The mar­i­jua­na dis­pen­sary on Down­ing Street is in a cozy Den­ver neigh­bor­hood, tucked amid cof­fee shops, bou­tiques and oth­er arti­facts of gen­tri­fi­ca­tion.  Enter­ing the store on a bright Sun­day morn­ing, I’m greet­ed by a glassy-eyed young man slumped in a chair with a large bowl of bud on his lap.  His job, in addi­tion to rolling ju-jus, is to check IDs, turn away minors and iden­ti­fy out-of-staters, whose pur­chas­es are lim­it­ed to one-quar­ter ounce per trans­ac­tion. Col­oradans can legal­ly buy four times that amount, the state’s law­mak­ers evi­dent­ly believ­ing that natives can han­dle their weed bet­ter than non-residents.

His col­leagues behind the counter are in a sim­i­lar­ly ami­ca­ble stu­por, but knowl­edge­able about their prod­uct and full of advice to pre­vent patrons from pulling a Mau­reen Dowd, the New York Times colum­nist who descend­ed into a para­noid delu­sion­al state after lock­ing her­self in a hotel room and wolf­ing down a THC-laced Sky Bar. The del­i­ca­cies at this shop are said to con­tain safe amounts of the active ingre­di­ent, enough to pro­duce a man­age­able eupho­ria that won’t end in an emer­gency room vis­it or inspire anoth­er loopy New York Times col­umn.

There is some­thing vague­ly sur­re­al about get­ting med­ical advice, how­ev­er sound, from peo­ple in a drug-induced haze at ten o’clock in the morn­ing.  The “wake and bake” crew at the mar­i­jua­na dis­pen­sary fits the car­i­ca­tures that oppo­nents of legal­iza­tion have sketched, mak­ing them a bad adver­tise­ment for their polit­i­cal cause.

Which brings me to Don­ald Trump. Con­tin­ue read­ing →