Image courtesy of Keith Spencer

I was never a pothead. Even during the psychedelic ’70s in Madison, Wisconsin, my poison of choice was bourbon. Or beer on Badger game days. While many of my friends were stoners, I stayed firmly in the Tequila Sunrise/Singapore Sling camp, sorority girl that I was.

It took me a full 38 years to bloom into the cannabis evangelist I am today.

It started with a freelance assignment. My editor suggested I check out a hot new San Francisco start-up called Meadow. Fresh out of legendary incubator Y Combinator, Meadow offered a more convenient way to get a medical-marijuana card. Click, click and a qualified physician would come to you, conduct an exam and voilà — you’d be the mellow recipient of the city’s primo legal weed.

Ho-hum. In my skeptical perspective, possessing a cannabis card was similar to having a fake “therapy dog” license for your canine — a bit scammy, but no real downside to it. I viewed the gig as merely another quirky writing project, like the interviews I’d had with a Christmas-tree farmer, a hot-shot floral diva and Macy’s window dressers earlier that year. Meeting a weed doctor ranked below tepid on my journalist curiosity scale.

Image courtesy of Meadow

Then I met Dr. Dan Price. After 14 years at Oakland’s Highland Trauma Center the board-certified emergency physician was quickly morphing into San Francisco’s guru of grass thanks to his knowledge, expertise and people skills. By teaming up with Meadow and highly respected cofounder David Hua, the good doctor helps patients find alternative wellness solutions to Big Pharma.

He zipped up — on a skateboard — to the co-working space where we’d decided to meet. Once we were inside, the cannabis exam itself was fairly straightforward and completely noninvasive. And it didn’t take long for my assumptions to crumble: as Dr. Price detailed the new ways cannabis could help my medical conditions (insomnia in particular), it started to click that today’s herb was not the Maui Wowie of my youth. Cannabis 2.0 was a radically different version of the one-size-fits-all weed that was our only option back in the day. The ancient plant was finally on the path to fulfilling its true place in our medical universe.

And as herb historians know, cannabis has been a medicine way longer than it hasn’t been.

I left the exam with a medical-marijuana recommendation letter plus an entirely new vocabulary. Indica? Sativa? Hybrid? Cannabinoids? I was in a brand-new world.

Behind Door Number 3?

If you live in the Bay Area, you’re deep in the domain of dispensaries. Wander around the city, and you can’t help but wonder what’s behind those mysterious doors. Many look pretty sketchy from the outside, like a dive bar that’s safe to visit only on game-day mornings, and then only if the Niners win. But once inside? Forget the grody head-shop stuff. An increasing number of dispensaries look more like an Apple store. They’re open, airy and sparklingly clean, a cross between a spa and a doctor’s office.

Despite these trendy innovations, though, I was nervous on my first dispensary visit. Armed with my rec letter and Dr. Dan’s suggestions, I meandered into a place called Igzactly 420. I chose this spot because, wuss that I am, I figured I’d be less apt to encounter trouble in the Financial District. And if the cops showed up, I knew three coffee shops where I could hide and also snatch a great latte. This is where my head was then: stuck in Reefer Madness stereotypes.

Was my initiation the “strange trip” my friends had predicted it would be?

Of course it was, in the best possible way. In fact, this first visit kicked off a series of revelations that eventually overturned many of my misconceptions. Gawking at the glass jars and the glossy gear, it was like Christmas morning for new cannabis lovers.

Even better, the staff didn’t treat me like I’d walked in with Cannabis for Dummies under my armpit. I’d gotten so used to the tech industry’s ageism — the assumption that if you’re over 40, you’ve got to be clueless — that it was a pleasure to discover its absence in this new industry. Ditto for the lady thing. This is an industry that values women.

This Silicon Valley–defying fact has held true as I’ve explored the new world of weed. As Ben Larsen, cofounder of Oakland’s Gateway Incubator, told me, “We have this unique opportunity to create the industry as we see it — as we want to see it. We want diversity, we go get more diversity. Want more women founders in the space, we go create more women founders. There’s a lot of passion — that’s what makes it so intoxicating.”

I marched away from Igzactly 420 with what is now my favorite “medible” — the award-winning Kiva Mint Irish Cream Chocolate Bar, made in good old California.

I’ve been to many dispensaries since that first visit, but next on my list is the new “haute” Harvest SF, which recently opened on Geary. As their site indicates, “This is not your typical dispensary,” and they aren’t kidding. Pricey and posh, the new location resembles a hipster wine bar. Now if only my closet held a little Stella McCartney number to speed me past the velvet rope and up to the reigning budtender.

365 Nights and Counting

My insomnia, the unhappy result of my late husband’s ten years of battling cancer and heart disease, has vanished. I had always been a champion sleeper, but when Bob was hospitalized (often), a four-hour night’s sleep was considered a good one.

I was also running a thriving business, raising an awesome daughter and tending to an ailing parent. My doctor took one look at me and prescribed Ambien.

I loved it at first. I slept and slept and slept. But then came the side effects. If I didn’t get a full seven hours of sleep, I’d walk around in a drugged daze. And even if I did, I was cranky. Very cranky.

Fast-forward to today. It’s been one full year since I was ushered into this surprisingly complex, frenetically evolving world of weed. Since then, my cranky has disappeared, my energy has mightily rebounded, and I look forward every evening to my chocolate Kiva nightcap. In a sense, natural cannabis has helped reset my body back to its natural rhythms. My brain approves.

Beyond these very real personal health benefits, though, there’s another thing that has completed my transformation to cannabis evangelist.

One Saturday, I stood in line at Oakland’s Harborside Health Center, surrounded by the proverbial melting pot of patients — black, white, brown, young, old. Grandmas. Millennials. Baby boomers. Vets. Mill Valley moms in their Kate Spades. They were the living, vaping, smoking, nibbling embodiment of Harborside Health Center’s mission: a “dedication to changing the perception of cannabis to one of wellness and healing.”

Once you hear the stories — many tragic, many uplifting — of the decades of struggle and devotion by cannabis pioneers, your slumbering sense of social justice wakes the hell up. We’ve endured 70 years of misinformation, propaganda, injustice and drug-war rhetoric over what? A plant whose very name in Latin means useful?

Enough of this nonsense. I’m a cannabis evangelist. Who’s with me?