Puff MOMMY

A mother was shocked when her ivyleaguer son went into the marijuana business. Then she saw the numbers. 

- Carol Mack

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?