If you make something in your own kitchen, you use your own containers.

A medicated cookie in Mom’s cookie jar is a lot more insidious than one in its own pre-labeled packaging.  Especially if you’re eight, and pretty good at swiping cookies from the jar.  Or especially if Dad packed your lunch today.  (Oops.)

For sticky fingers, a baker’s dozen is easier to pilfer from than an individually-packaged product.  And unless your kitchen equipment includes an industrial label-maker, you wouldn’t stamp each batch with ingredients, potency, and handy notes-to-self about what not to do (give it to children; operate machinery)—all the information typed on a typical Colorado edible today.

Hours after trying to replace labeled edibles with unlabeled edibles, Rep. Acree changed her goal: she demands labeled edibles.  Her ‘misleading edibles’ had been exposed as a printed T-shirt graphic (never made into food) and an already-banned California product.  The maligned MMJ industry was tempted put some labels on Ms. Acree herself.

It’s natural, says the Buddha, to label someone—especially someone who threatens your well-being or livelihood.  You label constantly: people, experiences, yourself.  It’s nothing against you—labeling is part of your complex human brain, a survival adaptation.  But some labels (“good”, “pleasant”) cause attachment; others (“unpleasant”, “clueless”) cause aversion.  And attachment and aversion, says the Buddha, cause your suffering.

Acree, the budtender interrupts, is the one causing suffering.  She started it.  So how can we stop labeling her?

Just notice, says the Buddha.  Look at your mind’s tendency to label.  You’ll notice something odd: what you judge in others is in you, too.

Cindy Acree is just like you.  She, too, suffers from attachment—especially attachment to image (another kind of label).  According to the statement on her business’s homepage, “the image your name projects defines who you are.”  So she recently worked hard for a new image: protector of children. 

But Acree’s suffering doesn’t stop there.  She’s attached to multiple images: protector of children, protector of trademarks (she named her company “Protektmark”); protector of big business.

Acree proves that these images aren’t mutually-exclusive.  While discussing her child-protecting legislation, she told Westword “I’m shocked you haven’t seen General Mills or Post or any of these manufacturers down here talking about trademark violations.” 

Finally, someone’s sticking up for General Mills and Post.  It’s like sticking up for kids—as long as you don’t care about the obese ones.  At the hearing, Acree displayed their sugary cereal (along with Mountain Dew, another pillar of child-friendly staples).

No one mentioned the epidemic of childhood obesity/diabetes caused by such products and their child-geared marketing.  Acree condemned MMJ’s marketing, but not pharmaceuticals’ prime-time lullabies.  She called for labeling laws, ignoring years of public outcry for labels on the genetically-modified foods that anonymously fill American supermarkets.

Sure, you could label her.  But she’s just like you, says the Buddha.  She looks out for her livelihood. 

And to promote her livelihood, she shouldn’t provoke those industries.  She’s President and C.E.O of a company that helps businesses profit using Intellectual Property law.  And food/pharma-corporations are Intellectual Property law’s biggest fans.  They often use IP laws to pocket profits owed to indigenous communities—or plant-based medicine cultures.  (For more on biopiracy, click here.  For an example, the neem tree—the same neem you organic growers use on pests—once yielded profits for a few corporations only, thanks to IP laws, despite Indians’ centuries of medicinal and agricultural uses so universal that they even call the neem tree “the village dispensary.”)

Since MMJ is a plant-based medicine culture itself, you could jump to all sorts of conclusions here.  But you’re mindful, says the Buddha: you don’t have to follow all your thoughts.  Maybe you want to call someone a “hypocrite,” but your blog warns against using labels while hypocritically using one (“Republican”) right in the title.  Maybe you’re tempted to judge a public official for lacking ethical code, but—

The Buddha clears his throat, stepping away from the budtender.  Part of his Eightfold Path—“Right Livelihood”—discourages (in one translation) selling consciousness-altering drugs.  So much for a unified ethical code.  The budtender shrugs, ignoring the irony.

Thankfully, Rep. Acree wasn’t so stubborn.  She reversed her position within hours.  She’s now working on MMJ labeling laws (which the Dept. of Revenue has already been fine-tuning for months). 

Labels on edibles protect patients and children.  One day, labeling laws could even protect edible companies (from allegations about their extraction processes—another factor behind the recent name-calling.)

Has this political charade helped children?  Maybe it helped the child in us all, who benefits from a conversation about labeling: labeling food and labeling each other.

Crisis: You’ve run out of medicine.  We can help—if you have your Colorado MMJ license.  But what if you can’t get your license, or can’t visit your dispensary today?  Are you doomed to suffer?  Maybe.

Maybe not, says the Buddha.  Try mindfulness.  Like marijuana, it eases suffering.  And you already have a stash of it.  You can practice it—by meditating.

Try medicating, the budtender interrupts.  You don’t have to practice.  Medicating is now as easy as eating cookies or gourmet baklava.  (Find out what’s in the bakery case today!  Limited-time offer if Republican Rep. Cindy Acree has her way!)  And if you can medicate—deliciously—why meditate?

You suffer emotionally, psychologically, says the Buddha.  (Marijuana may help, but the research is denied federal funding.)  You suffer because of habits in your mind.  And doctors can’t recommend marijuana to improve your mind. 

