A mother was shocked when her ivyleaguer son went into the marijuana business. Then she saw the numbers.
Every November my husband’s horse racing interests take us to an event in sedate and suburban Pasadena. This year the trip was particularly welcome, as I had a mission I needed to accomplish while in California: obtain a prescription for medical marijuana. After we arrived, a quick Google search revealed several nearby clinics whose websites also provided anticipated waiting times at each (why can’t restaurants do this?). GPS directed me along a wide boulevard dotted with CVSs and car dealerships to an unassuming storefront in a generic strip mall.
Inside, a lone young woman sat in front of a laptop, ready to do business. After a 40-second Skype interview with a doctor who was located, fittingly, in Malibu, I paid the $66 state administration fee and, as simple as that, had a very official-looking document granting me access to the state’s multibillion-dollar medical marijuana market.
As a teen in the late 1970s, I didn’t take part in the popular college marijuana culture. I disliked being high and never had a positive experience with pot. Fast-forward to 2015 and my opinion hadn’t changed. In fact, I believed that marijuana had become a relic, replaced by craftbeer, mixology, and club drugs whose names I didn’t even know. So when my son Andrew told me that his senior year economics thesis at Harvard would analyze fluctuations in the price of legal medicinal cannabis, I thought he had lost it. Really, I wondered. Who cares?
This story is from the March 2017 edition of Town & Country.
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This story is from the March 2017 edition of Town & Country.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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