I Got High With My Mom at HempCon

My mother (not her real name) and I get out of the cab at the corner of Kill Me Street and Carjack Avenue, in the Beyond Thunderdome section of south San Francisco. We are here on illicit business, so maybe this is exactly where all of this should go down.

Still, when we see the squat motel where we're supposed to stay—“This is where they bring prostitutes,” my mother says, and I just don't have the energy to respond about the dignity of sex work—we sigh and I drop my bag. But my mother won't. She cannot even be adjacent to this hotel, something about catching a venereal disease from it. My mother believes you can catch anything. You can catch tattoos, you can catch unwanted pregnancies. She is a very well-educated woman; the disparity in our worldviews is confounding to us both.

The sole virtue of this motel is that it is within walking distance of Hempcon, “America's Largest Medical Marijuana Show,” a several-times-yearly display of all that is newly decriminalized in the world of pot and newly discovered in the world of ailments that can be treated with marijuana, which is apparently all of them. Being within walking distance was necessary because my mother is an ultra-Orthodox Jew, and Hempcon weekend includes a Shabbos (like all weekends do) and my mother will not take a cab or train on Shabbos. But as bad as she wanted the weed, she wanted to live through the weekend, as well. In other words, we were desperate, but not this desperate.

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Maybe the simplest way to explain it is that my mother loves rules. She even loves exceptions to rules, because of their indispensable role in proving rules. Even here, on this strange trip, there's no relief from the hundreds of Levitical laws she is observing at any one time. And yet we are here to get my mother high, because believe it or not, there is no Jewish law against that. In fact, just the previous week the Orthodox Union, perhaps the largest organization in charge of declaring foods kosher, put some marijuana-extract products under its auspices.

My mother can't sleep. Night after night, no rest, and it's ruining her. It's maybe post-menopause, maybe just old age. Or maybe it's her desperate anxiety; she never guessed she'd live this long. And now that she has—now that her final daughter is married off—she has to make plans for herself, for still being alive. She tried sleeping pills, but they didn't work. She takes Xanax, but its effectiveness has waned, and she's worried that if she starts taking more, it'll work even less. (Also, Xanax can't help you relax if taking Xanax is something that's making you nervous.)

She's decided to try pot, but she's a Hasidic woman who lives in [redacted]. In her building, which is mostly occupied by Orthodox Jews, she smells pot in the hallways. She's a grandmother now, though, with grandkids who will need to be married off someday, and how will it look to the gossips and matchmakers in her tiny community when it (definitely) comes up that she knocked on their door one day and asked to borrow a cup of marijuana?

My mother needed something on the sly—but also totally legitimate. Ostensibly pot is legal. Or it's not illegal. Or it's decriminalized. It can be confusing. Which is how you end up with laws like being able to possess it, but not smoke it; being able to ingest it, but not grow it. “This is a really lawless section of the law,” says Aaron Lachant of Nelson Hardiman, LLP. “Everyone involved is incredibly anxious over this.” (You know what helps with anxiety?)

I had an idea: a medical (medical!) marijuana convention I'd heard about, thousands of miles away, on the opposite side of the country. My mother and I would go, and we'd explore pot's strange current moment, a time when the intersection of legality efforts and our still very Protestant notions of what is appropriate adult behavior has resulted in this: a country in which weed is completely okay and also really not okay, where I can bring my 68-year-old Hasidic mother to a weed convention—and write about it for a very well-known magazine—so long as we never, ever mention this to her friends.

All aspects of this trip were fraught. Just two days before we flew to California, I'd checked Hempcon's seizure-inducing website, alive with animated pot-leaf text in ultra-moss, and I discovered that America's Largest Medical Marijuana Show had been moved at the very last minute from San Jose, where it's been a regular since 2010, to San Francisco. After my third call to the weed-green-colored number on the website, I got a very grudging call back from a woman who explained to me that there had been some sudden legal issues in San Jose.

