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420 NEWS - Frustration runs deep among medical cannabis patients and advocates who say the commercial market created by Proposition 64 in 2016 isn’t meeting their needs.
Turn off Highway 99 in rural Elverta, drive five miles down the road and you’ll find a dusty lot crammed with cars on this scorching Friday evening. Behind the wooden fence, for a $10 entry fee, awaits a gathering akin to a block party crossed with a high-potency farmers market.
Alongside shirtless young men displaying jars of weed and decorative bongs, there are tacos and smoothies for sale. A woman in cannabis leaf-patterned shorts peruses the merchandise, while another with a severe black bob offers dab hits near the front. The DJ occasionally interrupts his mix of throwback hip-hop tunes (do you enjoy Coolio’s “Fantastic Voyage”?) to sell tickets for a raffle raising money for one vendor’s comatose employee.
Next to his booth, a table gives out free cannabis for veterans, who don’t have to pay to get into the event. Neither do patients with a doctor’s recommendation, like Dannie, a barber who was shot three times in his left arm and smokes cannabis to manage pain often inflamed by cutting hair.
Dannie, who agreed to be identified only by his first name, said he carries a medical recommendation because it’s safer should he ever get stopped by the police. But he still prefers buying weed at these clandestine pop-ups, where the products are more potent than at a dispensary.
“I’d rather spend my $30 on something that lasts,” he said.
This is just one of four unlicensed cannabis “seshes” in the Sacramento area that Bette Braden will host this week, as she does every week. The events started eight years ago for medical marijuana patients in an era of looser regulations, before California legalized recreational sales.
Since 2016, when voters approved Proposition 64, the initiative that authorized a commercial cannabis market in the state, Braden has come to view her seshes as both a business opportunity and an act of protest. Like many longtime advocates, she believes all weed use has a medical purpose, and considers it immoral that high taxes and a lack of dispensaries have made it inaccessible to many patients.
“The laws are so hideous,” Braden said, as she supervised from a camp chair near the entrance. “I used to be an activist. Now I’ve gone over to the underground.”
‘No one really cares about the medical side’
Frustration runs deep among medical cannabis patients and advocates who — by persuading voters to pass Proposition 215 in 1996 — paved the way for legal weed in California, but now feel left behind in a post-Proposition 64 era. In a profit-centered system focused on recreational sales, they argue there is little consideration for patients and their unique needs.
Collectives that once provided cannabis and community largely dissolved nearly five years ago, as California transitioned to a new regulatory framework based around licensed growers and retailers. Dispensaries, which are still prohibited in many parts of the state by local rules, have not widely embraced a replacement program that allows them to donate medical marijuana to patients who cannot afford to buy it. Medical identification cards, which can cost several hundred dollars to renew annually, confer few tangible benefits.
“No one really cares about the medical side, and that’s a mistake, because that’s where the value is,” said Richard Miller, who has promoted patients’ rights at the state Capitol for nearly two decades as a member of the American Alliance for Medical Cannabis and Americans for Safe Access. “I’ve been feeling over the past year like my work is a failure.”
The shift to treating medical marijuana users more like customers is especially tough for older patients with limited incomes and those with chronic conditions who need a large amount of cannabis for treatment. While California physicians can recommend cannabis for conditions including arthritis, glaucoma, migraines and seizures, most health insurance plans do not cover medical marijuanabecause it remains illegal at the federal level.
“My life is being messed with. I should not have to continue to…search out ways of finding the only medicine that has ever helped me.”
bonnie metcalf, who uses cannabis to ease pain from an immune diseasenone
So some cost-conscious patients seek other ways of getting their supply, such as the underground seshes sprouting up around the state. That further bolstersan illicit market that California has struggled to bring under control and alarms advocates who want patients to have high-quality, safe medicine.