What’s wrong with your mind?  Craving and attachment, the Buddha answers.  And marijuana’s public image—you’re craving munchies, attached to your couch—makes it an unlikely prescription for that.

Maybe you don’t think you suffer much.  For sure, if you’re eating enough (munchies or not), nearly a billion people are probably suffering more.  But to help anyone, says the Buddha, you can start by looking inside.

And don’t you—like everyone—sometimes suffer from your busy mind?  Ever drawn into petty worries, past regret, self-doubt?  When you’re mindful, says the Buddha, you notice those habits.  By noticing them, you loosen their hold.  Life is more fun—and not just for you.

The budtender shows you a book by journalist Michael Pollan.  Marijuana, he suggests, can help you experience the present more fully (like meditation).  You’re shocked; you would never use marijuana for anything but your official MMJ condition.  So stay tuned—to hear what mindfulness and meditation can do for you.

Colorado approved marijuana for eight medical conditions.  The Buddha approved his Eightfold Path for the human condition. 

What’s right for you?  Neither can erase cancer, or HIV, or MS.  Marijuana can help, our patients attest.  Every day, they defy disease and disability.  But everyone feels the same pain you do: anger, fear, jealousy too. 

You have many ways to suffer.  But you can press pause.  (Medicine helps.)  And according to the Buddha, you can end your suffering.

Wait—wasn’t he just out in the waiting room insisting that life is pain?  So the end of suffering must be the end of your life.  No, he clarifies: everyone dies.  You don’t need any more help with that. (Certainly not while you can buy cigarettes more easily than medicine.)  But you can also end suffering while you’re alive.

He joins us behind the counter, leaning across to make sure you’re listening.  Pain is inevitable, he says.  (His robes keep snagging in our jars’ snap-shut lids.)  Suffering is optional.

But this Eightfold Path sounds exhausting.  Both “Right Intention” and “Right Concentration”—and six other “Rights”?  You’ll take so many right turns, just to be right where you are—it’s only your view that changes.

And you already have plenty of rights here in the shop, thanks—the rights granted by Colorado’s Amendment 20.  With the right medicine, who needs “Right Mindfulness”?

It’s not easy being Colorado.  Your notoriously-healthy population keeps notarizing papers on pain you weren’t aware you contained.  (Severe pain officially plagues around 100,000 patients here.)  Skeptics mock your dispensaries—not in too much pain for ‘Name That Strain’?  Blogging?

Apparently dispensaries ought to be depressing, like hospitals.  But some would disagree: the Buddha, Fox News, and anyone who’s been to a dispensary.  Pausing at the front desk, the Buddha explains: pain’s a fact of life, he doesn’t want to carry a tiny document to prove it, but he’ll take a proper tour before making any big statements.  Meanwhile, Fox News affirms the absence of above-average pain.  In fact, they “now know that 94% of Colorado patients do not experience pain.”

Okay, maybe pain wasn’t crushing all our countertop conversations (we had none with Fox’s zombie populations).  But it’s not bogus.  It’s right there—but, suddenly, easier to bear.  Is it the whiff of medicine?  Or something else about the dispensary?  Here the budtender and the Buddha diverge.  And maybe talk some shit (in the following series of informative posts).

You might find yourself in this story, if you found yourself in this store a lot in 2010.  Either way, you’ll recognize people in The Buddha and the Budtender.  You know the long-suffering, the strong; you know someone as sarcastic as the budtender parodied most in these posts.  Like them, you’ll witness a larger shift—one sending shockwaves through the country and splitting cracks down the middle. 

Read this blog.  Meet the budtenders and patients.  Meet the Buddha, here to say things about our mind and pain (and to try our pain-relieving cookies).

How can you laugh about the Buddha—or pain?  One is sacred; the other causes untold suffering.  But if you put either on a pedestal, you might forget to recognize it in every face you see.

And, as you know, the Buddha didn’t really tour the business inexplicably advertised as “Boulder’s Mindful Medical Marijuana Dispensary.”  Some things happen only in our minds.  But they’re perfectly real.

Now we start at the beginning.  You’re filled with suspense.  (Will the budtender face the Buddha?  Or shuffle around awkwardly, and wait for Erin to handle it?)  In the words of our tip jar sign, “rage” this blog “to your face.”  It’s your story.

That’s innovation, that snappy addition.  Once, medicated chai (medicine + chai!) existed only in the minds of ganjapreneurs (ganja + entrepreneurs) and future budistas (budtender + baristas).  It adds up.  And words multiply (like these genetics): Northern Lights x Blueberry = Newberry!  And it’s hard to keep up.  Now, no longer busy selling pot to the good people of Boulder, and testing edibles on myself (also, of course, for the people), I’m going to use lots of words.  Maybe correctly.  At least more coherently. 

Coherently using words of your own?  Post them here!  Or share this page, and an aspiring wordtender (budtender-turned-writer) will really appreciate it.  Otherwise, this blog might just be analyzed for evidence of chronic side-effects, used for anti-pot propaganda in 2012 by a post-Obacalyptic (post-Obama + apocalyptic!) administration.  Reefer Madness 2: Near-Constant MMJ-Contact Makes Budtender Prone to Strange “Blogging.”  And we’ll remember when that budtender legally sold medicine at a perfectly legitimate business.  And we’ll laugh.