The legal issues turned out to be this: San Jose did not want Hempcon. In 2014, the city passed an ordinance saying only certified dispensaries could “transfer” pot, thus excluding the San Jose Convention Center. A spokesman for the city told the San Jose Mercury News that this information was in the contract presented to Hempcon's organizers, that it was right there, and that if the organizers of Hempcon had bothered to read the contract, there would've been no need to scramble to find an unoccupied convention center one week before their convention.

So, okay: We're not going to San Jose anymore; we're going to the Cow Palace in Daly City. Now my mother and I need to establish our terms. Before we got on the plane, we negotiated: I can include her in my story, but I can't use her name or say where she lives. I warn her that it might be easy to narrow down who she is based on certain biological truth. She said that's fine, just not her name, but I wanted to make sure. What if a local matchmaker happens to be at a doctor's office and happens to pick up a GQ and reads this story and recognizes my name? “Well,” my mother replies, “shame on her for reading GQ.” Okay, but what if those very grandchildren you're worried about grow up and find this story on the Internet? “Then you'll tell them that I couldn't sleep. You'll tell them that [Yiddish nickname for “grandmother” all the grandkids call my mother] couldn't sleep and she couldn't take it anymore.”

We abandon the proximity-to-the-convention plan and find a hotel near Union Square. She'll join me at the convention until sundown, when Shabbos begins; then she'll go back to her hotel room, wait out Shabbos, and meet me back at Hempcon after the sun sets on Saturday night. At reception, my mother asks for a room on a lower floor because she won't be able to use the elevator tomorrow after sundown, another Shabbos prohibition. We both settle into bed—she on the sixth floor, me on 12—and she allows herself to imagine that this might be her last sleepless night.

Her first and, until now, last foray into weed had ended badly. When my mother was an N.Y.U. student in the 1960s, she had a friend who was A Bad Influence, who took her to—as family legend has it—Allen Ginsberg's apartment, where my mother smoked pot for the first time. She threw up and she never smoked it again. Now we're going to Hempcon. In between these two life-cycle events, she became a Hasidic Jew and moved to a hub of Hasidic activity. She wears a wig and long skirts. She doesn't shake men's hands. She says a blessing before she ingests anything. She celebrates Passover in a way that is so specific and tedious that representatives for the word celebrate would like her to use a different term.

One day when I was 12, my mother sent me out for cookies and specified that they had to be Stella D'oro brand, because those cookies were kosher, and we'd be keeping kosher from then on. Our home was not a democracy. Next came three sets of dishes (one for meat, one for dairy, and one for Passover), quickly followed by a literal shutdown from Friday sunset to Saturday sunset—25 prime hours during which we could no longer watch TV, talk on the phone, turn lights on and off, or even cook. My mother had smoked cigarettes, and she no longer could, so in addition to a sudden vacuum of everything I loved on a Saturday, she was reliably irate until the minute Shabbos was over. From the outside, it was a clear-cut case of a person finding God.

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But I could see this wasn't all about God. It was also about culture, and about control. I knew my mother had had her fun in her life—that Allen Ginsberg story is just one of many; Paul Anka shows up in another—but now here she was, a middle-aged single mother facing a long stretch with teenage daughters in 1990s Brooklyn. Everywhere she looked, she saw only the coarsest culture. The cursing, the tattoos, the teen pregnancies, the potheads—and that was just on our block. She didn't know how to stop it from eating us alive.

So she became religious, and my sisters, in a move that still baffles me almost 30 years later, followed suit. People see family pictures of my mother and my sisters, all of them in their wigs and married to very visibly religious men, and they assume that I'm the black sheep, that I went off the rails at some point. It's not true. She did. I'm far more conventional than my mother is and not capable of such radical thinking as to not live on the course set for me at birth. Her choice to become religious was just another punk-rock move in a life filled with them. She has never cared what people think of her, which is unusual for a religious person, which is unusual for any person. And because of it, she is constantly surprising my sisters and me. In retrospect, it was probably only a matter of time before she wound up at a pot convention.