“There are some things in this world that should not have a f—ing price tag. And feeling good when you’re sick is f—ing one of them,” said Bonnie Metcalf, who lives in Sacramento County and suffers from sarcoidosis, a disease of the immune system that fills her body with lumps of inflamed cells called granulomas.
With an $1,100 monthly disability payment her only income, Metcalf said she cannot afford dispensary prices and relies on friends and Braden’s pop-ups for cannabis.
“It ain’t funny no more. My life is being messed with,” she said. “I should not have to continue to do this, to have to, you know, search out ways of finding the only medicine that has ever helped me in a way that I can still have a value to my life.”
‘It’s nothing but pain’
Metcalf’s body is snap, crackle, popping as she rolls into the living room in her motorized wheelchair for breakfast. An excruciating tingle runs from her neck and shoulders down through her hips and legs, she said, like a limb that has fallen asleep. It’s a dull, aching, don’t-fricking-talk-to-me kind of feeling, the same agony she wakes up to every day “until I get some pot in me.”
“As soon as I hit this reality, it’s nothing but pain,” Metcalf said. “It’s the first thing I think about. Because how can it not be?”
Metcalf does not like the side effects she experienced with pharmaceuticals — she took a steroid for her lungs that she said gave her diabetes — so she primarily sticks to cannabis and meditation to treat her sarcoidosis.
“It’s very strange, because there’s a point you get to where you don’t give a f— that you have pain. You’re so euphoric,” she said. “People would say, ‘Oh, you’re just doing it to get high.’ Well, yeah, dude, I would rather be in a euphoric state of mind than, you know, I can’t get comfortable. You can’t eat. Your muscles are constantly spasming. I’m on hot water bottles. I mean, it’s ridiculous.”
Cannabis has been part of Metcalf’s life for decades: Now 61, she said she first smoked weed at the age of 8, when an older teen gave her a joint at the park, and became an activist for cannabis access as a teenager.
While living in San Francisco in the 1980s, she worked with cancer and HIV/AIDS patients, Metcalf said, advocating for them to be able to use cannabis in medical settings. She collected signatures for the initiative that legalized medical marijuana and, after it passed in 1996, moved home to Yuba County, where she opened her own cooperative. Metcalf said she would drive a bus of patients down to San Francisco twice a month so they could see a doctor and get their paperwork in order.
That ended after 11 years, when Metcalf became too disabled to run the collective any longer. Despite her activism, however, she now refuses to get a doctor’s recommendation or a medical card or shop at dispensaries. She’s furious at how Proposition 64 commercialized cannabis in California, prioritizing getting high over medication and pushing aside longtime activists, growers and mom-and-pop businesses with expensive licenses and regulations.
“The system that exists is bulls–t,” she said. “These rich people are paying more for packaging and branding than they are worried about medicine for people. They don’t care. It’s not a medicine to them. It’s just another money-making scheme like beer or cigarettes.”
After eating a sausage scramble with green onions, Metcalf follows a meditative routine to help her mind vibrate above the pain. For her daily sacraments, she burns a bay leaf, a bundle of sage and a stick of palo santo, waving them around her body and each door in the house. She takes off her shoes and sits in the backyard for a few minutes, sticking her bare feet into the dirt to ground.
Finally, it’s time to medicate. Metcalf said she can no longer smoke weed because of the granulomas in her lungs. Instead, she takes two daily doses of FECO, a highly-concentrated cannabis extract — one in the morning to relax her body and one in the evening to help her sleep.
Back in her room, Metcalf turns on a playlist of affirmations by the musician Toni Jones and says a silent prayer (“May all beings live in peace, harmony, love and bliss”). Then she dips a fork into her jar of FECO and puts a dab of the oil on her tongue. She spits a chunk back into the jar, then bites another piece off the fork, until she estimates that she has half a gram.
The sensation starts in her head. She can feel her blood pressure calm. Her eyes relax and she sees the world in a whole different way. Everything is sparkly.
