Pubdate: Sun, 06 Mar 2016
Source: Orange County Register, The (CA)
Copyright: 2016 The Orange County Register
Contact:  http://www.ocregister.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/321
Authors: Scott Bosco and Brooke Edwards Staggs

A NEW, OLDER FACE OF POT

LAGUNA WOODS - Tony Pierce was 21 when he smoked marijuana for the 
first time. It was an act of rebellion, recalled Pierce.

"I thought I was going to hell. I remember feeling tired and then 
paranoid that my mother would somehow find out."

Pierce, now 62, said he had to cut short a career as an Orange County 
Transportation Authority bus driver after he was laid up by chronic 
pain from spinal cord cancer.

He'd spend 18 hours in bed some days.

Two years ago, Pierce moved to Laguna Woods, a retirement community 
formerly known as Leisure World, where 80 percent of the roughly 
16,400 residents are older than 65. What he found there was a highly 
organized and supportive medical marijuana collective ready to help 
him manage his pain.

"It gave me my life back," said Pierce, sporting shorts and a subdued 
Hawaiian shirt during a visit with neighbors and fellow collective members.

The collective, Laguna Woods Medical Cannabis Club, and its volunteer 
peer guides introduced him to pot-infused chocolate bars and other 
edibles, which he said has helped ease his discomfort and wean him 
off opiates that could leave him feeling stoned.

Laguna Woods is both Orange County's oldest city, age-wise, and the 
most progressive when it comes to community embrace of the early, 
less-commercial spirit of California's pioneering medical pot laws.

In September 2008, Laguna Woods was the first city to pass - by a 
unanimous City Council vote - an ordinance allowing medical marijuana 
dispensaries.

Today, about 400 community collective members with medical needs, 
like Pierce, have banded together to ensure needy patients have 
ready, safe access to medical marijuana.

At the helm is 70-year-old Lonnie Painter, a longtime pot user with 
long silver hair, earrings and tattoos who acts as a de facto spirit 
guide for cannabis patients in the community.

Collective members are focused on creating a free handbook and 
training facilitators to help seniors overcome the stigma marijuana 
use may still carry for them.

"The face of the user is not the ... Cheech-and-Chong type that 
you're thinking about," said Laguna Woods Councilwoman Shari Horne, 
who occasionally medicates herself. "These are your neighbors and 
friends that are getting a little bit of relief from conditions that 
they have."

But in the coming years, what patients have come to rely on and 
widely praise as Laguna Woods' simple, well-functioning community 
collective will have to be dissolved under new state laws intended to 
tame California's often chaotic medical marijuana industry.

To continue, the collective will be required to obtain a license, 
like the state's proliferating dispensaries do.

Additional uncertainty about the future could emerge in various 
efforts to legalize and regulate recreational use of pot, which could 
be before voters as soon as November.

Political experts and legalization advocates say seniors such as the 
baby boomers in Laguna Woods, who tend to vote in disproportionately 
high numbers, will play a key role in determining whether California 
becomes the fifth state to legalize cannabis for recreational use.

AHEAD OF THEIR TIME

Only 10 percent of Californians favored legalizing marijuana in 1969, 
around the time the first condos were being built in the 
master-planned retirement community that would become Laguna Woods.

Seniors have always been less likely to support either medical or 
recreational marijuana, voting and polling data show.

But since Laguna Woods incorporated in 1999, the community has bucked 
that trend - and more so as baby boomers have moved in.

"We want the best quality of life that we can have," said Barbara 
Ayala, 62, a resident who heads the advocacy organization OC NORML 
Seniors. "So cannabis is just another tool in the toolbox when you 
get to be our age."

Three months of debate in 2008 preceded the adoption of the 
groundbreaking ordinance permitting medical pot dispensaries.

"The question here was whether or not it was really impactful and had 
a positive effect on seniors," Councilman Bert Hack said. "Since we 
are a senior community and many people said that they got relief from 
this and nothing else, I thought that was a valid answer."

Santa Ana voters followed Laguna Woods' lead six years later, with 10 
dispensaries now licensed to operate in that city.

But no dispensaries have opened in Laguna Woods.

Several issues are to blame, including limited commercial storefronts 
and a refusal of landlords to rent to pot shops. Also, the Sheriff's 
Department, citing conflicts between state and federal laws, has 
declined to perform background checks required in the city law.

In the fall, the City Council placed a moratorium on dispensaries 
until a comprehensive study is completed on the best way to permit 
and regulate them.

Laguna Woods' medical marijuana collective dates back seven years, 
when Painter and others  with a nod from the city  grew pot in one of 
the community's gardens.

They initially gave it away to patients with doctor recommendations.

But citing security concerns, the homeowners association that 
oversees the gardens banned growing medical marijuana in community 
garden plots.

