Dispensaries Draw Diverse Operators

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Armed with their referrals from specializing doctors, patients come to Pico Collective for a dose of the herb they love most.

Once they’re buzzed in by a security guard, they step into a small waiting room featuring a portrait of Marilyn Monroe, a selection of magazines and a flat-screen TV. After their identities and doctors’ recommendations are verified by a man in a security suit watching through a window in the wall, they’re buzzed through again, first into a hallway designed to trap robbers, then into the showroom where the products are displayed behind a dark wooden counter.

Pico Collective sells marijuana in several forms including brownies, rice cakes and smoke-ready chunks with names such as Grapefruit Kush, Headband, Sour Diesel, Lemon Amnesia, God’s Gift and Blue Dream.

Prices, said co-owner Natalia Plyam, range from about $20 to $60 depending on the quality for one-eighth of an ounce. Credit cards are accepted. And in order to do business, she added, a patient must join the collective. Membership is free.

In the two months since the dispensary has opened, she said, more than 300 have joined, including several small-time growers whose crops are sold there. Growers must join a collective to operate legally.

A few miles away, Beverly Hills Green Cross on Robertson Boulevard isn’t just a dispensary: It’s also a T-shirt shop. And a church.

Green Cross was recently opened by Craig X. Rubin, who once ran for mayor on a pro-pot platform and is still serving probation for a 2007 conviction on illegally possessing and selling marijuana. Rubin, a pastor ordained by a small nondenominational Pasadena church, sells T-shirts out of one section of his storefront and marijuana out of the other. The pot section has Bible slogans on the walls above the marijuana display. He offers Bible study to anyone who’s interested.

Once patients are deemed eligible by an employee at the counter of the T-shirt shop, they are admitted through a locked door to the dispensary room where they use magnifying glasses to examine samples of marijuana with names such as Mango Kush, Mr. Nice and Grape Ape.

“For first-time patients we suggest our sampler at $120 for 7 grams,” explains Rubin, 44, who once ran another church eventually closed by police at which marijuana was burned on an altar.

During a recent visit there, Vanessa Rydquist, 31, expressed no interest whatsoever in religion. “I have serious carpal tunnel syndrome and tendinitis,” said the former data entry clerk, who hasn’t worked for a year because of the pain.

Doctors prescribed muscle relaxants to help her sleep, but they left her feeling “grouchy and angry” in the morning, Rydquist said. A much better solution, she believes, is two topical oils made from cannabis extracts that she bought at the dispensary for $20.

“It’s been pretty stressful,” she said of her pain. “It’s a miracle that this place exists.”

Another patient Gennaro Scotto, 36 didn’t have a specific ailment. “It’s all about life,” he said of his marijuana smoking, which he said began at age 12.

Rubin was quick to jump in.

“Some people use it as preventative medicine,” he said. “It just makes them feel better.”

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