The LA Weed Experience
Cosmo Soave-Smith is in LA to experience the legal weed buying experience so you don’t have to.
In 2016 California legalised weed for both medicinal and recreational use. In 2018, the first cannabis stores appeared on high streets around the state. By the year 2025 the cannabis industry in California alone is projected to be hitting $6.6billion a year. So by all means those players in the market now are grappling intensely to get a firm footing to cash in on some of those greener than green bills.
Having puffed on the devil’s lettuce more than once in my lifetime (and I did inhale) and finding myself on my way to LA for a few days anyway, I decided to investigate how this nation of commerce was embracing the green rush. Would they imitate the informal (read: drab, rude, charisma vacuum) model of Amsterdam coffeeshops, or would they come at it in a whole new way my tiny mind couldn’t comprehend?
This is my experience of buying weed in LA.
First off, I mainly bought my broccoli in Venice. Buying weed in West Hollywood is a pretty different experience, more akin to walking into an Apple Store than the indy vibe you get near the beach. This seemed to me to be quite soulless and full of rep-bros so after one brief visit I decided I’m more of a corner market dude than a Whole Foods guy.
Weed places in Venice tend to be hard to find. For the most part they’re generally unmarked stores with perhaps a small sign in the window. After a few days of struggling to find stores I decided to check the app store to see if there was some kind of weed map app. Which there is. It’s called Weed Maps. I feel like they could have come up with a clearer name.
Weed Maps will help you find a plethora of weed stores, even if occasionally it’s still hard to find the bloody door. They don’t make it easy for you. Trying to find the way in is akin to the first round in an escape room. Trying to not look a clueless twat is the first task. When you do manage to find the entrance, you’ll no doubt walk down a corridor before coming to a musty room with a small desk. This will remind you of the kind of minicab office you used to stumble into at 2am in Old Street, back before the heady days of Uber. You remember the kind: Stale smell, vague feeling someone might have been hacked up on the premises, a feeling with impending urgency not to upset anyone and to get in and out as quickly as possible. Good times!
Sitting at the front desk to greet you will be either a wedge police officer who absolutely despises you or a super stoned 26-year old girl with no bra. Hell of a coin toss. Here they will scan your passport before waving you through another door or up some stairs. Congratulations. You’re nearly there.
You have now made it to the showroom that, for some reason, has been put together on 200 quid. Fuck knows why, these places are making a fortune. But despite this, the room will have all the charm of a Matalan at the end of trading during a ‘Back 2 School’ sale. You’ve got your laminate wood-effect flooring, wipe-clean walls and an air-conditioning unit that’s whirring too loud and cooling too little. Behind some glass counters are four or five stoned girls. They’re super friendly, generally unkempt and not fussed about much. One girl is watching puppy videos on her phone and telling everyone the latest clip is cuter than the last. One older woman seems to be holding the whole operation together whilst her underling assists her as best she can, but she’s also so stoned she’s having a hard time counting dollar bills at the till. It’s a shit show.
You’re not allowed to approach the glass cabinets until you are called forward by an available assistant. This can mean gingerly waiting at the side for up to 10 minutes as the girls chat to the customers and are turbo prone to going off on tangents. You’re also not allowed to be on phones, so during this period on the sidelines you can reminisce as to how we used to queue before iPhones IE staring inanely at things tapping your foot. Your eyes are naturally drawn towards the merchandise. And there’s a lot of it.
“After a few days of struggling to find stores I decided to check the app store to see if there was some kind of weed map app. Which there is. It’s called Weed Maps. I feel like they could have come up with a clearer name.”
