Prop 215, also known as the Compassionate Use Act, brought about the legalization of medicinal marijuana in California in 1996, making operations like my friendly neighborhood pot shop, the Long Beach Organics Collective (read the reviews!) possible. What were originally envisioned as collectives made up of the terminally ill or chronic pain sufferers coming together in peaceful, self-supporting agrarian enclaves, growing and sharing their marijuana amongst themselves, has blown up into big business in recent years. San Francisco, with a population of under a million, is home to just twenty-three tightly regulated dispensaries. The city of Los Angeles is home to at least 540 pot shops, a figure that is said to be larger than that of all the Starbucks in the City of Angels. (There are just slightly a bit more than 1700 Starbucks in the whole state.)

In LA, billboards and print ads offering cheap medical marijuana evaluations are a regular sight. Their aesthetic borrows heavily from The Chronic and Doggystyle era rap album art, mixed in with a token bit of medical iconography; cannabis leaves abound. Banished to the back pages of local alt-weeklies, just a page’s turn from the escort ads, the target audience doesn’t seem to be cancer patients, people with glaucoma or those suffering from spinal injuries.

My pot shop is just a few blocks north of downtown Long Beach, a neighborhood that fell on hard times before the Great Recession hit. Then the already empty retail spaces expanded storefront by storefront, leaving many blocks largely vacant. While opening a more traditional business in any of these spaces would require surviving the excruciatingly slow and arcane process known as obtaining a business license, opening a pot shop has been the easier route. They are not the target of federal raids that still can and do target places like the hookah bar down the block which was so shady that a heavy chain and padlock was kept across the doors even during their so-called “business” hours, as they openly sold marijuana inside—all while operating under a business license for selling beauty and hair care products, one of the easiest to obtain. The Obama administration has called the feds off of dispensaries that abide by California law, regardless of the all-trumping federal laws against marijuana.

Now the Long Beach City Council has passed an ordinance in the hope to curtail the ever-expanding number of dispensaries. It sets a buffer zone around schools for one thing; it also mandates that all marijuana sold be grown within the city's limits.

There are three schools within just a few blocks of my pot shop. The closest, just a half block away, is a pre-school, which seems to indicate the end of the establishment. Community activists have been highly vocal in their support of these proposed laws, citing crime, ugliness and sketchy people. To them, dispensaries are no better than your average casita.

That has not been my experience.

My thoughts on the local pot shop began with a bowl of water. José, the intimidating, tall and wide guy who sits watch over the doctor’s office-like waiting room, set it down outside the front door. “For the dogs,” he said, as I walked past with my own beagle, Sigmund, “so they can have a drink.” My pot shop wanted to be a good neighbor. This was just the first step in what has become a growing neighborhood charm offensive. As it occupies the sole retail space on the block, the LBOC is continually looking to insert itself into the community, hoping to become loved and indispensable to stoners and marijuana teetotalers alike.

A good friend who lives nearby in an apartment she owns, inside of which she often smokes medicinal-grade marijuana picked up from one of those old-fashioned (illegal) drug dealer types. She recalled her response to the LBOC opening by miming taking a drag off a joint then speaking in fits and starts around a fake cough: “Fuck, man. What about my property value?”

And in a sense, yes. One of two things are highly likely to happen if you stand out front of the LBOC for any extended period of time: a patient will offer to sell you the weed he just procured at the dispensary, or someone will ask if you have a club card and if you can buy for them. I often recognize my high school-aged self in the faces of the shotgun-riding passengers sitting in cars parked in the 30-minute spot out front—it’s a green zone! That must have been the face I put on while someone over 21 went into the gas station to buy me beers. I’ve watched teenaged skater kids rip into the stapled-shut bags—police procedural rules bar cops from unsealing stabled prescriptions—more than eager to get at their purchase. Once one pulled out a huge bud right on the street corner, holding it up against the sky to examine the color of its hairs, the pockets of THC crystals.

But then there’s a philosophy student from Cal State University Long Beach, with a grey-flecked ponytail, that I see regularly. He walks incredibly stiffly, uses a cane. To pet my dog, Sigmund jump up and put his paws on the man’s waist; he is unable to bend over. He found himself on suicide watch after making a bad choice during a doctor's visit; he said that if a proposed treatment wasn’t going to help, he just wanted it to all end.

And there’s a grandmother with a motorized scooter who comes with her pre-teen grandson. She motors past the younger and not-visibly-suffering patients to pick up a quarter of her strain of choice.

