Daily · Dreamtime

Michael had trouble sitting in one place for any length of time, a legacy, in part, of five and a half years he says he spent in San Quentin for various pot-related offenses. (Spending years in a small, cramped prison cell had made him antsy, he said.) Michael has been involved in the marijuana business since he was eighteen years old. His first big deal, with an Arab partner, was smuggling into California two hundred pounds of hash from Lebanon. In the early seventies, he attended a pot-legalization rally in Washington, D.C. While in the city, he did some research on cannabis at the Library of Congress. He found a trove of cannabis studies from the early twentieth century; botanists at the time had studied the plant extensively. According to a paper from 1903, the internal clock that tells a marijuana plant whether to flower or not could be turned on or off by varying its exposure to light. By lengthening the “day” to sixteen or eighteen hours, growers could speed up the initial growth of the plants; later in the growing cycle, they could cut back on light exposure, causing female plants to flower. The useless male plants, which produce pollen rather than smokable buds, could then be thrown away.

By speeding up the growing cycle and getting rid of the males, you could produce three or four times the amount of pot indoors. In the winter of 1973, Michael, who was living in Mendocino County, put together a slide show for upstate growers based on what he had learned about manipulating the growing cycle. “Nobody ever grew males again,” he boasted.

Michael said that he served two stints in San Quentin. After he was discharged the second time, in 1999, he grew tomatoes for Whole Foods and worked for a seed bank. After the passage of Senate Bill 420, a friend told him about the dispensary scene and loaned him a 1987 BMW. Michael placed an ad in the newspaper saying that he would deliver cannabis right to a customer’s door. He opened the first Farmacy in 2005.

I asked Michael if being involved in the dispensary business was a wise choice for a two-time drug offender. “I’ve got two strikes around my neck, and, yes, I’ve been anxious,” he said. He noted that he had ten children from various wives and girlfriends, all of whom were supported by the income from his stores. He declined to reveal how much money he made.

Michael jumped off the couch and bounded downstairs to take care of some business, leaving me with JoAnna LaForce, who helps run the business side of the Farmacy. A cheerful woman in her fifties, she believes that she is the only pharmacist in the United States who actively participates in a medical-cannabis dispensary. Though doctors are protected under California state law, she explained, pharmacists are not, which means that she is theoretically subject to arrest, although the D.E.A. generally avoids entanglements with medical professionals.

LaForce told me that she had once been married to Michael; they did not have children. “I met him in San Diego in February, 1993, through a mutual friend,” she said. “At the time, he was on the lam. We were together for a year before the feds took him away.” When he got out of prison, they were together for two more years, and then he went to Mexico, to live on the beach and surf. When Michael decided to open the Farmacy, she was happy to help.

LaForce spent fifteen years working in a hospice with dying patients. “I saw the value of alternative medicine, particularly cannabis, in helping with appetite, pain management, and anxiety,” she said. “I found that I could use cannabis to decrease the pain medication, which in turn made patients able to spend their last days talking toError running style: Style code didn't finish running in a timely fashion. Possible causes:

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