To all the loner stoners out there – it’s now officially OK to leave the house. In Los Angeles, you can partake of social events and marijuana at the same time.
Sure, I know, it’s not like you’ve never left the house and gotten high before. But there’s always been that hint of paranoia, like you wouldn’t want to run into the cops, your boss or your parents while doing so. But in 2017, GRASSFED and The Art Of Edibles are putting on events where you might find yourself hanging out with all three at the vaporizer station, and nobody’s going to give you a hard time about it. After a visit to one of these events, it’s hard to imagine giving anybody a hard time about anything.
It feels like a moment whose time has come. Vendors of vaping systems (the Speakeasy 710, whose disposable offers dreamy, sweet hits of their 75% THC oil), multiple varieties of edibles (Moonman’s Mistress cookies were kind enough to offer “virgin” samples for those of us who needed to maintain, which were quite tasty, while Mondo offered a decent- tasting powder suitable for “micro-dosing” a few milligrams at a time), and even good old regular pot, or “flowers”, in the parlance of our times (Flow Kana, with an indica strain named Strawberry Lemonade that tasted rather like its namesake) offered samples of their wares, with VIP ticket holders receiving a goodie bag to take home.
People crowded around the various stations and heard a lot about their farming and production methods, mostly geared toward natural-foods values. The more organic and chemical-free, the better. The sheer variety of product on offer was almost overwhelming, and surely would have been if we’d tried everything at once.
As it was, following some vape samples, I was pleasantly buzzed but not nailed to the chair when the show reached its halfway mark. These consumer vapor products seem to have effects that are relatively short-lived compared to rolling up a joint, which was not allowed at the indoor venue.
The show itself was a hoot, with some decent stand-up comics – the Lucas Brothers, Amber Nelson, and Megan Gailey – joined by a bevy of lovely and talented burlesque dancers who took it mostly off. Hosts Karryn Feehan and Jillaine Gill kept the pace brisk and the crowd engaged, which can’t have been easy in a room that got gradually more quiet and mellow as the night went on.
That sounds like a nice event, doesn’t it… quiet, mellow people chuckling perhaps more assertively than they would otherwise, enjoying their new recreational liberties, too stoned to constantly check their cell phones. It reminded me of being in Amsterdam for the first time, just the sensation of being able to do this common, enjoyable thing in a public place. It feels like freedom, and right now, that’s a good feeling to experience.
Guest post by Mr. Ubetchakoff.
