Intake Area

I^NTAKE A^REA

JOHN ENTWISTLE: This is our intake area. The woman being interviewed by the Dateline NBC crew there, the older woman, is Hazel Rogers. She's 76, and she's a grandmother, and she's a medical user by virtue of her glaucoma. And she's been running our intake for years now and she's a wonderful person.

[He walks me over to a file cabinet and opens a drawer, revealing a ton of files, though looking far less than the 8000 members the club claims.]

Just to give you a general sense of what's going on...you're going to see a lot of people, every one of those people has their medical condition on file here and has AIDS, cancer, glaucoma, multiple sclerosis or some goddamned thing like that. We're talking thousands of people and thousands of files.
HARRY GOLDSTEIN: You have 8000 members? Because the New York Times last week said 6000.
JE: They're wrong.
HG: So how many people come through here a day?
JE: We're up there now. In a two hour shift, we're up there above 800. Sometimes it's really a lot. Fridays, about 2000, an eight hour shift.

[A woman comes up--nurse at intake--very stoned, red hair, blue eyes, very very high.]

DIXIE ROMANGO: I do the filing here, and let me tell you. I've been a nurse of 23 years.
HG: Hi, I'm Harry Goldstein.
JE: Harry's working with Word, it's an Internet publication.
DR: What? Who?
JE: She works here and is a member of our club by virtue of multiple sclerosis, if I can be so bold as to put that out.
DR:Dennis Peron saved my life. The club, it makes me feel like I'm a nurse again. It's given me something to live for and makes me feel useful.
HG: Did you smoke pot before for medical, theraputic purposes?
DR: Yes, but being as I was a nurse, I could never confess to it. Until I got so sick and I heard about it being a medicine...oh, there was a clip in the Bakersfield paper that said medical marijuana, and I went and I stood up and smoked pot and said that I smoked pot and virtually they kicked me out of the MS group in Bakersfield.
I got the news paper article at home, it made the headlines in Bakersfield, let me tell you. Then the Los Angeles Times did a half-page article on me on New Year's Day, 1995, and my own family wouldn't speak to me for four months; but uh, it's been a long haul and uh, I met Dennis and I've learned a lot from him. He's a very intelligent, compassionate man with a heart the size of the universe, and he literally saves lives every day around here. I'm crying, of course, so that's it.