Phase two of the charm offensive blew way past the doggie water bowl. One early weekday morning, I saw a flock of blue t-shirts milling around out front, trash bags in hand. The back of each shirt was silkscreened with a white cannabis leaf, with the words CLEAN UP CREW running beneath. The blue-shirted legal stoners made their way through the neighborhood, picking up trash with the help of latex gloves. Others swept up dead leaves and debris—surely including a fair number of hastily torn "Prescription" bags—from the sidewalk.

They clean up every weekend now, with at least a dozen people making up a given Saturday or Sunday’s crew. The volunteers are familiar faces from weekdays at the dispensary—the same twentysomething-heavy crowd, but with quite a few more female volunteers to balance out the bros. And they don’t do some half-assed cleaning job. This is far from being a spotless neighborhood, the grass and sidewalks littered with an array of trash and leftover food—chicken bones and stripped cobs of corn impaled on sticks, sold by street vendors, along with various fast food packaging and wrappers. On weekends now, the sidewalks are spotless, the landscaping free of clinging bits of trash, no dregs of meals half ground into the sidewalk.

There’s definitely a Mafioso feeling to the whole thing—as if the residents in the neighborhood are “being taken care of.” It’s not like we’ve all been gifted iPods that fell of the back of some truck, but with all of the political debate going on, the charm offensive does make it feel like I’m unwittingly giving something back, if only my own attitude, for these cleaner streets, for the dog water and also for the dog bag dispenser they later installed outside. I use the bags—they’re the biodegradable kind, the ones that won’t clog up landfills like the cheap plastic sandwich bags I used to buy for picking up after my dog.

The charm offensive is not entirely working. A stroller-pushing mother unleashed a fierce tirade on a pair of street cleaners the other Sunday. Even as they were picking up trash, she pointed them out to her husband as if they were breaking car windows or stencil-bombing people’s front doors: “Look baby, there’s two of them now,” she said.

Then, yelling across the street, not pausing as she pushed he daughter forward: “Now you’re fucking out here picking shit up off the street?” she yelled.

The Mafioso thing is definitely getting to some more than others.

I became the best of neighbors to the LBOC completely by chance way too early recently when my trusty beagle sidekick and I foiled a robbery attempt. Out for a morning walk, not even half-awake myself, Sigmund and I passed by someone walking up the sidewalk around the corner from the front of the dispensary. I vaguely remember saying hello, which is totally out of character for me, especially when resignedly taking the dog out anytime before 6:00 a.m. This makes me think that Sigmund howled at the man—and his beagle howl is raw and loud, a painful sound to hear. On my way back, I saw the same guy messing with the metal gate covering the LBOC's glass doors. He was trying to dismantle the cameras, as it turned out. José told me all of this the next day. He said that as they were playing back the security tape, just when the would-be burglar was trying to take the camera down, the footage showed Sigmund and I walking past, and the burglar took off.

Even before the City Council passed the "locally grown" part of its initiative, the LBOC had moved into the empty office space next door. They quickly put up walls, added new doors and may have already started growing a crop right here on my block. The front of the grow operation space has large plate-glass windows looking out on the street. They hope to decorate them with rotating art installations. None of this may matter, in light of the school-zone buffer laws. But they seem to think that if they can make the neighborhood love them enough, all the laws might just go away.

Willy Blackmore lives in Long Beach, where he works for a PR firm and also writes sometimes.

Photograph by Katherine Hitt, under a Creative Commons license.

From the unmemorably titled "Reminder":

Ten number one albums in a row
Who better than me?
Only The Beatles nobody ahead of me
I crush Elvis in his blue suede shoes
Made The Rolling Stones seem sweet as Kool Aid too
‘96, ‘97, ‘98, ‘99, 2000, 2001 and beyond
‘02, ‘03, ‘04, ‘05, ‘06 and 7, ‘08, ‘09

Man, that is basically the equivalent of me typing "You guys. Wut?" and then copying and pasting it 20 times. You guys. Wut? You guys. Wut? You guys. Wut? You get the point. Anyway, go help Joe make his list!

'Because we are essentially tracing the photograph, a lot of people think it's not a big deal,' says [Hai] Knafo. 'But it is.'

'We have our little tricks,' says Noli Novak, who has been with the Journal since 1987. 'A portrait with less dots will take less time.'

'People at the Journal don't even know there's a whole department doing this,' says Novak."
—Never before have I read a piece about working commercial artists that, instead of making me either envious or awed, makes me instead suspect of their entire line of work! And yet here we are.

To be fair, this rally they held yesterday—across the street from a theater showcasing Harvey Fierstein in Fiddler on the Roof—was to be a Very Serious Episode of Kathy Griffin's "My Life on the D-List." The singular break with tradition, where Kathy Griffin shows that she cares more than just about Kathy Griffin. That's hard to do on your own reality show! Yet she does! She tells us she supports the troops at USO shows! She read aloud the emails and letters she receives from gay service members and their would-be spouses detailing the destructive secrecy that defines their everyday lives.