In order to explore/enjoy all that Hempcon has to offer, here's what you need to do: First, you get a “medical evaluation”; then a doctor gives you a prescription card; then you're invited into the “Prop 215 area,” where you can listen to a terrible DJ with an I ♥ VAGINA sign in front of his turntables while you sample marijuana delivered in more ways than you ever knew were possible. Doors open at 3 P.M. Sunset is at 5:04. Two hours should be enough for my mother to get her prescription card and get back to the hotel in time.

We take our place in line among the anxious, the depressed, the arthritic (do 23-year-old boys get arthritis?), the glaucomic (do 23-year-old boys get glaucoma?). Something is wrong with everyone.

They wear hats with marijuana leaves and broad-billed baseball caps. The older ones have gray undertones in their faces, like oxygen and water have been sucked from layers of dermis that were once pink and buoyant to the touch. There are younger men who seem to be aspiring to join them.

My mother, who has big eyes and olive skin and brown hair that has made the Jewish woman's long day's journey to blonde (and yet you'd still identify her as a brunette), looks despondent. She was hoping this was going to be a dignified event, and I was, too, I guess. From inside her bubble, she thought that the legalized-marijuana efforts had made this realm safe for the educated middle class. She expected men in white coats titrating appropriate concoctions for serious, responsible patients with healthy credit scores. Instead, she is surrounded by exactly the people she became religious in order to avoid. Me, I had allowed myself to fantasize about branded pens and canvas bags, though I probably should have known better. Weed legislation has been passed in spite of, not because of, the people we're surrounded by, which are people who might have trouble passing a joint effectively. These are not March on Washington protesters. This is the cast from the “Thriller” video. “I expected to see more doctors here,” says my mother. Her tone is even, polite, but in her face I can see the mounting regret.

After a halfhearted security check through our bags, my mother and I are sent to the prescription area, where young men in scrubs check IDs and hand out clipboards. One of them takes our wrists and writes numbers on them in permanent black marker—this is maybe not a great idea?—and we are pushed to the head of the line to meet the doctor.

My mother has come in prepared to plead her case about her insomnia, her arthritis, her anxiety. She's taking this seriously; she was under the assumption that this would require a serious diagnosis, and I can feel her disappointment growing, her dimming hope that she was doing something medical, or scientific, replaced by the feeling that she's up to something seedy. “Where are the people who are serious about this?” she asks.

The doctor doesn't even look us in the eye. She asks us no questions, fills out some paperwork, and moves us along. My mother bites her nails the whole time, and she is relieved when we call her an Uber and send her back to the hotel.

That night, my mother asked if I would find out from one of the rabbis I know—not one of the rabbis she knows—how she might be permitted to ingest something on Shabbos if she isn't allowed to smoke. His verdict: She could have an edible, as long as it's not something she'd chew like food. It can't be a brownie; it would have to be something in which the medicine was its purpose. Like a lollipop? Yes, the rabbi said, that would work.

A lollipop. I had my mission.

Good Shabbos! It is 4:45 P.M. by the time I emerge onto the convention floor from the musty, DMV-style inefficiency of Prescription Village. Immediately it's clear that no one is in charge here. Everything is chaos. It is anarchy. It is Vietnam. It is The Godfather Part III.

There are a couple of rooms filled with convention-style booths, some with signs, most with weed, one with a couch. I look around and see people taking large drags off dabs and hypnotically bending over pipes. Sebaceous 19-year-olds giggle and punch one another in the arm.

