A new, older face of medical marijuana

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.

Contact the writer: sbosco@ocregister.com or bstaggs@ocregister.com

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