For HRC, and for the Bravo network as well, it was already pretty much a slam dunk. HRC, including honcho Joe Solmonese, were all in matching "Repeal DADT" shirts, so they showed up well. (They made up about a tenth of the crowd.) They got local ABC 7 and FOX 5 to report on Griffin's smackdown of Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Crazytown)—Griffin called the nutbag a "nutbag." The synergy therefore spread beyond the 300-odd activists (and, obviously, HRC staffers) corralled in a rally in D.C.; amplified by the evening news, much-later to be amplified on Kathy Griffin's show.

This triple win then, through no doing of HRC's, became a quadruple win.

Lieutenant Dan Choi, the West Point graduate and combat veteran who outed himself on The Rachel Maddow Show last year, invited himself to speak at this "rally." (Choi was initially discharged from the Army after his self-outing and has since been reinstated as an enlisted officer.) At the end, he asked everyone to march, not down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol and Barney and Bachmann, but up Pennsylvania toward the White House. His remarks were met with cheers (though not from HRC, who hadn't invited Choi and didn't answer his requests to speak (though Griffin did).

Lieutenant Choi then left the stage to begin his march. He looked really intense. Most of the media stayed with Griffin, though—who, her job done, did not follow along. A block up, the few hundred at the rally were struggling to keep up with a soldier on a mission. By the time Choi reached the White House gates, mostly just a few dozen tourists were present to witness a uniformed officer in the U.S. Army handcuff himself to the White House gate. He was, yes, soon arrested, as were two others. Given such unbecoming behavior from an officer, he will likely be discharged once again. And so progresses the cause of equality for gay Americans and D-list celebrities and their respective television networks and lobbying institutions.

Video by Liz Glover. Colin Sweeney is a writer in Washington, D.C.

There's a tie at the top of the board between two people, someone named J. Elliott, with his bracket the Detective Goose (figuring out the meaning of that should drive me insane for the rest of the day) and P. Gaines with the Pete's Jayhawks bracket—I'm going to go out on a limb and say P in "P. Gaines" stands for Pete. Deductive reasoning score! Swish! Still, not one of you has managed to get every single game right. Here's where most people seem to have gone awry:

• Georgetown sucking balls. I watched almost all of this game and can say that they really were never trying at all and Ohio was playing with some real "Let's do this!" fervor.

• A big year for Murrays. Not only is the Murray character from "Flight Of The Conchords" seeing a huge-to-mild resurgence by way of his HP ad campaign, but also the school Murray State provided one of the bigger upsets of the day by beating those obnoxious and preppy Vanderbilt Commodores (WTF? How obnoxious is that mascot?) with an insane shot by Danero Thomas as time ran out, sending the mainstream media into a real tizzy. Nice Vera Bradley luggage, losers.

Furthermore, do you guys think anyone at HBO or either of the actual Flight Of The Conchords are seeing any cash from the participation of Rhys Darby in these ads? They never address the character by name and he doesn't necessarily do anything that's particularly Murray-ish besides being a New Zealander so it seems like it could really go either way. ALSO, if you google Rhys Darby, you can see a really random picture of him when he's not all Murray'd up and without a mustache even. So that's cool/weird I guess?

• A few other upsets. Marquette, with its ugly-ass jerseys (below) lost to Washington, which I believe is located in the state of Washington, and Old Dominion prevailed over Notre Dame. Both games were 11 seeds over 6 seeds with close scores, but one was significantly more exciting than the other, as Notre Dame and Old Dominion scored a total of 100 points. That's like women's college basketball scoring, or so I've heard. Don't get me wrong, I love lay-ups and sick mid-range jumpers as much as the next guy, but I don't respect women's athletic prowess nearly enough to actually watch them play organized sports, much less look at their box scores.

So here's the rundown as we enter Day Two: A quick glance shows that most of you have Kansas winning your the whole thing, but Duke, Syracuse, and Kentucky are very much in the mix. This makes sense, since they are the the highest ranked seeds in each of their divisions—who says The Awl audience doesn't get sports?!

The current highest ranking Awl contributor is Eric "Old Jews Telling Jokes" Spiegelman, while, amongst the staff, Choire and Alex are tied for the 184th position and I am in a modest logjam at 234. But you know what? Winners are not made in the first day of the tournament and it's a marathon not a sprint and all's well that ends well.