I find my way over to a table that sells $5 dabs and $10 Red Bull slushies, and this, dear reader, is where I must leave you. I won't bore you with graphic details of what happens next. You've already been the sober person in a room full of stoners so often by now that I don't want to subject you to similar tedium. Suffice it to say that I'm out of practice, and that once I put my $5 on the table and do the whole New Journalism thing, I become very hungry and mistake all the samples of weed food for normal food as they're politely passed out to guests. Hours pass while I attempt to interview a guy who went to culinary school and now makes weed-infused chocolate sauce, and a woman who makes tinctures that come in adorable little apothecaric vials, like you might buy at Anthropologie. At some point, I sit down in a folding chair and text A Supportive Friend, and I tell him that no one will talk into the microphone and that I'm terrified of asking them to because they will yell at me. He tells me to just leave the recorder running. It turns out this is technically illegal in California (THANKS, FRIEND), but we're down the rabbit hole now, so. The problem is my big fat fingers have become the size of sausages and I can't operate the teensy buttons on my recorder, so I either call Friend and cry, or I text him that I'm crying.

I also buy a slushie.

The sun rises and sets and rises and sets and children become adults and presidents serve out their terms and that's how long I am in this place, when suddenly I freeze with panic: I have to get back to the hotel. My mother needs me. My mother needs me to sleep. I was a baby once, and she rocked me when I couldn't sleep. She fed me. She loved me. How could I leave her? What she needs now, I will deliver, and what she needs now is a rabbinically sanctioned piece of candy to cure her sleep problems.

I finally get back to my hotel, make my way up to the sixth floor, and knock on my mother's door. I hear a voice ask who it is. I croak my name, and it comes out like this: Bleeeeeeeh. The door opens and my mother, my beautiful mother, takes a look at me and says, “Whoa.”

I reach for her hand and I open her fingers and like a warrior I place in her palm a lollipop that could pass for weapons-grade plutonium, but much worse-tasting. I find my way out of her room, and I go up to mine, and I close the shades because somehow I will have to return to my normal state before my next day of reporting. I close my eyes, and as the lights go out on my world, I register the time on the hotel's digital clock.

It's 6:27 P.M.

An entire day passes and I'm not quite sure how, except to say that maybe don't drink Red Bull slushies at marijuana conventions when you're technically at your job. Sunset comes, Shabbos ends, and my mother texts me: “RU still in there.” (All of her texts read like ransom notes.) She Ubers to the Cow Palace. She is really impressed with Uber, she has to say, just as a concept, and how polite the drivers are. This one had free bottles of water in the back! She is in a good mood because last night she slept through the night for the first time in what is now years. She can't believe it. “I forgot what it feels like to be a person,” she says.

She has her prescription card and her admission ticket ($40 per day or $150 for all three days, said the sign at the door, I swear to God) and meets me inside. The Cow Palace smells worse today than it did yesterday. The NO SMOKING signs are utterly invisible through the smoke, and the maintenance workers are wearing dust masks to shield themselves, which I'm sure is exactly OSHA compliant.

Nearby, there is a commotion. The joint-rolling contest is beginning onstage. The emcee is a “cannabis comedian” named Medicinal Mike Boris, who has a goatee and a suit that is at least part rayon. He also has a bizarre air of superiority to the stoners, and though his jokes get big laughs, I am not impressed, since it's really easy to make stoned people laugh, in my experience.

Later, we talk to Medicinal Mike, and my mother closes her eyes during this conversation and takes a slow and deep breath, and she wonders how she got here.

Everyone is against legalization, he says: the government, the cotton growers (because hemp is competition), the beermakers (because who wants beer when there's weed?), the pharmaceutical companies. Medicinal Mike has acute narcolepsy, which causes seizures. To treat it, he began using CBD, the part of the plant that doesn't make you high (though he's not against getting high; he's very pro getting high), and he hasn't had a seizure in seven years. He is a medical marvel, a triumph of botany.

“But look at him,” my mother says later. I know what she means. His entire circuit is humor that relies on you being stoned to enjoy it. Maybe that sounds like snobbery, but to me it's simply about trying to find yourself in your surroundings, and, well, we can see our reflections in Medicinal Mike's shiny suit. Another rule my mother likes to stand by is that you should never survey your associations and think you are different from those you have decided to surround yourself with. No, in every situation, the common denominator is you.

