By Count Friedrich von Olsen

As a confirmed member of the older generation, I must acknowledge a profound sense of befuddlement over this whole marijuana issue. In my twilight years, with senility encroaching upon me, I am incapable of understanding how it is that a drug being made available for medical purposes can be marketed openly as an intoxicant…
In the interest of complete and full disclosure, I was not in California in 1996 when the state’s voters, in their wisdom, voted to make medical marijuana available to those who can benefit from it. Had I been here, I would have voted against it. But the voters spoke and Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act, is now the law…
To my way of thinking, compassionate medical use means just that. If marijuana is medicine, then it should be treated as such. It should be available at licensed pharmacies staffed by conscientious and trained medical professionals. If it is a legitimate medication, it should be kept in the pharmaceutical vault with all the other medicine…
There is something not quite right about a store that is devoted to just one product. Perhaps there are exceptions, but usually a grocery store has a healthy selection of edibles. What grocery store would sell nothing but tomatoes? Or nothing but rutabagas? Or nothing but squash? What sort of drug store would sell nothing but penicillin? Wouldn’t people question a pharmacy that just sold Nembutal? Wouldn’t the medical industry become alarmed at a drug store that sold nothing except Ritodran? Am I the only one who sees the utter absurdity of a store, or actually hundreds of stores, selling nothing but marijuana?
I am not naive. I wish I could be naive. Life was more fun when I was naive. The thing is, I can’t believe that there is anyone naive enough to think that medical marijuana clinics are selling marijuana, in the main, for medical purposes. I would never bother to look into this myself, but I detailed my butler, Hudson, to do some research for me. There are literally hundreds of strains of marijuana that have been bred and genetically altered to boost the amount of the major intoxicant in the marijuana plant, Tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC for short. THC is the primary psychotropic agent in marijuana. Many of these strains with intensified concentrations of THC have been patented. They are given names that celebrate their psychotropic intensity. Let me regale you with a few: White Widow, One Eyed Jamaican, Abra Cadabra, Acapulco Gold Afghan Kush, Agent Orange, AK 47, Bog LSD, Godcrack, Green Crack, Island Maui Haze, Knock Out, LSD, Purple Haze, Sputnik, Sweet Dreams, Trainwreck, Tsunami Crush, Yuckleberry Wow, Premium KB Killer, Perma Hash, Night Train, Maui Wowie, Alaska Thunderbolt, Alaskan Thunderf–k, Jack Kevorkian, Jack The Ripper, Green Poison, Full Melt Hash, Assassin and let’s not leave out F——g Incredible…
It goes without saying that LSD marijuana is not intended as a cure for glaucoma. It is intended to make the person who smokes it hallucinate…
None of this, it seems to me, is in keeping with the declared intention of the Compassionate Use Act to make medical marijuana, which I understand has some value in treating nausea, available to patients made ill by chemotherapy…
As old fashioned and behind the times as I am, I think I might have a solution to the problem of perfectly healthy young and maybe even not so young people abusing our collective compassion to obtain a drug that has only limited and maybe even marginal medical applicability for the dubious purpose of smoking themselves into a hallucinogenic state, while allowing unscrupulous individuals who are barely higher in the social order than dope peddlers from reaping a huge profit. The state legislature should enact a law requiring that all pharmaceuticals are to be dispensed by a licensed pharmacist within the context of an actual pharmacy, which would be subject to exacting regulation to ensure the quality of the product’s dispensed and the health and safety of the consumers. Indeed, I am mystified as to why this has not already occurred….
On an end note, I fear that there will be many who will dismiss my rumblings here as the close-minded misimpressions of an old man who cannot possibly relate to the realities of the modern world, the drug culture and those immersed in it. My words might be discounted as the spouting of someone too timid to venture to taste any of the forbidden fruit this world has to offer. For those, I would like to relate – that is, confess – that I once had an experience with marijuana, having smoked some myself. This was in Port Said in 1943, where I had been dispatched to ensure the delivery of some very important materiel crucial to the war effort, upon which the delivery into the right hands the lives of many depended. I was with some other chaps who were also engaged in some activities equal to or even greater than my own in daring and responsibility. On this particular day, there was a lull in the stress and demands we all faced, as we were all awaiting the arrival of a much larger contingent of our countrymen, which would allow our collective effort to move on to the next level. The four or five of us found ourselves at lunch at an outdoor café about equidistant from the hotel in which I was staying and the docks. After a rather sumptuous meal, the proprietor of that establishment, as was the local custom, presented us with a hookah, that is a waterpipe, at the pinnacle of which was loaded what was represented to us as “Egyptian tobacco” over some Turkish tobacco. We all partook of the acrid smoke and I had several deep draws on the mouthpiece attached to a narrow hose that led from the implement, the final one of which, I seem to recall, was punctuated by an almost strangulating cough. Before we left the table, someone inquired as to the nature of the Egyptian tobacco, at which point we were informed that it was actually Moroccan kif. I must admit that the remainder of that afternoon was a singullar one for me, as I found myself engaged in a rather spirited internal monologue and my head filled with some very interesting ruminations and some even more unconventional and even bizarre abstract projections. I soon separated from the others and began to drift back to the hotel where I was staying and did all right for several blocks, but then came to the intersection where my hotel was located. I was on the corner diagonally across from, that is cater corner to, the hotel. I remained there, seemingly wedded to that spot for what must have been at least 45 minutes or maybe as long as an hour, unable to figure out how I could get to my destination. Being a man who was constantly engaged in some very complicated, even daunting and might I say risky assignments in which I had to have my wits about me, my experience that day, in which I was left utterly unable engage in as simple of a task as cross the street, left me with the impression that this kif, hashish, marijuana or whatever it was, really isn’t my cup of tea…