So Painter, a former chef, started buying cannabis for the collective 
on the "gray market" that supplies most dispensaries.

And he got a seller's permit from the state Board of Equalization, 
which Painter said means the collective pays taxes on the products it 
sells at cost to residents.

Painter locates sources of cannabis, puts together education programs 
and helps new members get started.

He invites patients to his home or will go to theirs, bringing a 
padded silver suitcase packed with jars of marijuana bud strains with 
names like Purple Train Wreck and Green Crack.

Painter's most important role, he said, is screening the cannabis.

Samples are sent to a nearby laboratory and returned with labels that 
spell out the product's levels of THC, the main compound that gives 
marijuana its psychoactive effect, and CBD, the chemical believed to 
have the most medicinal benefits.

"A lot of time is spent making sure our products are safe, reading up 
on the science to make sure we understand how things change and what 
dosages people should use," Painter said. "That and interviewing 
people to try and figure out what works best for them."

POT 101

Roughly 60 seniors filled a clubhouse room on a recent Tuesday night. 
Some were experienced, hoping to pick up the vape pen or Cannabis 
Club hat being raffled off. Others had never tried marijuana and had 
a list of questions.

One woman asked whether marijuana expires.

Another asked, "Does it help with pain?"

Retired microbiologist Behram Deboo asked for directions to make 
cannabis-infused tea.

Deboo is battling glaucoma. The 82-year-old tried using marijuana as 
an edible in hopes of relieving the pressure on his affected eye.

But he admits he made a rookie mistake.

He said he took some, didn't feel anything and took more. When both 
doses kicked in, he started to panic.

He managed to calm himself down, slept "like a baby" for 10 hours and 
woke up feeling fine.

Deboo wants to give cannabis another try to see if it might help ease 
several ailments his wife is battling.

He wants to do it right this time, he said. So he attended the 
introductory meeting of Painter's Laguna Woods Medical Cannabis Club 
in search of information.

"A lot of elderly customers, they're trying cannabis not for the 
first time, but in new forms and delivery vehicles," said Eddie 
Miller, chief strategy officer for GreenRush, a technology platform 
that connects patients with deliveries from local dispensaries.

Patients older than 60, who account for 7 percent of the nearly 
25,000 Californians served by GreenRush, are far more likely to buy 
marijuana products other than flowers for smoking, Miller said, with 
oils, butters and edibles especially popular.

They're also more likely, Miller said, to look for products that 
include more CBD, the medicinal chemical.

Until recently, that was all a foreign language to Laguna Woods 
resident Kay Nelson, who turned to the collective for help managing 
chronic back pain.

"If you want to take oxycodone and be kind of in lulu land and be 
constipated, it works fine," said Nelson, 74. "But I don't want that. 
I want to be able to function and enjoy life."

She now uses a vaporizer when she feels pain, and she's found it 
helps her sleep.

"I would never go anywhere else except through the club here, because 
I think Lonnie is very knowledgeable," Nelson said. "He only buys it 
from the best."

Though few residents in the low-crime community complain about its 
cannabis-friendly reputation, neighbor disputes are common, with pot 
sometimes the source.

Recently, a woman reported the smell of marijuana coming from an 
adjacent apartment. When police investigated, they found the neighbor 
was cooking fish.

AGE OF INFLUENCE

Seniors 65 and older are the fastest-growing age group in America, 
according to census data. They also happen to vote at the highest 
rate, with nearly 60 percent participating in the 2014 election 
compared with 23 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds.

That's one reason marijuana activists say it's important to get 
communities like Laguna Woods  where 79 percent of residents are 
registered to vote and lean more to the left than the rest of the 
county  backing the legalization movement that is expected to be on 
the ballot Nov. 8.

"Without us it's not going to get very far," said Ayala, the OC NORML 
Seniors leader.

Ayala helped gather signatures in 2010, the last time Californians 
voted on legalization. That proposition was defeated by 53.5 percent.

Only 42 percent of Californians 55 and older supported legalization 
that May, data from the Public Policy Institute of California show.

The firm's most recent data now put that support at 49 percent.

"I don't know any senior that wouldn't vote in favor of 
legalization," Ayala said.

"Even if they don't use it themselves, I have never spoken to one 
senior that says they wouldn't use it if a time came where they felt 
they would benefit from it," she said.

Part of the power of senior advocates is that they put a different 
face on the movement, said Derek Peterson, chief executive of the 
Irvine-based cannabis firm Terra Tech.

They're parents and grandparents and veterans and former leaders in 
the community.

With careers and child-rearing days behind them, Peterson said, 
seniors are free from many of the concerns that can give younger 
supporters pause about going public.

"They don't have as much to lose, so they can take a position," 
Peterson said. "I actually think they're going to be a very powerful 
voice because of that."

City editor Jennifer Karmarkar contributed to this report.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom