Thursday

My mother (not her real name) and I get out of the cab at the corner of Kill Me Street and Carjack Avenue, in the Beyond Thunderdome section of south San Francisco. We are here on illicit business, so maybe this is exactly where all of this should go down.

Still, when we see the squat motel where we're supposed to stay—“This is where they bring prostitutes,” my mother says, and I just don't have the energy to respond about the dignity of sex work—we sigh and I drop my bag. But my mother won't. She cannot even be adjacent to this hotel, something about catching a venereal disease from it. My mother believes you can catch anything. You can catch tattoos, you can catch unwanted pregnancies. She is a very well-educated woman; the disparity in our worldviews is confounding to us both.

The sole virtue of this motel is that it is within walking distance of Hempcon, “America's Largest Medical Marijuana Show,” a several-times-yearly display of all that is newly decriminalized in the world of pot and newly discovered in the world of ailments that can be treated with marijuana, which is apparently all of them. Being within walking distance was necessary because my mother is an ultra-Orthodox Jew, and Hempcon weekend includes a Shabbos (like all weekends do) and my mother will not take a cab or train on Shabbos. But as bad as she wanted the weed, she wanted to live through the weekend, as well. In other words, we were desperate, but not this desperate.

Maybe the simplest way to explain it is that my mother loves rules. She even loves exceptions to rules, because of their indispensable role in proving rules. Even here, on this strange trip, there's no relief from the hundreds of Levitical laws she is observing at any one time. And yet we are here to get my mother high, because believe it or not, there is no Jewish law against that. In fact, just the previous week the Orthodox Union, perhaps the largest organization in charge of declaring foods kosher, put some marijuana-extract products under its auspices.

My mother can't sleep. Night after night, no rest, and it's ruining her. It's maybe post-menopause, maybe just old age. Or maybe it's her desperate anxiety; she never guessed she'd live this long. And now that she has—now that her final daughter is married off—she has to make plans for herself, for still being alive. She tried sleeping pills, but they didn't work. She takes Xanax, but its effectiveness has waned, and she's worried that if she starts taking more, it'll work even less. (Also, Xanax can't help you relax if taking Xanax is something that's making you nervous.)

She's decided to try pot, but she's a Hasidic woman who lives in [redacted]. In her building, which is mostly occupied by Orthodox Jews, she smells pot in the hallways. She's a grandmother now, though, with grandkids who will need to be married off someday, and how will it look to the gossips and matchmakers in her tiny community when it (definitely) comes up that she knocked on their door one day and asked to borrow a cup of marijuana?

My mother needed something on the sly—but also totally legitimate. Ostensibly pot is legal. Or it's not illegal. Or it's decriminalized. It can be confusing. Which is how you end up with laws like being able to possess it, but not smoke it; being able to ingest it, but not grow it. “This is a really lawless section of the law,” says Aaron Lachant of Nelson Hardiman, LLP. “Everyone involved is incredibly anxious over this.” (You know what helps with anxiety?)

Now that pot is (sorta) legal, it's gotten perfectly dignified, right? Getty Images

I had an idea: a medical (medical!) marijuana convention I'd heard about, thousands of miles away, on the opposite side of the country. My mother and I would go, and we'd explore pot's strange current moment, a time when the intersection of legality efforts and our still very Protestant notions of what is appropriate adult behavior has resulted in this: a country in which weed is completely okay and also really not okay, where I can bring my 68-year-old Hasidic mother to a weed convention—and write about it for a very well-known magazine—so long as we never, ever mention this to her friends.