Getting Legal, Part 1: The Day I Became Legal
October 27th, 2008 by Perry
After years of shifty go-betweens, waiting at drive-thru restaurant parking lots and sitdowns with hippies, I finally decided to apply for a medical marijuana card.
Having been in trouble with the law for possession, ironically the legal safety issue wasn’t one of the reasons I went out to get the card. Instead, the idea of being on any sort of government-sanctioned list of marijuana users made me feel uneasy, almost like a pre-approval process for a tapped phone line and an introduction to big brother society.
Nevertheless, I did it because I have every right to under California law. All I had to do was arrange an appointment via a phone number for Medicann that I found at a local headshop.
So I made the appointment – the earliest I could see a doctor was about ten days out – and as the day grew nearer I debated the issues involved in getting the card more and more. I struggled with the idea of getting a card because knowing that I was taking the same medications for anxiety, stress and headaches that people sought for glaucoma and chemotherapy recuperation made me feel some measure of guilt. Although I’m a proponent of legitimzed free use, e.g. no illness should be needed to enjoy marijuana if you’re of age, I still felt the strain of an ingrained stigma.
After a lot of internalized debate, I realized that this is the result of my subconscious associating marijuana with a Class A controlled substance. The fact is that marijuana is used by patients for a variety of maladies, but that’s not why I think marijuana should be legalized, there’s another, more personal reason…
