My look inside MedMen, a new kind of dispensary marketing the stigma out of cannabis. 

Imagine you&#39;re 16 again, and you&#39;re sick. You&#39;ve just had to transfer out of a normal high school to independent study, because you can&#39;t sit through classes without being overcome by intense, unexplainable nausea. Nobody can figure out what&#39;s wrong with you. You can&#39;t eat, and you wake up nauseous, and your weight is hitting dangerous lows. Your primary care physician can&#39;t figure out what&#39;s wrong, and refers you to a specialist. At first, the gastroentirologist diagnoses you with acid reflux. That doesn&#39;t explain all of it, and so you have to get an endoscopy. The procedure makes you nervous, but it&#39;s necessary to figure out what&#39;s wrong with you. When you come out of it, they explain to you that they tried blowing air into your stomach and it wouldn&#39;t expand. Turns out, what&#39;s making you sick like this, is anxiety. Your body is constantly in fight-or-flight mode. You&#39;re given the standard option for treatment: you can take benzodiazepines, a class of drug that includes Xanax and Klonopin, known for its severely addictive tendencies. There&#39;s a history of addiction in your family, so this scares you. If you want it, there&#39;s an alternative option. You can get a prescription that allows you (and an adult) to go into buildings with bars over the windows. Inside, there&#39;s a variety of completely safe, non-addictive medicines, ones you can pick and choose from behind the counter until you determine which is right for you. The medicine will even make you hungry, a feeling you haven&#39;t been able to feel for months. But this option is highly stigmatized, looked down upon by the general populace. Would you still choose it? I know I would.

&nbsp;

I did.

&nbsp;

The story of what led me to medical marijuana isn&#39;t the most dramatic there is. It&#39;s well-documented that cannabis helps with things like chronic pain and seizures as well as mental illnesses. As a medicine, it has helped countless numbers of people. However, as the cultural tide shifts, it&#39;s becoming clearer that its medicinal uses aren&#39;t necessarily at the forefront of everyone&#39;s mind. That&#39;s okay, too&mdash;the same properties that alleviated my anxiety allow for people who may not be similarly afflicted to come home, light a joint, and relax at the end of the day. MedMen, a company that aims to modernize the way we consume cannabis, caters to both crowds.

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Is This the Future of Cannabis?

L'OFFICIEL USA May 2024 - Natalie Portman Cover

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Is This the Future of Cannabis?

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