Kings of Wishful Thinking | 12

Ah, the stoner film.

A high art form, so to speak.

There's nothing like sinking into a comfy couch, shutting off your brain, and watching the decision-making of someone who puff-puffed past a few too many times.

Today's episode is a dubious tale about one man's quest to conquer the business of weed.

But unlike Chee Chin Chang, or the dude, He's a very buttoned-up character and he probably could have chilled out a bit.

But that's just like my opinion, man.

I'm Steve Bussemi, and you're listening to Big Time, an Apple original podcast from Peace of Work Entertainment and Campside Media, in association with Olive Productions.

Vanessa Gregoriadis is taking over from here.

So, our story today takes place over 20 years ago.

My husband and I were New Yorkers, but we 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 LA 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 after Craigslist personals shut down, people couldn't get into the business fast enough.

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.

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, yeah, we could do this, we could do that.

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 legally used-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 Inglewood 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 and it's like, oh my god, because the first time ever in my life where I had seen name brands on marijuana, and they had 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 LA, but I had a car.

To be super LA about it, I had leased a beamer.

It was a beamer coop, and it was also Seafoam Green.

And now I was in my coop 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.

That's what I was telling you about.

This is audio from my recorder back then, so it is pretty rough.

There's no course in college that teaches you, you know, 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 doeish 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 an 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 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.

You go into this, quote, doctor's visit, and he's like, are you so-and-so?

Yeah.

You have anxiety?

Yeah, I guess so.

Okay.

That was it.

Yeah, that was it.

All right.

All right.

You're good for a year.

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 higheth it back to the shop and back to Eddie, who finally walked me into his store.

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.

You know, getting my teaching credentials, getting my real estate advice, doing things that were, you know,

proactive, exactly.

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.

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.

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 LA, 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 decoying 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 LA about 11 hours, and then dispensary owners like Eddie would buy marijuana from them.

Where you find that a grower that just grows fantastic medicine, you have to pay them a price a lot higher than you pay others, but everyone's happy all the way through.

I met one of the guys involved in this.

I'll call him Sam.

He was the inverse of Eddie's weed yuppy vibe.

Where Eddie was clean-cut and in a button-down in 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.

And when he'd been in Europe, he traveled to Amsterdam where he bought a bunch of seeds.

10 packs.

I mean, they were in like, you know, weird little jars.

They were just seeds.

I had that fall thousands of seeds made from the best strains on the planet.

And up north, lots of people were planting seeds, getting started in the business.

Some of the houses were like hippie collectives, like there'd be a sweet person always cooking food, and it was all organic.

And they had a great garden, really good people just getting some really good money together.

Sam said the pot grown up north, then sold in the south to guys like Eddie with weed stores in LA, 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.

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?

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 gonna go to Sunstead.

Eddie's hustle was impressive and non-stop.

I am on my way now to Marina and then to West Valley,

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.

Hey, Nikki, how are you doing, sweetie?

Good, what's your talk?

Good.

Not much, hon.

I just, um.

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.

And when he showed up, he said even he had a problem on this round of selling weed in LA 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.

And the amount of marijuana just happened so insane so quickly.

That's when I realized that Eddie was driving around with thousands of dollars in cash on him, basically at all all times.

After a while, you're just like, well, I'm just going to make one purchase.

What's the big deal?

It doesn't even occur to you.

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?

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.

Who was gonna 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 Oceans 11 and 420, police code for weed.

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.

All of his hard work in this brave new world of sort illegal 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.

Stab in the back, they burn you as you go forward.

It just gets to be too much.

Plants don't do that.

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.

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.

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.

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, bras, and they just busted in.

The DEA swept in, took the medicine, took the cash, and swept out again.

This is just the latest in a series.

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.

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 are people and plants and it's 3 a.m.

and you can just watch something as 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 allege that Eddie was doing this.

And in fact, that he'd taken Pot out of state to sell to the Carolinas.

