SF Buyer's Club: California Bar

HARRY GOLDSTEIN: I'm up here in the California bar. People sitting at tables. It's a beautiful atmosphere. It's like a club, a cafe, except everyone's sitting around with bottles of water and soft drinks and smoking pot and getting high. Everyone here has a purpose for being here, some look a lot worse than others. People are very nervous about me taking photographs. I've decided to squirrel away in this corner and yap into my tape recorder for a while, hoping that people don't give a shit about that. Just had a man, totally wasted, I mean a wasted face, like a death-camp refugee, who saw me with a camera and begged me not to take his picture, so I just put it away. I have to say I sort of feel a definite contact high sitting here.
This could be since I supposedly have a meeting with some people about an hour from now, and I'm going to reek of marijuana, if not just be completely incapacitated.
I think I'm going to ask the guy at the bar if I can take pictures of the preparations he showed me, the tincture and the pills. Hopefully that'll be ok.

If you scrape the floor in here, you could pick up enough bud to get really baked.
John is really good. I still don't know if I ever got an answer to the mind/body separation thing going on. Something they avoid. On the other hand, this is more holistic than I was imagining previously. It's not easy to make that separation, and I don't think they really try.
I'm not the only reporter here; there are probably three or four of us wandering around. You can tell who we are because none of us are smoking. I wish I was. And none of us are going up to the counter with big wads of cash. No, we're all sitting here talking into our microphones, scribbling in our notebooks. And the Dateline NBC people, who got permission ahead of time, have video cameras rolling with boom mikes hanging in people's faces. Taking still photographs seems, and is, intrusive. Whenever I've asked permission to photograph someone I've been denied.

JOHN ENTWISTLE: Like I say, this is our California bar. We sell snacks, water, soda, things like that. And then we have the spectacular upstairs board. We have the quad A California green checking in at $80 an eighth down to the B grade California, which is a really great pot. It comes in at $50 an eighth.

HG: Are these marijuanas graded in terms of their medicinal effect, like stopping spasms or ....

JE: I'm not 100% sure how it's done, but they're graded along consistencies that have more to do with marijuana than a given percent of clinical outcomes. The outcome is a medicinal one, but there are some aesthetics involved--there are potency questions involved, but to say there's a potency rating for marijuana one, two, three, isn't correct either, because you're dealing with a balance of something like over 400 chemicals in the plant.

Most people think of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, THC Delta-9, as being the main ingredient in marijuana, and they're correct, but the effects of that ingredient are mitigated in some instances, enhanced in others, by this other range of chemicals. Mexican pot tends to be higher in CBD, one of the pot chemicals that the brown marijuanas are associated with.

Brown marijuanas are higher in the CBD part of the CBD/THC ratio, while the greens happen to be higher in the THC part of the CBD/THC ratio and, in between the two, you have very distinctive jumping-off points, distinctly different effects. One will effect your mood more than another, another will effect your body more than the other. Different things work for different people.

HG: Isn't that one of the reasons Marinol....

JE: That's the big problem with Marinol...

HG: Because there are no mitigating effects of the other chemicals in marijuana, just pure THC.

JE: Exactly. And it's not even organic THC, it's a petrochemical analog.
Now this is the other thing we have here--baked goods, different cookies, foxy bars, banana bread, chocolate chip, sugarless oat raisin, lemon squares, ginger squares, rice krispie, chocolate brownie, spice cake, blonde brownie. These are all excellent. Then we have vegan eats, stuff that's 100 percent organic, has no milk, butter, eggs or refined sugar--oat raisin, carrot cake, banana bread.
Now let me explain something to you here. This is an area I ran into when I was doing deliveries in the field and it shocked me. There are people out there who don't smoke because their lungs can't do it anymore. They want to eat pot because they're at the end of their life for real. They can't even get up out of their beds to leave their rooms, ok? They've lost the majority of their body weight; they're merely waiting to meet the end. One of the things that happens at that point in the human body is that your stomach becomes hypersensitive. You can't eat something that has nuts in it. The nuts don't digest, they hurt your stomach. So what they did at first was that they'd pick the nuts out of the cookie. And they would ask by name for the truffles, and explain that the desire was the smoother intake. So we acclimated to do that. That's what's going on here and it gives you a reflection of our clientele. Along those same lines, we have people who can no longer eat it or smoke it. And for those people we have the tincture, which is a really neat product, which I'll show you.