It's green. It's herbal. It's organic. It's compassionate. It's healing. And it's nonprofit too.

This plethora of adjectives is not describing a gimmick to cash in on alternative energy or a new diet plan.

No, it's L.A.'s latest retail craze: medical marijuana.

Those words, pulled from the Los Angeles city clerk's website, were the most common descriptors in the names of the 966 dispensaries registered in the city.

A Times analysis of pot store names, however, showed that the most frequently occurring word was the socialist-tinged "collective," appearing in 199 of the names.

Whether that choice of words is merely merchandising double-speak or genuine cultural expression -- a point on which reasonable minds might differ -- may ultimately be of little consequence.

But by plotting the addresses of the pot dispensaries, The Times has made another finding: At least 260 of them fall within 1,000 feet of a school, a library or a park. The distance is significant because it's the buffer in a proposed law the Los Angeles City Council has been kicking around for a couple of years. The ordinance is still pending, with no vote yet scheduled, while council members figure out how to shield their constituents from too much underground pot culture without trampling the dispensaries' legal right to exist.