What I saw in line at a South Jersey marijuana dispensary | Mullane

The weed line stretched around the Curaleaf cannabis shop in Bellmawr, as budtenders with iPads sorted the “adult use” people from the medical card people and, if requested, pairing each with a strain of bud to attain their desired high.

A hundred people waited. More made their way from two parking lots.

“You medical or fun weed?” I asked a manbun guy.

“Fun, I guess,” he said.

“Was told that fun weed people have to wait in line,” I said. “But medical has privilege and goes right in, no waiting. It’s like Studio 54 in the old days.”

It was mid-morning on a weekday when most grownups are working, so I expected a stoner crowd — underemployed gamers, bald-with-ponytail boomers, aging suburban GenXers who head into the garage late to puff and “take the edge off.”

Sure, I found some, whom I've always seen as harmless, aimless and likable.

Mostly I found people, both medical and non-medical, who said they were buying weed to deal with chronic anxiety. It’s better than drinking and safer than opioids, they said. They don’t want to become thick as a brick and die, just chill.

“I have severe anxiety,” a woman said. “Racing thoughts, depression, I feel overwhelmed, can’t sleep, and sometimes I don’t want to get out of bed.”

The pandemic was frequently cited as the source of anxiety. Or what made their existing anxieties worse, from lockdowns to job loss to long separations from loved ones, the lingering effects of Fauci-ism that therapists, sociologists and historians are just beginning to tally.

I’m ambivalent about legalized smoke, mostly because the opioid epidemic persists. Decriminalizing marijuana seems a better compromise.

As a young long hair, I smoked a lot of weed, daily if I had it. I had friends who smoked (still do) and spent years working crummy, backbreaking jobs (a long, hot summer of jackhammering, for instance) where smoke was common.

Legalizing weed would open the gates to legions of normies who would never would have tried the stuff. They’d do foolish things, like slip down the slope to heavier drugs and lifelong addictions, or they’d drink, toke and drive. Just as some people can’t handle their booze, not everyone can handle their weed. I’ve seen it. They freak.

But a week since weed went legal in the Garden State, most of those concerns were somewhat allayed after Madison, a Curaleaf employee (the company brass would not let employees give me their last names) took me inside the shop on Creek Road. She was my affable tour guide through Jersey’s brave new world of weed.

The place is clean, well-lit and, remarkably, has no trace of pot smell.

“Sure beats those skeevy trailer parks and creepy apartments I used to buy weed at,” I said.

Madison chuckled lightly, maybe a bit uneasily.

“We call this our sales floor, and here we separate our recreational from our medical patients, because our medical patients are our priority,” she said.

The clientele ranged from college manbuns to seniors with canes, but skewed toward manbuns.

Around the place were glass cases with displays of glass bongs. The budtenders — employees trained in the cannabis arts — helpfully suggested various strains of bud, like sativa, an energy booster, or indica, which can make you as mellow as Dean Martin on his third highball.

But it’s not like Wawa. You can’t just walk in, order and go. Curaleaf requires a pre-order online. Your stuff will be waiting for pick up.

“You sell munchies?” I asked Madison.

“No. We should, shouldn’t we?” she said.

I imagined a cafe, the “Bud Bistro,” serving Doritos and cheesesteaks, my go-to munchie foods way back when.

Madison introduced me to Emily, a budtender. She said she loves cannabis, learning cannabis law, and studied chemistry at Fairleigh Dickinson.

“The first thing I like to ask people is what effect they’re looking for,” Emily said. She asked, “If you were buying, what effect would you be looking for today?”

“Well,” I said, “it’s a busy day, working in two states. I guess I’d want to get through it but not get way stressed, you know, be relaxed. But not so relaxed that I can’t read my notes. You got a weed for that?”

“Absolutely,” she said. “I would go for a sativa strain or a hybrid, like Cake Pop, something to get you motivated, but without being too jumpy.

“Sativas,” she said, “can have a variety of effects. It’ll be a little different for each person. But usually sativas are more euphoric, more racy, more uplifting.”

“Makes you the life of the party, unafraid to talk to girls and such,” I said.

“Sometimes, yeah,” she said. “Or it makes you think big thoughts, like outer space and how, you know, how big it is. Or, maybe you wonder why bread is bread, but when you heat it, it’s toast, so why does its whole name change?”

“Or,” I said, “if you drop a bar of soap on the floor, does it make the soap dirty, or the floor clean?”

“Right, right. Stuff like that,” she said.

Pairin cannabis with personality and desired effect seems somewhat safer than scoring an eighth of mystery pot from a shady dude in an apartment that smells like hipp incense and cats. But my guess is next up for legalization among the Trenton brain trust will be magic mushrooms, and who knows what after that.

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This article originally appeared on Burlington County Times: In Bellmawr, users say recreational marijuana takes edge off anxiety