As good as a deep, inky red wine pairs with a steak or champagne with oysters, it’s nothing compared to how well cannabis pairs with EVERYTHING.

Not only does cannabis give you the munchies (there’s a reason it’s a great medicine for people with eating issues or whose appetites have been impacted by chemo), it also makes the food you eat taste amazing.  That happens because THC causes your brain to process more information.  You’re simply more aware of your surroundings and what you’re experiencing in it because more of your synapses are open and processing information.  That is what THC does to our brains.  It’s the same reason some people feel paranoia – it’s the flow of all that additional information that your brain regularly “screens out” or misses.  Yeah, it can be daunting, intimidating – scary.

But all that additional information can also enhance the flavor of food.  Cannabis and eating establishments are as natural and delicious a pairing as chicken and soup.

Lowell Cafe is in West Hollywood.  It opened a few weeks ago — America’s first ever fully licensed cannabis restaurant.  The restaurant aside, It’s a dispensary where you can smoke your buy on the premises.  That’s a first anywhere in the country (as far as I know).

Part of the lingering ooga-booga in our thinking about cannabis is that smoking cannabis causes people to act like they’ve been drinking for hours.  It’s not the case – at all. 

As cannabis users can attest – smoking cannabis doesn’t fog your mind like alcohol does.  It doesn’t make you irrational.  It doesn’t make you loud.  It doesn’t impact your motor skills.  It doesn’t make you want to fight or vomit up everything you drank.  It doesn’t make you want to take out your junk and piss wherever you are because all that alcohol filled your bladder.

Cannabis civilizes most people.  Fact.

My good bud Johnny invited me to join him – he’d made reservations after hearing Howard Stern do a live broadcast from the café last week.  There’s almost always a line outside the place – even with reservations.

The concept is this – when you sit at your table, there are two menus (same as with alcohol).  The only difference here is (because of the way cannabis is still regulated), you have to purchase your cannabis separately from your food.  Two different bills.

One can bring in one’s own weed – but the “corkage” is $30.  Lowell Cafe is a dispensary.  They grow all their own weed — organically.  The prices aren’t cheap.  They’re retail-retail.  But that’s to be expected.  You’re here also for the experience of smoking marijuana in public – with strangers – like you’d drink in a bar with them.

While you can also get that same experience at a concert, it’s not the same.  Everyone doing that illicitly.  Here – it’s the whole point of the exercise. 

For starters – the room is smoky – but it’s not dense with smoke as it would be if it were filled with tobacco smoke.  Tobacco smoke is sharper, heavier, denser, more genuinely toxic.  There’s no data yet that says what cannabis second hand smoke is filled with.  I can only tell you that whereas a restaurant filled with tobacco smoke makes eating downright unpleasant, that was not the case at Lowell Farms.

The eating experience was not impacted by the smoke whatsoever. 

The cannabis menu (you can read it yourself here) includes flower (they provide rolling papers or they’ll rent you a piece – the state regs prevent customers from bringing their own pipes for now), oils and edibles.  The food the café serves has not been prepared with cannabis – that’s not allowed yet).  If you want to buy and use oils, the restaurant will rent you a rig with which to smoke it.  You can rent a simple rig or a very cool “gravity water pipe” that I wish I had photographed because it was incredibly cool.

I was too busy eating, enjoying the buzz and talking.  Johnny and I ordered a pre-rolled Space Coyote – a combination sativa flower, kief and oil, with a bubbly, spirited impact (according to the menu).  The Space Coyote was indeed heady and social.  And it made the food taste awesome.  Johnny ordered the Lowell Cobb.  Enjoyed it immensely – fresh ingredients not overly slathered in dressing. 

Feeling less in the mood for healthy, more in the mood for “stoner cuisine”, I opted for the sticky tamarind wings and the jalapeno mac-and-cheese bites.  Did I mention how cannabis makes everything taste great?  The tamarind doesn’t bash you over the head.  It doesn’t have to.  The wings were easily inhaled.  The mac-and-cheese bites came with a chipotle-sriracha sauce that cleared the sinuses effectively. 

The staff is all young and excited to be there.  They know they’re pioneers in a business that will take over the country.  Lowell Farms has applied for a liquor license.  They don’t need it.  They should avoid it.

The tone in the room was cannabis chill.  Not alcohol loud.  There was a lot less glass being clinked.  It was… civilized is the word I keep coming back to. Until you’ve experienced sitting in a room with strangers who are all smoking cannabis – like it was normal – you can’t know how remarkable it is. 

We’ve lived in the shadow of Harry Anslinger’s bullshit, racist marijuana mythology for so long, we’ve almost forgotten how incredibly untrue every bit of it is. 

Marijuana legalization has not brought about the fall of Western Civilization.  It hasn’t harmed the communities in which it thrives.  It hasn’t brought about a rise in teen smoking (they’re smoking less, in fact, because every last bit of rebellion has been taken away from smoking marijuana – it’s hard to rebel against something your parents do, too.)  It hasn’t brought a rise in traffic accidents.

And that’s the last point I want to make here.  Lowell Cafe has a valet parking lot.  People hand their keys to the valet then go inside for 90 minutes (that’s your limit for the time being – there’s a line to get in, remember).  They smoke copious amounts of cannabis and they eat.  Then they get their car from the valet guy – climb in it and go home (or wherever). 

I walked down La Brea to where I’d parked my car at a meter.  I got into my car.  I drove home.  And I went back to work.

I wouldn’t have – couldn’t have – had I been drinking all afternoon.

I have seen the future, America – and it was the bomb.

Now, please — quit Bogartin’ that joint and pass it over to me…