Big Weed Read Online Free

that day on the golf course, he needed some help, so I agreed to do a brief consulting gig with his firm.
    In that moment, though, before my buzz dissipated, I saw an entirely different business in my mind’s eye. I saw it as if it had already been built. They say that Michelangelo saw David inside that marble slab and only had to help the statue find its full expression. That’s how I felt when I realized what a great marijuana company could be like.

    A few days later, I was sitting in the office of a physician who worked in Colorado’s growing medical marijuana trade.
    If you wanted to buy medical marijuana in the state of Colorado, you needed to have a red card—official proof that you had jumped through all the hoops. Doctors didn’t write “prescriptions” for the stuff, they wrote “recommendations.”
    The doctor Jake hooked me up with was in his eighties. Kind eyes. Fuzzy gray hair loping over the tops of his ears. “So what’s troubling you?”
    Where do I start? The poor doc didn’t have enough time in the day to hear it all. Did he really want to hear how I’d lost my company more than a year ago when the market crashed? Did he really want to hear how I’d almost brought home a seven-figure payday—and then didn’t?
    â€œAnxiety,” I said, hitting upon a diagnosis he could probably use. “I have trouble sleeping. Been through a tough time lately. Does anxiety work?”
    â€œNo,” he said. “It has to be one of the six qualifying conditions approved by the state, a physical ailment that the marijuana can help you treat.”
    That was marijuana’s gift to the world, its raison d’être in the new medical marketplace. While the rest of us prized it for its ability to get us high, there were people living with chronic illness—cancer patients, AIDS patients, to name a few—who wanted marijuana for its ability to extinguish pain, stimulate appetite, and banish nausea.
    Wait. Back in my youth I’d suffered an injury in a snowboarding accident and compressed a thoracic vertebrae in my back. The injury still bugged me. So much so that I used an inversion table to hang myself upside down from time to time. Stretching myself out was one of the only ways I’d found to chase the pain and numbness away.
    â€œThat’ll do,” the doctor said.
    He initiated the paperwork and helped me fill out the state application. I stepped outside to get it notarized by someone in his office. Next, I needed to stop by the post office and mail it in to the state viaregistered mail. But I could walk out of the doctor’s office right now and buy up to 2 ounces of weed per visit.
    It sounded too good to be true. In fact, a lot of habitual marijuana users thought so, too. That’s why they stuck with buying their weed off the street.
    As I was about to leave, I lingered in the doctor’s office. I have a soft spot in my heart for docs. My dad was a former U.S. Navy flight surgeon. In December 1968, he soloed for the first time, earning his wings. The very next day, he delivered me at the hospital at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. I grew up all over the United States—North Carolina, Washington, California, and finally Colorado. Ours was an interesting childhood, to say the least, but a distinctly middle-class one. The thought of an elderly doctor willing to write recommendations for marijuana struck me as odd.
    â€œIf you don’t mind my asking,” I said, “why do you do this?”
    He shrugged and gave me another smile. “I always thought marijuana was harmless. I’m glad I’m able to finally do this for people.”

    Now that I had a red card in my pocket, I could legally enter any marijuana dispensary in the state. My first visit to Jake’s business impressed the hell out of me. Imagine walking in and hitting a wall of that powerful marijuana scent. Once again, I