Michelle could see Caitlin’s grip tighten on her wine glass. She had to know these statistics already. And hadn’t she expressed doubts about the whole marijuana focus at the last board meeting? But her tone, her body language-she didn’t want to hear it now. Not from Troy.
“I’m not saying there aren’t problems,” she said. “But addressing them by wholesale legalization? You really think that’s a way to help poor kids of color do better in life? Making it easier for them to smoke pot all day?”
“I’d rather have them smoking pot than sitting in prison, learning nothing except how to be better criminals. But you know what, I can understand why people have doubts about legalization. I can understand why your group is against that, even if I’m not so clear on why an organization from Texas is dumping a ton of money on an election in California. Shouldn’t we be left to make our own decisions about this?”
Caitlin snorted. “What happens in California doesn’t stay in California. I think you know that.”
Now Troy sat back in the booth. He chuckled. “Well, all right, you have a point there. And look, I know I’m coming on strong. I get impatient sometimes. I’ve just seen too many kids get screwed up by the system. You see them when they’re little, running around and playing without a care, and you watch them turn hard and hopeless. It’s got to stop. Even if we disagree on legalization, can we at least agree on that?”
Caitlin nodded slowly. “I guess we just disagree on how to go about it.”
“Can we talk about sentencing reform, then? Because I’m having a hard time understanding why Safer America is so dead set against it.”
“Because longer sentences work. Why else have we seen crime rates drop the way they have?”
“Now, there’s absolutely no proof that longer sentences have anything to do with that. Rates started dropping before longer sentences kicked in.”
“What does it have to do with it, then?”
“Demographics. Not as many young people since the Boomers aged up. Smarter policing in some cases. Less opportunity to commit crime in others-increased surveillance, cell phones-”
She lifted an eyebrow. “Cell phones?”
Something had shifted between them. Michelle couldn’t exactly call Caitlin’s attitude playful now, but she was interested. Engaged. Troy had relaxed, too, leaning back against the bench, arm stretched along the back.
“Yeah. Cell phone videos. Crime’s just harder to get away with than it used to be.”
“But you can’t just pretend punishment doesn’t play a role in that. A criminal in prison doesn’t have an opportunity to commit crimes, now, does he?”
“All right, I’ll grant you that. But how does a drop in violent crime correlate to locking up non-violent offenders for longer and longer periods? There isn’t a country in the world that incarcerates a greater percentage of its people than the United States. And about a half a million of those people are behind bars for drug offenses. That’s over a thousand percent increase since the War on Drugs started in 1980. You can’t tell me that’s what winning a war looks like.”
“Maybe not. But legalization? Isn’t that just giving up? We passed a few of your pot ‘clinics’ on the way over here. Aren’t those bad enough? Waiting rooms full of kids working the system to get high legally? You want even more of that?”
“Oh, you were down on the boardwalk.” He rolled his eyes. “Yeah. Look, I agree there’s abuse. I just disagree that this abuse is worse for our communities than criminalizing behavior kids are going to engage in anyway.”
Caitlin nodded slightly. Not because she agreed with him, Michelle thought, but just to show that she’d heard what he had to say.
She sipped her wine. He drank his beer.
“Besides, some of those clinics are doing good work,” he said. “I can take you to one, if you’re interested.”
Caitlin laughed a little, uncomfortably. Maybe she was picturing all those stoned kids on skateboards and not particularly wanting to mingle with them. “I don’t know that we have time for that.”
“It’s just up the block. I mean, literally. On this street.”
Abbot Kinney’s marijuana dispensary was hiding in plain sight, between an old bungalow turned shoe boutique and an art gallery. It had a cheerful neon green sign that said Organic Medicine, a display window with hoodies and Chinese herbs and medicinal teas. Outside, there was a rack of T-shirts and a table and chairs, with a big aluminum water bowl for dogs. But the most unusual thing about it to Michelle’s eye was the large, open door. That wasn’t how these places generally did business. Usually if they even had windows, they were shuttered, protected by iron bars.
This one looked like an ordinary retail store.
“We’re an open clinic,” the young woman at the counter explained. “You don’t have to have a prescription to come in and look. We sell all kinds of other medicinal products. And our herbalists can recommend things other than cannabis, if you’d like.”
She didn’t look like the sort of person you’d expect to find working at a pot dispensary. She wore a tailored white blouse and black slacks, tortoiseshell-framed glasses. The store didn’t look like the dispensaries in Humboldt Michelle had seen either, with its neat racks of T-shirts and sweatshirts, shelves of teas and herbs, aromatherapy burners and neti pots.
But then there was the main counter, filled with pipes and vaporizers and edibles, and the large glass jars of buds that lined the shelves behind it, the pungent scent somewhere between pine sap and skunk that they couldn’t completely seal up.
There were a couple of customers at the counter, being serviced by two twentysomethings, a man and a woman wearing logo T-shirts.
“I’ll take two grams of the Fire OG Kush and what do you have in a top-shelf Sativa dominant today?”
He looked like a studio exec, thirtysomething, swept-back hair, expensive, slouchy suit.
“I’ve got a dank Jack Herer,” the clerk said.
“Organic?”
“It’s indoor. This time of year, that’s what you’re going to get.”
The other customer was a woman in her sixties, frail, with the sort of gray pallor that came with a serious illness. “Why don’t you try the 420 Bar?” the clerk was saying. “And another thing you might like are these tinctures. They’re great for making tea.”
“Well, this is pretty interesting,” Caitlin said. She turned to the woman behind the register. “So if I told you I had a particular condition, you’d recommend something for me?”
“I wouldn’t,” the woman said. “I’m not an expert. I mean, I know the basics. But it’s really best if you consult with one of our herbalists and decide on a course of treatment.”
“I’m just curious,” Caitlin said. “You medical-marijuana people make all kinds of claims on what it’s good for. If I came in here with a doctor’s note, saying I wanted something to treat, I don’t know, insomnia or PTSD or something, you’d tell me there’s some kind of pot that’s good for that?”
“A lot of our patients use cannabis for insomnia. And there are a few small studies where veterans are finding cannabis helps them with their PTSD. You really should talk to one of our herbalists about it, if you’re interested.”
Caitlin hesitated. “That’s all right,” she said. “I’m from out of state, anyway.”
“Yeah, that’s a problem with edibles,” the clerk was saying to the older woman, nodding. “They can take a long time to kick in. If you don’t want to smoke, have you considered vaporizing? There’s a couple vaporizers I can recommend that don’t cost too much.”
“I think I do want to try that,” the woman said. “I’d like something that works right away.”