy.
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.
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.
Gold, precious gold, had been discovered in California. Almost overnight, tens of thousands rushed off, obsessed with striking it rich.
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.
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Chapter 2: How did the green rush impact Los Angeles?
What I loved about all those people was that they were the kings of wishful thinking. And what I hated about all those people was that they were the kings of wishful thinking. The whole thing was just based on those kind of people that would sit around getting high going on.
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.
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.
I was told by people that there's this guy in Englewood that was a cancer patient and he was helping supply a bunch of other cancer patients and people that are HIV positive with marijuana. And then they bring me to this place is like, oh my God, because the first time ever in my life where I've seen name brands on marijuana and they had
Chapter 3: What was the role of dispensaries during this era?
chocolate bars that had logos on it and marijuana that had logos on it and a glass case that looked like a store and everything's packaged and logoed and marketed. It was just like, you're freaking kidding.
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.
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.
There's no course in college that teaches you how to buy marijuana.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 4: Who was Eddie and what made his dispensary unique?
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.
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.
Right along with banning, you know, handguns and shotguns and banning the declawing of cats. Yeah, medical marijuana fits in there, too.
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.
Kevin Booth, the filmmaker.
Look, it's always been recreational. That was the thing. You got with these people and there'd always be like the one guy that really was sick, or maybe he's a burn victim that I knew, or just different people that really, I mean, they really needed it to get through the day, but they would be surrounded by a bunch of other people that would be like, if I don't get my medicine, I'm going to die.
And you'd be like, what? You know, just admit you're getting high like the rest of us. I don't need the lecture about like your problems. Let's just get high. Like, it's fun, okay? Just leave it at that.
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.
Wow, that's great. where you find a grower that grows fantastic medicine, you pay them a price higher than you pay others, but everyone's happy all the way through.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did dispensary owners face in the early days?
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.
That's what we're doing.
You and I are going to go to Sunset.
Eddie's hustle was impressive and nonstop.
I am on my way now to Luna and then to West Valley later.
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.
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.
He was just like a normal single dude who is all business. Except none of it was normal.
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.
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Chapter 6: How did the marijuana supply chain function in California?
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.
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.
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.
An ATM business is the absolute ideal situation for laundering money. Because if you have an ATM business, you just take all your cash that you need to launder and you just fill your ATMs up with it and boom, you're all good.
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.
It was pretty obvious the prices were starting to really drop.
Sam saw this firsthand.
The prices just started plummeting. There was just so much weed every harvest season that people just started getting out of it. And the smart ones, this whole time they'd been starting legitimate businesses, changing their income sources. The writing was on the wall.
It was supply and demand. There was too much supply. Filmmaker Kevin Booth again.
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Chapter 7: What were the risks of operating in the medical marijuana business?
And they went after very aggressively the operators that were clearly playing both sides of the law, that were purporting to be adhering to some non-existent state law, but were also shipping product out of state into the black market.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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