![](\"http:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/Mystery-Soda-Machine.jpg\")
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T<\/span>he battered, graffiti-burdened vending machine is a mechanical relic of the not-so-distant past \u2014 a past I briefly access through a synaptic flash of fragmented but vivid memory: a 12-year-old me at an Albuquerque roller skating rink that smells like popcorn, nacho cheese and cigarette smoke, dropping shiny quarters into a crisply polished, factory fresh Coke machine of the same design.<\/p>\n As my mind dials back to the present, the shiny clear plastic buttons on the machine fade to dull, scratch-cataracted shells of their former selves. Gone with the luster of the buttons are the colorful soda logos within, all replaced with deliberately misaligned, multicolored letters queerly accented by backwards question marks, all spelling out the same word \u2014\u00a0\u201cMYSTERY.\u201d<\/p>\n The relic\u00a0is covered in the sort of alphabetical abuse public surfaces in cities always face \u2014 plenty of violent threats and childish vulgarity intermixed with odd bits of religious fervor and romance poetry.\u00a0But it\u2019s the original message of the machine, now obscured and faded by the erosion of time and the accumulation of filth, that carries the most ominous overtones: The letters say \u201cEnjoy Coke;\u201d the state of the machine seems to say \u201cwhile you can.\u201d<\/p>\n Or maybe that\u2019s just the weed talking \u2014\u00a0it\u2019s been particularly vocal on this trip.<\/p>\n I\u2019m in Seattle, Washington and completely exhausted from 420, which saw me wake up at dawn, miss my flight in Oakland and (after reenacting the first third of Planes Trains and Automobiles<\/i>) finally arrive in Seattle just in time to attend an elaborate \u201cjoint pairing\u201d dinner <\/a>that culminated with the lighting of a 15-gram \u201ccannagar\u201d \u2014\u00a0a decadent amalgamation of 12 grams of premium flowers and 3 grams of rosin wrapped up in cannabis leaves.<\/p>\n Now I\u2019m standing with KC Franks, co-founder and owner of Lux Pot Shop \u2014\u00a0one of the main organizers of the 420 dinner \u2014\u00a0in front of Seattle\u2019s (almost) famous<\/a> \u201cMystery Coke Machine.\u201d The big mystery is \u201cwho the hell put this soda machine out on the sidewalk?\u201d The lesser mystery is \u201cwhat kind of soda will the machine give me if I feed it some quarters?\u201d<\/p>\n The nearest building to the machine is a locksmith, and while the staff offers no keys to unlocking the mystery of the machine, the extension cord leading from it to their building satisfies my curiosity on that front.<\/p>\n Nine quarters, two grapefruit sodas and one can of root beer later, I solve the other mystery and we head back to Franks\u2019 car, which he\u2019s agreed to drive up to Kerry Park so I can gawk at panoramic views of Seattle and try to photograph the Space Needle through the iconic black curvature of \u201cthat statue,\u201d which I later learn is called Changing Form \u2014\u00a0<\/i>an exceptionally apt symbol for Washington State\u2019s cannabis industry.<\/p>\n Seattle has long been a \u201cboom and bust\u201d city: It has seen shipyards turn to gold mines, then turn to homeless encampments, then back into gold mines; it has soared and crashed on the wings of aircraft manufacturing \u2014\u00a0it is a city always in the shifting grips of fickle fortune.<\/p>\n I think about that as Franks\u2019 bespoke, leather-trimmed SUV carves through the mild midday traffic and he talks about the journey he took from working in broadcast news, to managing Lux (formerly Stash) as a medical dispensary, then taking the plunge into the recreational market with Lux.<\/p>\n Lux unofficially bills itself as \u201cthe Nordstrom of pot,\u201d and everything from the decor to the packaging from their accepted vendors maintains that image.<\/p>\n Earlier in the day, after a visit to the Lux location in Ballard \u2014\u00a0the largely gentrified historical heart of Seattle\u2019s seafaring Scandinavian community \u2014\u00a0we had smoked a stimulating Jack cross, which paired beautifully with a few dabs of some equally sativa-dominant terp sugar with \u201cgold\u201d somewhere in the name. At some point Franks decides I should see \u201cthe other side\u201d of the city\u2019s cannabis industry \u2014\u00a0which meant a visit to the Capitol Hill neighborhood, where I found the Coke machine.