“It’s like a rain. It just starts raining,” she said, as the relief slowly washed down her body, loosening her joints before arriving, finally, at her feet.
“As long as my mind is high, I can control the body,” she said. “I can choose to disconnect from the pain. I can choose to put it in the background.
‘Our whole system fell apart’
Though it was the first state in the country to legalize medical marijuana with Proposition 215, California has always had a fraught relationship with it.
The Compassionate Use Act allowed people with a valid doctor’s recommendation, as well as their caregivers, to cultivate cannabis for their personal medical use — opening the door for collectives where patients unable to grow their own medicine could pool their resources to pay “caregivers” to do it for them. Compassionate care programs offered weed to the sickest and poorest patients for minimal or no cost.
But federal pressure from the “War on Drugs” remained, and the state was reluctant to jump into regulating medical cannabis until 2015, largely leaving the task to local jurisdictions. Writing recommendations became a lucrative business for some unscrupulous physicians, while illicit operators took advantage of the enforcement gaps to open hundreds of what were functionally retail dispensaries, enhancing skepticism about the legitimacy of the medical marijuana system.
That changed in 2019, after the passage of Proposition 64, when California began requiring collectives to get licensed like a commercial dispensary. Unable to complete the expensive and complex process, many shut down. More than 60% of cities and counties in the state still ban cannabis retailers, even for medical use, though starting in January, they can no longer prohibit medical cannabis delivery.
“Overnight, our whole system fell apart,” said Valerie Corral, founder of the groundbreaking cooperative Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana in Santa Cruz. “They were so busy counting tax dollars that they put us all out of business.”
Corral received a license, but she sold it after it became clear opening and operating a dispensary would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that her donation-based organization did not have. Now she grows cannabis and works with local dispensaries to donate it for free to patients — the result of a 2019 lawthat, after a multiyear effort, established a replacement to California’s traditional compassion programs.
Leona Powell, a former member of Corral’s collective who smokes weed daily to deal with lingering pain from a 1978 airplane crash, said she misses volunteering in the garden and connecting with other patients at weekly meetings, where they would share information and potluck dinners. Living primarily on Social Security payments, the 75-year-old Powell said she relies on donated cannabis from a local dispensary, because she otherwise cannot afford the price of a standard eighth of an ounce, which typically costs $40 or more plus tax.
“That’s only a couple of joints. That’s two days’ worth. Now what?” she said. “I don’t have that kind of money.”
Efforts to formalize the medical marijuana system in California also lagged. In 2003, the state established a medical identification card for patients, mainly as a way to defuse interactions with law enforcement, but made it voluntary. Few people applied for one, perhaps afraid to register themselves with the government — though some activists did as a political statement.
At its peak, in the 2009-10 fiscal year, counties issued 12,659 annual medical cards, according to data from the state Department of Public Health. Surveys at the time estimated hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million, medical cannabis patients in California. By last year, the number of medical cards dropped to just 3,218, among the lowest on record.
Advocates say there is little reason to get a card, which carries an annual fee of as much as $100, on top of the cost of the doctor’s recommendation. With the card, patients are exempted from the state sales tax on their cannabis but not other state and local taxes, so they would need to spend hundreds of dollars per month at a dispensary to realize any savings. Californians can also get medical cards before they turn 21, when it is legal to buy weed for recreational use, and cardholders can purchase more cannabis per day.
“There’s a tendency to be dismissive of cannabis users” among the medical establishment, which is then reflected in policy, said William Dolphin, a University of Redlands lecturer who researches and writes about medical cannabis. “We’ve seen across the country a desire to wash their hands of it.”
(Alexei Koseff covers Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Legislature and California government from Sacramento. He joined CalMatters in January 2022 after previously reporting on the Capitol for The Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Chronicle, where he broke the story of Newsom's infamous dinner at The French Laundry restaurant. Alexei is a Bay Area native and attended Stanford University. He speaks fluent Spanish. This story first appeared in CalMatters.org.)
