The lounge room upstairs was messy and filled with clutter, magazines, and rock-n-roll memorabilia. The dim lighting and the dark stain of the old wood on the walls and floors, seemed like a more appropriate setting for a vampire bar, then a medical cannabis dispensary.

There was a room visible down the hall where they had cannabis products and paraphernalia merchandised. I could see an additional room through an open door across the lounge from me, that had a wide-open floor space, and appeared to be some kind of studio, with stage lights and audio equipment set up in various places.

An intimidating looking security guard, who I recognized as the voice from the intercom, was armed and wore a full body tactical uniform. He checked my doctor’s recommendation and ID, and had me fill out a collective membership agreement to join the dispensary’s non-profit, cannabis collective. This agreement made it theoretically permissible for them, to be able to exchange cannabis with me for ‘donations’.

Technically, there was no legal vehicles for cannabis sales or retail stores in the existing State law, which had never been designed to manage or regulate the marketplace that had been evolving. The dispensaries, and other cannabis entrepreneurs like us, were using a non-profit collective model, as a pretense to operate in a way that was quasi or questionably legal, at best.

The medical cannabis laws in California for instance, would not protect you from being arrested, but could only provide you with an affirmative defense in court, as long as you were in compliance with State laws. That was in and of itself problematic, because the State laws were unclear and misunderstood by just about everyone from the operators to the cops on the streets, the DA’s and judges in court, and even our representatives in the State legislature.

Driven by the confusion, growers and dispensaries would collect hundreds, or even thousands of collective-member agreements and doctor-recommendations, which in theory could justify large volumes of cannabis possession in court. This was even further complicated by a patch work of different rules in counties and cities that applied their own regulations or outright bans on cannabis businesses in their jurisdictions.

Perhaps the biggest challenge was that, even though it wasn’t technically legal for sales to be occurring, and they were classified as donations, the State still wanted to collect tax revenue on the purchases as if they were sales.

The State Board of Equalization didn’t care how the legislature had defined sales. From their point of view, sales were occurring, and they wanted their cut.

Cannabis businesses, especially the public facing ones like dispensaries, were caught in between a rock and a hard place. They risked getting raided for not paying their taxes, or they risked getting raided if they paid their taxes, because to do so, meant to implicitly acknowledge that they were committing State and Federal felonies in the sale of a controlled substance. These semantics were no joke, as the penalty for admitting to this ‘sale’, could in theory command punitive, mandatory, minimum sentences. On the other hand, if you didn’t pay your taxes than you could be charged with other felonies, like tax evasion, wire fraud, and money laundering.

It was a lose-lose situation basically, but it was the cost of doing business to be a pioneer and stake out an early claim in this space.

“The buyer’s not here” the security guard groaned gruffly, “you can leave your samples with me.”

I was disappointed.

Maybe Nick was right, I lamented, maybe this is, going to be harder than I thought?

I took a brownie and rice crispy sample out from my cooler and handed them to the security guard.

He immediately ripped a package open and shoved an entire brownie into his mouth in one bite.

“This is fucking delicious!” He mumbled, as crumbs fell out of his mouth and onto his uniform, “Mmm… ok… you pass the test… I’m going to go get the boss, wait here.”

He went into a backroom, as I waited on an old, faded leather coach, and nervously tapped out a beat on the top of my box. I was about to make my first sale; I could feel it!

The security guard came back a few minutes later, followed by a tattooed, long-haired biker dude, and a naked, redheaded woman, that was wearing only a pink bathrobe.

“Billy,” the biker dude shared, shaking my hand, as I introduced myself.

“We’re going to set up to shoot in there,” Billy addressed the red-haired naked woman, pointing towards the empty studio room.

Billy turned back to me and held up a rice crispy treat in his hand. He read the label without looking up.

“I Can’t Believe It’s Pot Butter.” He smiled. “That’s funny.” Billy put the rice crispy treat back down on the counter and took out a cell phone.

He looked through his phone for a moment before turning back to the woman in the bathrobe.

“Just hang tight here for a few,” Billy instructed her, and then turned to me and added, “You too.”

I sat in the lounge for about five minutes and exchanged awkward small talk with the red-haired, naked woman in the pink bathrobe.

“So,” the naked woman broke the ice, “you sell pot?”

“Pot edibles.” I replied.

“That’s really cool.” She seemed genuinely intrigued.

“Do you eat a lot of edibles?” I decided to do some market research.

“Me,” she laughed, “no, I smoke sometimes though.”

She didn’t look like she ate a lot of brownies and probably wasn’t my target consumer at the moment, anyway.

“What about you?” I continued to shoot the shit, “what do, you do?”

“I’m a visual performance artist,” she shared.

“Oh, that sounds interesting,” I engaged with her, “what kind of projects do you work on?”

“I specialize in triple penetration, and anal orgies.” She informed me.

“Oh, ok,” tongue tied, I stammered, “that’s ah… terrific.”

That’s terrific? I reprimanded myself. What the hell, was that?

Eventually, Billy came back in with a wad of cash in his hands.

“I’ll take two dozen of the crispy treats,” Billy ordered.

My heart sank. Even though this was my first sale, my moment of glory, and was kind of a really big deal for me; the cereal bars were light as air, and selling merely two dozen cereal bars, wasn’t really going to solve my problem.

I was dreading walking back down those stairs again.

“Would you like to try some brownies, too?” I recommended to Billy with a smile.

“I think I’ll stick with the cereal bars for now,” he smiled back politely.

The expression on my face quickly turned to fear. The brownies were super dense and probably each brownie, was at least three or four times heavier, than a cereal bar.

“Are you sure?” Desperate, I begged him, “I’ll be honest with you,” I leveled with him, “I’m taking the subway, and I have to carry everything I don’t sell here today. The brownies are an amazing product, but they’re like… super heavy… please, won’t you give them a try?”

“Haha, ok,” Billy laughed, “give me two dozen each of the brownies and the cereal bars.”

“You got it!” I gushed and shook his hand again, “thank you, so much!”

I grabbed the eighteen cereal bars out of the cooler along with twenty-four brownies and placed them on a wooden countertop on the other side of the room. I took the rest of the cereal bars out of my box and added them to the stack.

“Here count that,” Billy handed me a wad of cash which I counted on top of my box.

“$120,” I reported.

“Perfect.” Billy wrote up a receipt for me.

We exchanged contact info and I made my way back down the staircase of terrors!  While my load was still back breaking, crushing and burdensome, it had just become that much lighter!