Doctor’s Note
On May
16, 2008, I drove from my new apartment in Silverlake to Venice Beach. I had seen an ad in the L.A. Weekly for a
medical marijuana clinic that welcomed walk-in appointments. They had listed the price at $75 for a
prescription.
The
first time I got a prescription, I had to jump through all sorts of hoops. First of all, I needed a California State
ID. I went to the DMV and just when I
was about to get my picture taken, one of the tellers determined that my
passport was not suitable for identification purposes, because the little
plastic sheet over the picture had become unstuck (because I had foolishly sent
it to the dry-cleaner in the inside pocket of my jacket). This meant I would need a birth certificate,
so I went online and ordered mine for about $50 or so and waited about a week
and a half, or two, for it to come in the mail.
Finally it arrived, I went back to the DMV, I got my picture taken, and
then they told me that I wouldn’t be able to get my actual card for another two
weeks. But they gave me a receipt that
the ID had been instated.
This
all after I had already met with Dr. Sonia Patel, who had given me a
preliminary three-month prescription for my chronic back pain, insomnia, and
anxiety, to be upgraded to a one-year clearance after examination with another
doctor. I had her note, but I needed my
ID card. That day I went to the Farmacy
in West Hollywood with my DMV receipt and doctor’s note, and they said that
would do just fine. Thus I was allowed
to get weed without going to a dealer, which was both a blessing and a
curse. A blessing because it was
perfectly legal, and a curse because it was pretty much always available for me
to blow large amounts of cash on.
But
after three months my prescription ran out because I never had gotten around to
getting that second opinion from a more probing general physician. By that point I was living in Palms with my
new roommate Brett who always picked up more pot than he needed and always sold
me some, so I relied on this method for a while, until I moved into my own
place, which was the killing gesture.
I had
been living in my own place for about two and a half weeks. I had been surviving off of the last stash I
had bought from Brett, and now I needed to take care of things on my own. First, Brett told me to go to his doctor—Dr.
Cohen. When I called Dr. Cohen he sounded very flustered. I knew he wouldn’t make things difficult for
me, but then he told me he had raised his price from $150 to $250. I stupidly told him I would pay that
exorbitant amount. I made an appointment
with him only for him to cancel it because of his own back pain. We rescheduled for a new day and I drove to
his office building in Beverly Hills and waited for him to arrive and about ten
minutes after our scheduled time he called me to say he had been in a car
accident, and would only be a few more minutes if it weren’t for the lady he
had gotten into it with, who wanted to call the police. I told him that was fine, and rescheduled for
yet another time.
I told
my friend Sycamore about this and he told me this guy did not sound very
reliable and that I should just be concerned about it because if he happened to
lose his license, then I would be out of luck for my prescription, not to
mention with the exorbitant fee already paid to him. So I went to the pages of L.A. Weekly and
decided a walk-in appointment for $75 sounded pretty great.
It was
right across the boardwalk from Muscle Beach—the outdoor gym where I barely ever
saw anyone working out. I walked up the
stairs and signed in at the desk. The
security guard was making small talk with everyone waiting. I wrote in my little orange notebook a list
of things to do. Among them were: buy
invitations, find Ashleigh’s info, buy a house phone (which could be put off),
get a new cell phone (which could be put off), return L.A. Story to the library, measure space in apartment for bar
table, futon, find rug to go on top of carpet, get a bathroom storage thingy,
do a practice LSAT on Monday, see Mike Toumayan on Sunday at 2:00, complete the
18th and 19th chapters of S/M. The security guard asked me what I was doing
and I told him I was writing in my journal and he told me a story about how he
had found someone’s journal left on a bus before. The TV in the waiting room was playing a
hip-hop video countdown. One of the
assistants came up to tell the guy at the front desk that there was a guy on
the boardwalk taking pictures of the front of their building and it appeared
suspicious. Two Latinos without shirts
tried to sign in for an appointment and were turned away until they could find
shirts to wear. The wait was not very
long. They took my picture before they
sent me into the doctor’s room. They
also asked for $150 for the recommendation fee—double the advertisement, but
still much better than the alternative.
I met
Dr. Weinman, who was very friendly and nice and concerned. He got a cup of coffee before we started the
interview and said that it was his alternative to pot, which he had used to
smoke but no longer did. I told him
about how I was going to take the LSAT and he told me to take a few weeks off
of smoking before I did that—six weeks, he said. I told him I wanted the prescription for
social anxiety and depression and he said that would be okay. He said in the case of depression, he
wouldn’t recommend it. He would
recommend seeing a therapist. He said he
would recommend it for anxiety, however.
Then he asked me about how I smoked it and I told him through a bong and
he explained to me the benefits of a vaporizer.
He was a very benevolent man, perhaps one of the few people I met in
that entire year that did not cause me any fear or stress, perhaps the only
person who truly seemed to be looking out for my well-being. He gave the prescription and I was allowed to
go into their on-site dispensary and I picked out a gram because I said that
money was tight at the moment. I drove
home on an ecstatic wave, happy that now, I had my license to smoke, I had
nothing to worry about.
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