Photographers Blog

Olympia, Washington

By Nick Adams

I had been running all over Seattle for eight hours photographing same-sex weddings that had begun at midnight when I got a call about Frankie’s Sports Bar & Grill in Olympia. It has been a whirlwind of excitement in Washington this past week since Initiative 502 and Referendum 74 became law. Referendum 74 legalized same-sex marriage and Initiative 502 legalized recreational use of marijuana for personal use, in private, to people over the age of 21 in Washington.

It’s hard to describe the feeling of photographing people using cannabis out in the open. I’ve only seen it once before at Seattle’s Hempfest, and it’s still such a strange sight to me. It wasn’t all that long ago that I was in Illinois riding along with Galesburg police officers ready to make arrests for possessing any amount of marijuana.

As I walked into the “Friends of Frankie” second floor space I was immediately hit by the smell of cigarette smoke. For a while now, patrons had been paying the ten-dollar fee to use the smoking area since Frank won a legal battle with the state. Only within the past week has marijuana made an appearance. It was interesting to note how segregated the two vices were in the area equivalent to the entire downstairs bar.

I asked the bartender to point me toward Frank, the bar’s owner, and found him engaged with a group of medical marijuana users. Frank doesn’t use marijuana personally, but sees it as a way to pull in money during hard times.

A grinder and a lot of marijuana were set up on the table. The medical users were all sharing their cannabis. The medical marijuana users also had paraphernalia like pipes and items that I had never seen before — a device for smoking amber-colored hash oil. The patrons were using a blowtorch to light the pipe.

Reuters photographer Robert Galbraith spent some time at Oaksterdam University in Oakland,  California where they teach the next generation of medical marijuana entrepreneurs. The city of Oakland had just passed Measure F, which created a special tax category for medical weed dispensaries, the first in the nation. As state and local governments look for new revenue streams in the recession, medical marijuana is becoming an attractive stream for new tax revenue.

Listening to another news report that stated there are more medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles than Starbucks coffee shops, I thought it would be a good time to look at Oaksterdam University, a “school” that teaches students the finer points of marijuana law and cultivation techniques. The school sits on a busy street corner in downtown Oakland, California with several of its business entities found throughout the neighborhood. There is a book store to sell students books and supplies, as well as hats, t-shirts and smoking paraphernalia; a glass blowing shop across the street; and a medical marijuana dispensary around the corner.

In the one-room school, students listen to lectures and grow marijuana for homework. Three type of students attend Oaksterdam — those with the intention of eventually working  in the medical marijuana industry; those wanting to grow for their personal use, and others interested in the politics of pot and those who want to make it legal. Most of the students in the evening class are middle-aged medical marijuana patients eager to learn the trade and how to grow their own medicine.