This was for Botan.

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 that the prices were starting to really drop.

Sam saw this firsthand.

The prices just started plummeting.

There was just so much weed that we harvested

that people just started getting out of it.

And the smart ones, this whole time they've 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.

It just of course imploded.

I mean, when I got started in this thing, $3,000 was a pound.

By the time I was leaving LA, you couldn't even get $1,000 for a pound.

Kevin and others told me that people started driving weed to the east where they could get better prices.

Some guy that's driving it to the East Coast, he's going to drive it to the East Coast to sell it for $5,000 a pound.

And so every single thing happening in California was driving the price down in California.

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.

You know, there are more marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles than there are Starbucks.

There was this sort of line that there were more dispensaries than Starbucks, and that was true, but it was way more than that.

Peter Hecht is a journalist who wrote a book about this time called Weedland.

There was no place on the planet that matched Los Angeles in the intensity of retail sales of pot.

To Peter, this is not what the medical marijuana revolution was supposed to be about.

That was true of medical marijuana collectives in which sick and dying people, AIDS patients, cancer patients, and more were raising their own marijuana and sharing it.

It was not to authorize 800 dispensaries in the city of Los Angeles and part-time actress bud tenders and the 420 nurses and sexualization.

The market did not wait for regulations.

It did not wait for rules.

It went crazy at every sign of the door being cracked open further.

Never mind that there's no state regulatory framework that authorizes these establishments or that they're all illegal under federal law.

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 and 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 roof 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 wrap 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 LA County jail and was organizing other men in prison 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.

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.

It's weird doing these drug war documentaries because I don't watch it for a while and then you put it on and you're like, he's dead.

Oh, he's dead.

He's dead.

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 printout, just like the one I had for the doctor.

But that didn't stop anything.

They got prosecuted anyway.

And in the end, all these kings of wishful thinking in California didn't even get to legalize recreational marijuana first.

But then Colorado legalized this first, right?

That's when everybody in California was like, we blew it because why?

Because people in California could not agree on how to make it work.

But you know what's fascinating?

Everything Eddie said would happen has happened.

Pot is totally totally capitalist today and sort of legal.

You've got these monster, monster indoor grow operations that are just warehouses.

I mean, that are just the size of a Costco warehouse.

How is anybody going to compete with that?

The sad part of it is that I think a lot of this really cool, small boutique type things that made it so fun in the early days, they all got kind of blown out of the water.

Eddie and Sam were just the first part of a crazy wave that has kept crashing and crashing.

Oh my god, I must have sat through 100,000 pitches about the new marijuana cryptocurrency that was going to be like the one that everyone uses.

Their CBD

became like the new thing where all these people that didn't really catch the wave on marijuana were going to be like, I'm catching this wave, you know what I mean?

And it's like marijuana, but you don't get high.

Yes, but you don't get medical benefits.

Okay, but for me, the medical benefits are getting high.

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 the wares in sleek glass-walled stores.

It's like just so crazy.

It should be like a fruit stand, but it's like, oh, the marijuana is in these special glass cases.

Look how fancy it is with the lighting and everything and the fancy names.

Turns out these 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.

Next week on Big Time, party planning is under siege.

This has been Big Time, an Apple Original podcast produced by Peace of Work Entertainment and Campside Media in association with Olive Productions.

It's hosted by me, Steve Bussemi.

This episode was reported by Vanessa Gregoriatis and produced by Natalie Rubimet.

Our story editor is Audrey Quinn.

Lane Rose is our showrunner and managing producer.

Our production team includes Amy Padullah, Rajiv Gola, Morgan Jaffe, and associate producer Dania Abdullah.

Fact-checking by Mary Mathis.

Sound design and mixing by Shawnee Aviron.

Our theme was written by Nicholas Principe and Peter Silberman of Spatial Relations.

Campside Media's executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriatis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Scher.

Follow and listen on Apple Podcast.

Thanks for listening.