<\/p>\n When Sir Mix-A-Lot released \u201cPosse on Broadway\u201d in 1988, he was talking about \u201cThe Hill,\u201d now a heavily gentrified shadow of its gritty former self. In Mix-A-Lot\u2019s story, 23rd and Union is where \u201cthe driver broke left\u201d towards Broadway. In mine, it\u2019s where \u201cthe driver\u201d dropped me off at Uncle Ike\u2019s Medical Dispensary \u2014\u00a0the \u201cweed circus\u201d to Lux\u2019s sophisticated cabaret show.<\/p>\n I talk to a local who calls himself \u201cD\u201d and says Ike\u2019s has a complicated relationship with the corner, which once was home to the \u201ctraditional\u201d cannabis purveyors \u2014\u00a0street dealers, including himself.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s kind of [messed] up because it was mostly us\u00a0out here [selling weed] on this corner before Ike\u2019s,\u201d he said. \u201cNow it\u2019s a white Jewish guy banking on those same customers.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n But now, many years from his street dealing past, D is a frequent customer at Ike\u2019s \u2014 something he attributes to the store\u2019s lower-than average pricing. Others on The Hill have been less forgiving, with vocal protests from traditional Black residents continuing to dog the owner of Ike\u2019s.<\/p>\n A quick perusal of the store\u2019s shelves \u2014\u00a0packed beyond capacity with every manner of cannabis product you can imagine, plus some others you never thought of, and perhaps with good reason \u2014\u00a0shows me all I need to see. I break with my personal \u201cno preroll\u201d policy and grab a few joints for an aimless walk through a sleepy residential neighborhood with sweeping views of the rest of the city. I take the time to decompress from my scatter-shot attempt at experiencing the city in two days and consider all I\u2019ve seen.<\/p>\n Much of the civic infrastructure visitors associate with Seattle \u2014\u00a0the Space Needle, the Monorail, the Seattle Center \u2014\u00a0was built for the Century 21 Exposition, the 1962 World\u2019s Fair that helped revitalize the city and grow its population to roughly its current size.<\/p>\n Now, as Seattle prepares to enter the third decade of the actual 21st Century, its cannabis industry stands on a precipice \u2014\u00a0the only certainty about the future is that it will bring change. Will cannabis continue to be a force of gentrification, or will it find a way to enfranchise communities historically impacted by the War on Drugs? Can regulation square the circle of safe access and \u201cpublic safety?\u201d And what about that looming shadow cast by the DOJ?<\/p>\n But as I end my day in the same place and way I did the day before \u2014\u00a0at a quiet park with an expansive waterfront vista near Pike\u2019s Place Public Market, breathing in joint smoke with the brine of the sea \u2014\u00a0I feel a powerful surge of optimism: From my vantage point, I can see not just Seattle, but all of Washington and the entire West Coast evolving towards a cooperative industry that enhances the opportunities for all <\/i>people and creates stability without sacrificing the unique spirit of cannabis for the shackles of corporate culture.<\/p>\n Or maybe that\u2019s just the weed talking.<\/p>\n TELL US,\u00a0<\/strong>have you experienced Seattle\u2019s cannabis culture?<\/p>\n The post West Coast Wanderings: Seattle Through A Smoky Lens<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
A scattershot exploration of Seattle, Washington taken in from a vantage point as high as the Space Needle. The battered, graffiti-burdened vending machine is a mechanical relic of the not-so-distant past \u2014 a past I briefly access through a synaptic flash of fragmented but vivid memory: a 12-year-old me atContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":17432,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[480,50,99,481,98],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17431"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17431"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17431\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17433,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17431\/revisions\/17433"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/Mystery-Soda-Machine.jpg\")
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\nRead More: West Coast Wanderings: Seattle Through A Smoky Lens<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"