The Advocate
The office smelled strongly of pot—not of pot being smoked but of pot as potpourri, piled generously in invisible bowls somewhere. The floor was covered in astroturf and the walls painted with cartoon-like macaws and howler monkeys. It seemed a marvel that there was any work being done at all. But the Green Alliance was in the early stages of a spirited advocacy campaign, and I was applying to be an advocate.
“I’m here to see Tiffany Wright?” I ventured at a desk by the entrance. “That’s Tiffany Wright,” the young woman said, gesturing with her pencil at a diminutive woman dressed in bright purple with eyes and hair belonging to a much larger race of humans. Tiffany was on the phone, so I waited and discussed moon signs and rising Virgos with the woman at the desk, whose first question to me had been: “Are you a Cancer?”
My conversation with Tiffany was closer to a sales pitch than an interview. She did ask me “What made you apply for this job,” but it seemed a concession to form more than anything else.
An ordinance now before the LA City Council would limit medical marijuana dispensaries in Greater Los Angeles to those that opened their doors before the City instituted a moratorium (since overturned in court) on new permits in 2007. But pot has unquestionably been a boom industry in LA since the recession began: more than 600 new dispensaries have opened since the moratorium was passed, and closing them would cost LA county roughly 5,000 paying jobs. Now, strangely, the fight to close pot dispensaries was creating even more jobs, for “420 Advocates.”
Tiffany framed the issue differently: “We already overturned the City’s illegal moratorium and we want to ensure that patients continue to have safe and legal access to their medicine.
“But our lawyer’s very expensive,” she added. The crux of an advocate’s job would be to make the rounds of pot dispensaries in their assigned district soliciting donations from dispensary owners in order to “save their own asses,” in the words of Tiffany’s boss Dan Halbert. If the ordinance passes, the Alliance wants to be in a position to launch a decisive counterstrike—a class-action lawsuit, a referendum, a PR campaign. “Dan’s not a weed guy,” Tiffany said, “he’s just a businessman who wants to stay in business.”
“Now, we’ve got to band together to make sure that we can all keep our doors open,” Tiffany said. “A lot of these places are pulling in two, three thousand dollars a day. Wouldn’t it make sense to divert just half of one day’s revenue in order to stay open for another 365 days? If we get that donation from just a quarter of dispensaries, we’ll have enough for our legal fund.” But the timing was crucial—GA hopes to raise $250,000 within a month.
“I need someone who can close. You’ve got to be able to trigger those psychological impulses, create a sense of urgency, and walk out with a check. Between us on the desk was a small notepad that said: “The Wright way—creativity, efficiency innovation.”
“We’ll train you on the issues, but you really need to know how to sell. I know how to sell—I could sell fire inhalant. I could teach anyone to sell fire inhalant—if they’re not a lame duck—but we just don’t have time.” Tiffany looked at me quizzically, shuffled some papers and stood up. “We’ve got a lot people coming in this afternoon, so we’ll be getting in touch with you later tonight. I’m going to pass this over to Dan,” she said, holding my resume, “and he’ll be with you shortly.”
Before moving to Los Angeles in March to found the Rainforest Collective—the dispensary where we now met—and, inadvertently, the Green Alliance for Patients and Providers, Dan Halbert ran a dating service in Phoenix, AZ. “If you’d a told me one year ago,” he began our conversation, “that in a year’s time I’d be up in LA defending my right to sell marijuana, I don’t know what. I never thought I’d be here, but the problem is that there was no united front for dispensary owners.
“So now we’re trying to show other dispensaries that they have a vested interest in this kind of work. I’m bringing people in here so that we can decide if we think you’re able to do that.” He glanced down at my resume again. “What brought you to LA?”
