Getting Legal
Before my lunch break, I Google “marijuana doctors” and find one a few miles from the office. Dr. Kenneth Ridgemont III. I call his office and a girl answers. I’m not sure what to say. I say, “Hi, I was wondering, do I need to make an appointment, or how exactly does this work?”
The girl says, “No appointment necessary. Just come in anytime you want. The examination will take about fifteen minutes.”
I say, “Okay, thanks.”
I head over to a nondescript two-story office building on my lunch break and make my way to suite 206, which has no placard outside indicating that it’s a doctor’s office, just a plain door marked 206. There is no doorbell, so I knock and hear the same girl’s voice that answered the phone. She says, “Door’s open.”
I walk into a small room about the size of my own office. The girl I talked to sits behind a desk. She’s pretty clearly high out of her mind. She says, “Hi,” then hands me a clipboard with one sheet of paper attached to it and says, “Fill this out and the doctor will see you shortly.”
The form asks for my name, driver’s-license number, phone number—no address—and my symptoms. I have no idea what to write, but I figure I’ll have to make whatever symptoms I list believable; I might even have to do a little acting. I write “back pain” and “insomnia.” These shouldn’t be too hard to fake.
I give the form back to the girl behind the desk and she says, “Great. The doctor is ready for you now.”
A door behind her desk opens and out steps a guy wearing jeans and a T-shirt under a doctor’s white coat. He says, “Hello. Please follow me to the examination room,” like he’s a robot. I’m assuming he’s following some carefully scripted protocol, quite possibly a routine that’s required by law for this man to maintain whatever barely legal medical license he has. I follow him into the so-called examination room, half-thinking I’m going to get clubbed in the fucking head and wake up in a gutter with my wallet missing.
I sit down in a regular chair in the examination room. There is no examination table. In fact, there are no items in the entire room giving even the vague impression that this is a medical office at all. There are a few shelves with office supplies, like toner and reams of paper, but no cotton balls, no bottles of hydrogen peroxide or rubbing alcohol, no charts of the human ear. The only thing remotely medical is a stethoscope hanging around the good doctor’s neck. It looks like he got it out of a doctor play-set from Toys R Us.
He reads over the form I filled out. I’m expecting him to ask me questions, to verify that I am, in fact, in need of medicinal marijuana. Instead he says, “Okay, everything looks good here. Now I’m going to perform the physical examination,” and I’m ready for the clubbing.
He bends down, takes one of my legs by the ankle, and extends it outward until my leg is straight. He says, “Great,” and puts my leg back down on the ground. He then puts two fingers on my sternum, gently taps it, and says, “Perfect.” Then he says, “Turn your head please.” Here comes the clubbing. I turn my head and he puts the fake stethoscope on my Adam’s apple and says, “Exactly.”
Then the doctor whips out the form I filled out, signs his name on it, and says, “I’m going to prescribe you medicinal cannabis. Cannabis is most effective and least harmful to your body if ingested in the form of an edible, or if inhaled after being vaporized. Please take this to my receptionist and you’re all set.”
The doctor leaves the room. I hand the form to the receptionist. She charges me forty dollars and I walk out with a signed and notarized document that allows me to purchase marijuana legally at one of hundreds of stores that sell it in Los Angeles.