How Montana built a legal cannabis market from a thin medical marijuana law, federal raids, ballot fights, and two decades of stubborn local pressure.
“There’s marijuana stores in Montana?”
When it comes to Famous Last Words, those were mine.
It was October of 2009. I was sitting on my usual stool at the coffee counter at the Merc, a coffee shop on Last Chance Gulch in Helena, Montana. My stool was the first one on the short end where the counter jack-knifed. I eavesdropped on a conversation going on kitty-corner from me.
That morning in 2009, I had been a lobbyist for 18 years. I was also a nerd.
The Appointment That Opened The Door
Nonfiction is my go-to genre when I read. After graduate school and two liberal arts master’s degrees, I took to reading cellular biology, evolution, books on politics and culture, and, importantly, systems theory and how to build systems.
This is why when I jumped into that conversation at the coffee counter and learned about the relatively simple process of getting approved to use medical marijuana in Montana, questions started taking form in the interdisciplinary mists of my mind.
Is it real? I wondered. “Medical” marijuana? How does it work biochemically? Who’s involved? What does the law say? What words on a page made a marijuana store not a crime? What state agency oversees it?
“Text me his number,” I said to my coffee counter compadre as some unseen cosmic page turned. “The doctor.”
I left the coffee shop the Tarot’s Fool.
I was Eve. Pot was the apple.
Legal marijuana, huh? Sure. I’ll bite.
My appointment for a medical marijuana card was a flirtatious little chat in a strip mall clinic in Missoula with a doctor I’ll call Dr. Fleck. Flirtatious on …
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Author: Kate Cholewa / High Times