Inside the cabinets is everything you’d come to expect from a weed shop plus a whole lot more stuff I’d never even heard of. Products tend to be split into one of three categories. First up you have the cabinet full of bud. Good old fashioned skunk weed to us Brits. Except instead of coming stuffed into tiny plastic baggies, the product comes in ornate glass jars. Maybe 50 or 60 different kinds of weed are available. You’ve got the the usual Indica strains on one side to get you so stoned you become one with the couch, and the Sativa strains on the other side, for giggling at nothing and talking about how the word ‘Wednesday’ is weird. You can ask to smell any of the products and boy, are there a lot of them. There’s an incredible array of smells. Some sweet. Some sour. Some floral. The weed is cured perfectly, soft to the touch but dry enough to burn. They’ve also got packs of fags but made with pure weed. Tempering your excitement is tricky and part of you feels like this is too good to be true, like this is some kind of trap, like you’ve wandered into the the weed version of Hansel and Gretel.
Cabinet Two contains weed concentrates. Like e-cigarette cartridges you plug into your e-cig. This is where a lot of brands have directed their efforts, so there’s loads of fancy packaging around. Ultimately all the products are the same though, with many of the brands using the same strains. You pop one of these in your e-cig and start puffing away and you’ll be suitably inebriated within a minute. Wildly convenient for the stoner on-the-go.
The third cabinet is filled with things I didn’t even know existed. Cans of soda with weed in. Chocolate covered blueberries with weed in. Name a foodstuff and they’ve got it with weed in it, presenting munchies sufferers with a horrendous dilemma. Juice with weed in. Ice-cream with weed in. Nougat with weed in. Taffy. Jerky. It’s wild.
Before you’ve had a chance to take this all in, a store clerk will call you over to ask you what they can help you with. This is a lovely sentiment and is well-meant, but the assistant is so stoned she really won’t have the ability to follow through on this promise. Instead she’ll look at your face whilst you tell her what you’re after, trying to look engaged whilst occasionally glancing at your ear because she’s just noticed it’s there. Then she’ll tell you what she really likes and sell you something you really weren’t asking for. But you buy it because at the end of the day it’s weed and that’s what you came here for.
My store assistant laughed after one of my jokes and said she was really into self-deprecating humour and that I should keep it coming. Now this is probably the worst thing you can say to an Englishman as to my mind ‘self-deprecating humour’ is just called ‘humour’. In the split-second that followed those words I went inwards on an existential crisis: Am I a self-hater? Am I not being kind enough to myself. Is this the root of my flaws? This is obviously not the kind of thing you really ever want to address let alone whilst leaning against a flimsy glass counter in a weed shack in front of a highly inebriated surfer girl under the watchful eye of a forlorn and gun-toting policeman. I’d advise all those heading in to try and keep chit chat to a polite minimum for everyone’s existential safety.
So you press on trying to get the girl to stop going off on a tangent and trying to bring her back to the purpose that you are there for - to procure weed and weed products. The aim of which is that you’ll emerge from the premises within 25 minutes of entering with your little paper bag of once-illegal narcotics. In terms of cost it’s not too dear but not so cheap that your paper bag will be weighing you down.
The law states no loitering outside the premises, especially using your cannabis products. This is backed up with policemen who enjoy nothing more that nabbing you this way. During my week in LA I saw 4 sets of people harassed by cops for doing this. I think in one circumstance they confiscated the goods. This encourages a rodent-like scurrying once one has procured your products to whatever smoking hovel has been arranged. Mine luckily was a short walk to a friend’s apartment where I proceeded to chew several gummy bears and descend into a 90-minute long reckoning of wondering what colour a smurf would go if you choked it.
My overall impression of the weed business in LA in late 2018 is that it’s far from cracked the model. Whilst I definitely prefer the whimsical stores in Venice to the investor-bro-funded fancy stores of West Hollywood (filled with brand reps who have the same enthusiasm and tact as the men who stand outside curry houses on Brick Lane), neither offers a smooth experience. Ideally this should be no harder than popping in to a liquor store to pick up some beers. Whereas currently it’s a bit of an arse bleed, like getting an MOT.
Cosmo Soave-Smith
Ad Creative
Cosmo is a creative copywriter and runs the #3 most popular fidget-spinning channel on YouTube. He likes offal, the hits of Celine Dion and other cool stuff. His father played drums on the track Turning Japanese.