Catch-up post: If this were Trader Joe's, there'd be free samples, I'm just sayin'
hypnagogie and I visited our first marijuana dispensary in Maine a few weekends ago, which for a child of the Nancy Reagan era such as myself was an extended exercise in cognitive dissonance. Maine is fully pot-legal, but going to a dispensary still requires a medical weed card. CBD-related products, though, can be bought over the counter with adult ID, and
hypnagogie has a chronic pain thing, so off to the hippie wilds of Ye Olde Down East we went to see if some CBD cream would help.
Nothing much to say about the experience, really, which might be the weirdest part of all-medical marijuana proponents are well aware of the image problem they need to throttle, so everything looked healthy (read: like a Minnesota Reiki studio) and smelled healthier (read: like getting groped by a lavender bath bomb). Aside from the ID check at the reinforced doors and a run across the street to the ATM because cash only, natch, everything ran Safeway-smoothly. That, and both customer service folks and the one other guy there all looked like the sorts who use "dude" as conversational punctuation, but that might just be southern Maine talking. Thing was, it was an unremarkable, quotidian transaction that took place at a cabinet with weed in it, which still feels wacky-alternative-timeline to me, the sort of thing in a Doctor Who episode that would make you yell at Russell T. Davies because come on, man. We stepped back into the parking lot with our little brown grocery sack, I looked around and went "...welp, that was a thing that happened," and thus ended the experience. Things change.
Report on CBD cream: didn't work. Booooooo.