My fine adopted state of California has raised a stiff middle finger to the rest of the country with this, the brilliant and much-needed 24 hour marijuana vending machine. It is official: every last need I could possibly have is now covered.

I have a few friends who have prescriptions for medical marijuana, all of whom are in perfect health (except for chronic coughs caused by smoking medical marijuana). Ironically, I had another friend who had cancer. That’s not the ironic part. The ironic part is that he went to his doctor because he was having trouble eating. The doctor tried to prescribe some crazy caplet that listed “long-lasting hallucinations” and “intense diarrhea” as possible side effects. He called me to ask if I knew anything about it … I guess because he fancied me some kind of drug expert. Don’t ask me what I’ve done to earn this reputation. I said it looked scary and he should just get a prescription for marijuana … after all, they legalized it for people who were in his exact situation, right?

The next day, he went back to his doctor and asked for the prescription. The doctor refused. He would rather have had my friend take this radioactive death-pill than smoke a little herb. The reason, of course, is that the federal government could potentially bust him for prescribing marijuana, since federal law trumps state law — whenever the government feels like enforcing it, that is. They generally don’t concern themselves when state laws are more conservative than federal laws. (Warning: I do not have any examples, and so this last statement should never be repeated to anyone who actually knows what he or she is talking about.)

Okay, so this doctor referred him to another doctor. The second doctor responded to my friend’s request by saying, “don’t you know someone who could get it for you?” After this, he gave up on the legitimate medical community and finally went to see one of the doctors who advertises in the back of LA Weekly with ads that look like this:

(I wonder if this has any medical legitimacy? Are there musician-only diseases? Is that some kind of code for syphilis?)

… or this …

(It’s funny: my doctor has a picture of himself in his office wearing this exact same outfit. Does that have something to do with the Hippocratic oath?)

So anyway, my friend went to one of these back-alley doctors, paid him $200, got his prescription, and right away, his appetite returned. So, the results of our experiment teach us this: marijuana works as medicine. And my friend, who had cancer, could not get it. I really don’t know what argument you could raise that would convince me it should continue to be illegal. To me, one’s position on legalized marijuana is pretty much the dividing line between rational and irrational.