Oregon NORML’s Cannabis Café top story on USA Today

Screenshot of 11/23/09 USA Today website

(USA Today) PORTLAND, Ore. — At first glance, the Cannabis Cafe, in a former adult club called Rumpspankers, looks like any other coffee shop. Customers sip coffee while playing cards, working on computers, or sharing a meal.

But here, patrons also slip away to smoke joints and pipes in the back. And the cafe features a vapor bar, where customers can get the benefits of cannabis without the harmful carcinogens.

Fourteen states, including Oregon, allow cannabis to be cultivated and used for medical reasons, according to NORML. Maine this month became the fifth state to allow retail pot dispensaries, joining California, Colorado, New Mexico and Rhode Island, according to NORML.  But NORML officials say only Oregon has a place where any medical marijuana cardholder can socialize and use free, over-the-counter cannabis, which is dispensed by what the café calls “budtenders.”

“It really is a revolutionary model in that the cannabis isn’t being bought and sold,” said Russ Belville of Portland, who is national outreach coordinator for NORML. “This is the only place I can think of in the world where the cannabis is free.” Oregon law prohibits the sale of marijuana, although it can be exchanged among medical marijuana card holders.

NORML members pay $20 a month plus $5 per visit to use the cafe, which is open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday. It’s only open to registered medical marijuana patients, growers and caregivers who also belong to NORML.

So far, the concept has been a hit, organizers say and there has been no community protest. The 100-seat cafe opened at 4:20 p.m. Nov. 13, and about 300 people came through that night. Many brought donations of marijuana. “The cafe on its opening day ended up with more marijuana at the end of the day than at the beginning,” Belville said.

I’m sure there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth over USA Today’s line that “the Cannabis Cafe is the nation’s first medical marijuana smoking lounge.”  There is already the post “Portland’s Cannabis Cafe is not the first medical marijuana coffee shop in America” on the Examiner site, which goes into great detail about the Denis Peron-era medical smoke lounges in the Bay Area of the mid-1990′s.  Others have left comments about current lounges in California and Colorado dispensaries and even a “smoke room” in the back of one Portland head shop.

So, you’d think with all these open and operating cannabis smoke lounges in existence already, opening one in Portland wouldn’t be much of a story, would it?  I mean, any reporter from the AP, USA Today, New York Times, Reuters, Huffington Post, The Telegraph, or the Times of London, should be able to “cannabis café” or “marijuana lounge” into Google and instantly read all the press about these existing smoke lounges, right?  If they do those searches and find nothing to dispel the notion that Oregon’s café is the “first”, is that the fault of Oregon NORML for having a successful press release, the fault of journalists for bad fact-checking, or the fault of all the previously-opened smoke lounges to openly proclaim their existence?

That’s what makes this story a “first” – the open proclamation of a social outlet for patients that allows medication.  Dispensaries and head shops that allow for onsite consumption are not making that aspect of business publicly known.  Dispensaries and head shops are there primarily for the sales of marijuana and accessories, respectively.  This Cannabis Café exists first and foremost as a café; it is not trying to solve patients’ medical needs, but rather trying to provide a social outlet for people who happen to use cannabis medically.