Elsewhere I speak with people who have epilepsy and cancer and who use marijuana, and all of them swear they are symptom-free. And my mother, who has had a good night's sleep, doesn't believe any of them. “Everyone seems to have a bad back,” she says. “Everyone seems to have the same story.” She is still wounded over the lack of white coats, the seeming illegitimacy of this whole enterprise. Which is ironic, because if my mother ever mingled with the hipsters who have moved recently into [her redacted neighborhood], she'd realize that pot is still the domain of the artist class and also now of the plain old professional middle class. You want legit, Mom? You want community? Go meet your neighbors. They would be happy to help. It'd be a hipster badge of honor to be the guy who got the Hasidic lady high.

But this is all too murky for my mother. She doesn't believe there's a way to participate in pot culture without becoming a pothead. “You can't associate with these people without being one,” she tells me. I tell her she is classist, and she says yes, but not economically so. She is classist for good taste and bad taste. My mother, unlike me, does not mince words. What she means is: There is no slippery slope. There is a cliff.

After the winners are declared in the joint-rolling contest—they're judged on…tightness, I guess?—Medicinal Mike throws pre-rolled joints into the crowd and everyone dives for them. He announces that he's out of supply, to please come back later during the Hempcon Cup Awards (Best Personal Vape, Best Topical, etc.). A man behind us in a black hoodie closed tight around his face makes a noise like a Wookiee in distress, and my mother and I, who will smell like marijuana for the next two weeks, take that as a signal that our time at Hempcon is over.

Alas, what happens at Hempcon doesn't stay at Hempcon. The lollipops lost their potency for my mother after that one time, and she is awake right now as you read this, no matter what time it is for you. And I am awake, too, because my mother is suffering, and all I can think of is this: How can it be that you survive so much, you overcome all the odds against you, you smoke up with Allen Ginsberg and the world belongs to you, you cope with a daughter like me, and at the end what awaits you are long nights of staring up at the ceiling, each passing minute adding to a misery and surliness that will take you through the next day, the next week, the next month—that will become a permanent part of you if you let it. How can it be that you can smell an antidote beyond your door, right out there in the hallway, and still it's so far away? How could something that grows out of the earth be more immoral than something concocted in a laboratory? What is the thing that America is clinging to as marijuana makes its slow way not so much to decriminalization, or even to legalization, but to moral neutralization? What's the real issue here besides: We don't like the people who like it too much?

And yet. “We” have our reasons, don't we? The truth is, weed's movement for dignity is often hilariously at odds with weed culture and its pot-leaf couture. My mother takes Xanax, but she never wears a shirt or a hat or a pair of above-the-calf sweatpants with pictures of Xanax on it. The acid-reduction pill I take doesn't have a lifestyle. My birth control pill is far more political than any plant, but there is no strain of female contraceptive called Legion of Bloom.

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“Maybe it was the stress of the hotel, and I finally slept from being worried?” my mother tells me on the phone, trying to figure out what is different here than there. Maybe it was all those hills, she thinks—walking up and down them can tire you out. Maybe it was how an airplane ride depletes you. “Maybe it was the power of suggestion, like a placebo?” She was so sure it would work. I tell her she should maybe try another strain, or maybe even another lollipop. But she's home now, back in her life, and that strange weekend feels even stranger every day that goes by. “Maybe if the people doing all this were real scientists,” she says, “they could extract the proper amount of the thing that would help me sleep.” Maybe, maybe not. She doesn't know. She has no one to ask.

“All that,” she says. “All that for nothing.”

She is up at night, watching cooking shows, falling asleep briefly, waking up too soon after. We are back to where we started. Weed is coming out of the closet, and my mother, who has surveyed the field, has seen enough and is going back in.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a GQ correspondent.

This piece originally ran with the title "Reefer Momness."

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