Dr. Kush.(marijuana, Proposition 215, Senate Bill 420)

The Tibetan prayer flags suspended on a string over the sleeping body of Captain Blue rose and fell in fluttering counterpoint to the wheezy rhythm of his breath. Lifted by a gentle breeze off the Pacific Ocean, each swatch of red, white, yellow, or green cotton bore a paragraph of Asian script. Every time a flag flaps in the breeze, it is thought, a prayer flies off to Heaven. Blue's mother says that when her son was an infant he used to sleep until noon, which is still the time that he wakes up most days, on his platform bed in a one-bedroom apartment overlooking Venice Beach, a neighborhood of Los Angeles.

It was now three o'clock in the afternoon, and Captain Blue was dozing after a copious inhalation of purified marijuana vapor. (His nickname is an homage to his favorite variety of bud.) His hair was black and greasy, and was spread across his pillow. On the front of his purple T-shirt, which had slid up to expose his round belly, were the words "Big Daddy." With his arm wrapped around a three-foot-long green bong, he resembled a large, contented baby who has fallen asleep with his milk bottle.

Captain Blue is a pot broker. More precisely, he helps connect growers of high-grade marijuana upstate to the retail dispensaries that sell marijuana legally to Californians on a doctor's recommendation. Since 1996, when a referendum known as Proposition 215 was approved by California voters, it has been legal, under California state law, for authorized patients to possess or cultivate the drug. The proposition also allowed a grower to cultivate marijuana for a patient, as long as he had been designated a "primary caregiver" by that patient. Although much of the public discussion centered on the needs of patients with cancer, AIDS, and other diseases that are synonymous with extraordinary suffering, the language of the proposition was intentionally broad, covering any medical condition for which a licensed physician might judge marijuana to be an appropriate remedy--insomnia, say, or attention-deficit disorder.

The inside of Blue's apartment, where he spends most of his time, measures less than four hundred square feet. It opens onto a huge wraparound terrace that offers mind-bending views of the ocean and the Hollywood Hills. The apartment, which is in the vicinity of Washington Boulevard, used to be occupied by another pot dealer, who moved out a few years ago, leaving Blue with his crash pad and a list of about a hundred patients. The building is near Abbot Kinney Boulevard, the commercial drag in Venice that, in recent years, has been transformed from a low-rent strip of bars and secondhand-clothing stores into a destination for well-heeled shoppers and restaurant-goers. The building retains a funky seventies vibe, with white wood floors, murky brown walls, and faded Morrison Hotel-style carpets. The sounds of "Tom and Jerry" episodes blare through locked doors in the middle of the day.

I recently spent six months, off and on, with Blue--at his apartment, in private homes, on farms, in pot grow rooms, and in other places where "medical marijuana" is produced, traded, sold, and consumed in California. During that time, I saw thousands of Tibetan prayer flags. The flags identify their owners with serenity and the conscious path, rather than with the sinister world of urban dope dealers, who flaunt muscles and guns, and charge exorbitant prices for mediocre product. For Blue and tens of thousands of like-minded individuals, Proposition 215 presented an opportunity to participate in a legally sanctioned experiment in altered living. The people I met in the high-end ganja business had an affinity for higher modes of thinking and being, including vegetarianism and eating organic food, practicing yoga, avoiding prescription drugs in favor of holistic healing methods, travelling to Indonesia and Thailand, fasting, and experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs. Many were also financially savvy, working long hours and making six-figure incomes.

Blue and I have known each other for almost two decades. Our fathers were both professors of political science, and, starting in the mid-eighties, we both attended Ivy League colleges in the Northeast, where we shared a fondness for illegal drugs. After graduation, Blue spun records and taught nursery school in Manhattan. He left for California in 1998, not long after the state banned cigarette smoking in workplaces--Blue is highly allergic to cigarette smoke--and passed Proposition 215. After working for a while as a bouncer, he began selling pot full time.

In 2003, the California State Legislature passed Senate Bill 420. The law was intended to clear up some of the confusion caused by Proposition 215, which had failed to specify how patients who could not grow their own pot were expected to obtain the drug, and how much pot could be cultivated for medical purposes. The law permitted any Californian with a doctor's note to own up to six mature marijuana plants, or to possess up to half a pound of processed weed, which could be obtained from a patients' collective or cooperative--terms that were not precisely defined in the statute. It also permitted a primary caregiver to be paid "reasonable compensation" for services provided to a qualified patient "to enable that person to use marijuana."