Realizing that the shots implicated delicate issues of burgeoning female sexuality, Skumanick sent letters to the parents of the girls in the photos informing them that the girls would be brought up on child pornography charges if they refused to complete a multi-month counseling program. He reminded them that, if convicted, they would have to register as sex offenders under Pennsylvania’s version of Megan’s Law.

If you’re confused about (a) how a girl could be charged with child pornography for taking pictures of herself or (b) why it’s appropriate for a DA to threaten people with felony charges as a way to get them to take counseling classes, you’re in the company of basically every human being other than George Skumanick.

To help sort everything out, Skumanick called a meeting with the families a few weeks later. But the meeting cleared up exactly nothing. One parent asked how his daughter, who was wearing a bathing suit in the relevant photograph, could possibly be charged with a crime. Answer? She posed “provocatively” in the photo. When asked what the hell that meant, the face of law and order for Wyoming County responded, “[T]hese are the rules. If you don’t like them, too bad.”

By this point, Skumanick’s investigation had escalated, Crucible-style, and twenty kids were being accused of being wild child pornographer nymphettes. All but one refused to take the counseling class.

This is what was in store for that one student: a five-part class designed to give the girls “an understanding of what it means to be a girl in today’s society.” The course included, among other things, an essay on why the student's actions were wrong, an investigation of negative portrayals of women in advertising, a module entitled “Gender Advantages and Disadvantages,” and the reading of Maya Angelou’s poem, “Phenomenal Woman.” (Basically, imagine a Judith Butler class, but taught in the 1950s, and by a police officer.)

Fearing that Skumanick would make good on his threat to bring child pornography charges if they didn't submit to the counseling program, three of the girls and their parents filed suit against Skumanick in federal court. At issue were two photographs. In one, two of the girls (both 13 years old) are wearing white bras, one talking on the phone while the other makes a peace sign. This image might make a normal person think of goofy sleepovers, hairbrush microphones and general adolescent hamminess, but to Skumanick, the shot smacks of one thing: porn. This is even more true of the second picture, where the third plaintiff is seen, presumably emerging from the shower, with a towel wrapped around her, just below her breasts.

Whether these pictures constitute child porn under Pennsylvania law seems like a pretty easy question. But that's a question of state law, and typically one that can be raised only in state court, and only after someone is actually charged with a crime. To prevent the charges from being filed in the first place, the girls needed to allege that any criminal prosecution would implicate federal Constitutional rights.

The plaintiffs focused on two rights that they claimed would be violated by the counseling program: the girls' freedom of speech, and the parents' right to direct the upbringing of their children. According to the plaintiffs, the former would be violated by forcing the girls to explain why their actions were wrong, and the latter would be encroached by allowing Skumanick & Co. to instruct the girls on "what it means to be a girl in today's society." In threatening prosecution if the girls didn't take the class, the plaintiffs argued, Skumanick essentially punished the plaintiffs for refusing to agree to these Constitutional infringements.

Skumanick's (non-)defense: "Every pedophile, every predator, waits with eager anticipation of that ruling. It is the interest of those pedophiles that is being advanced by [plaintiffs' attorneys]."

The district court judge agreed with the parents and entered an order [PDF] forbidding Skumanick from filing child porn charges against the girls. Reinforcing my belief that the judiciary is the only consistently sane branch of government, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday upheld the trial court's decision [PDF]. In the category of sentiments we can all get behind, the court held, "[A]n individual District Attorney may not coerce parents into permitting him to impose on their children his ideas of morality and gender roles."

And: "'What it means to be a girl in today's society,' while an important sociological concern, in this case is [at] a disconnect with the criminal and juvenile justice systems."

To make this story even sweeter, the voters of Wyoming County voted Skumanick out of office last November, after a 20-year stint as District Attorney. (You can visit his website — and please do — here.) So, yay, great, the end. Right?

Not exactly. The Third Circuit decision really only prevents crazy moralizing district attorneys from strong-arming kids into taking bizarre gender studies courses. And though we should all celebrate any time anyone escapes from reading a Maya Angelou poem, this doesn't really address the underlying issue: whether sext images by teens can be treated as child porn.

Though the question remains unresolved, it's doubtful we'll see ourselves enmeshed in a national epidemic of teen sexting prosecutions. Public opposition is a pretty good check on prosecutorial zeal. And public opposition tends to express itself most fervently when the threat of prosecution hits closest to home. Most parents of teens and tweens would probably agree that embarrassment is punishment enough for racy photos, and that a prison sentence and a spot on the sex offender registry might be overdoing things. It's the rare person who sees a teen in a bra and thinks, "hardened sexpot," and as Skumanick's fate suggests, if that person is a prosecutor, he's probably not long for his job.

Ian Retford is the pseudonym of a lawyer in New York City.