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Reeferfront Times
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REEFERFRONT TIMES
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[DISPENSARY REVIEW]
Tommy Chims Smokes Nature Med’s Weed
Written by T OMAS K. C IMC AR S
It’s cra y to think that a few short years ago one could expect to be tossed out of a head shop simply for saying the word “bong.
In those days of “tobacco water pipes and winking conversations with store staff, the need to employ language artfully made each interaction take on a delightful speakeasy quality, with no one saying exactly what they meant despite everyone fully understanding what was being communicated. It could be cumbersome, of course, trying to delicately express one’s needs without accidentally stepping on one of the trap door words — especially if you were ballsy foolhardy enough to try to talk a head shop employee into helping you score some weed — but it also lent a certain mystique to the proceedings that became a large part of stoner culture in its own right.
Fast forward to today. More often that not, the first interaction I have when walking onto the sales floor of a dispensary goes something like this:
B TE ER: So, what brings you in here today?
TOMM : I have come here to buy weed from you.
B TE ER: es, we can do that.
I’m likely guilty of romantici ing a practice that was actually super annoying and only looks good now through the lens of time, but it just feels like something is lost in that latter interaction. The giddy thrill of speaking in code so as to evade the law is gone, replaced with a fully transactional and plainspoken approach not dissimilar to what one might experience when purchasing a toothbrush.
All told, though, the new way of doing business certainly has its upsides.
Those advantages were on full display during my recent visit to Nature Med Dispensary (234 Kingston Drive, 314-939-1076), where, after handing my medical card and I to the staffer manning the front desk, I was greeted by a downright chatty man eager to talk cannabis in as much detail as I could possibly handle. ature Med’s sales floor has big “head shop energy, with glass cases lining the room on three sides and a wide selection of bongs, vapori ers, glass pipes, rolling trays and other paraphernalia taking up real estate on the walls beneath flat screen TVs that show menus of the shop’s T C options. At present, the dispensary only stocks Flora Farms flower, but that will soon change, my budtender explained before going on to enthusiastically tell me about each strain in great detail, and plainly from personal experience. A second budtender, who was otherwise unoccupied, joined the conversation as well, and soon we were just three stoners gleefully comparing notes about our favorite strains right out on the open sales floor — a far cry from the days of old.
After discussing all of my options at length with my new pot pals, I opted to purchase an eighth of Sour Tangie ( 0), an eighth of Etho Cookies ( 0) and a mysterious one gram pre roll dubbed simply “indica blend ( 2 ). After taxes, my total came to 11 .21.
I tried the pre roll first. A Flora Farms affair, this joint was more expensive than any of the others in the house, and apparently contained six different indica dominant strains — Fifth imension, Black Garlic, Cobalt
Flora Farm’s Sour Tangie strain came highly recommended by a budtender at Nature Med, and it didn’t disappoint. | TOMMY CHIMS
Fire, GMO, Lemon Cheese and Miracle Alien Cookies. According to my budtender, it came from the shake at the bottom of several bags that had been delivered from the cultivator to the manufacturer for the sake of rolling pre rolls. That shake naturally contains more trichomes that have fallen off the buds, I was told, leading to its high T C rating of 2 . percent. My budtender told me he HIGHER THOUGHT S
From the altered mind of THOMAS CHIMCHARDS
couldn’t even finish his when he’d gone to smoke one, and he said he fell asleep soon after he put it out, about halfway through. On inhale I found it to be a smooth smoke, though bewilderingly difficult to pin down flavor wise, owing to the wide selection of strains within. In any case, it was a pretty light flavor, and I didn’t find myself coughing much at all. I began to feel a super strong body bu after just a few hits, and I wound up putting the pre roll out just as my budtender had. My head felt pretty clear, with a bu y body high being the star of the show here, and a deep feeling of relaxation that gave way to a powerful case of the munchies and, soon enough, some dead to the world sleep. ext up, I got into the Etho Cookies. Flora Farms branded and rated at 1 . 1 percent T C, this bag boasted light green buds with a few dark purple spots, covered in trichomes and orange hairs. The
Welcome to Higher Thoughts, wherein ol’ Tommy Chims smokes one strain from this review — in this case, Sour Tangie — and then immediately writes whatever comes to mind in the hopes of giving you, dear reader, a clearer picture of its overall mental effects: no rules, no predetermined word counts and, most crucially, no editing. Here we go:
NICK SMILED AS he handed the envelope over to his arch-nemesis, Mrs. Crandall. At last, he thought to himself, justice will be served.
“You thought you would get away with it, didn’t you Crandall?” he asked rhetorically. “Well, once you have a look at these compromising photos you’ll be changing your tune.”
Nick had never resorted to blackmail before, but he knew he was dealing with a monster. Mrs. Crandall had slandered his good name and betrayed him in a fiendish plot so twisted and diabolical that it pushed him over the edge. He had peered into the abyss, and in turn, it had gazed into him.
Mrs. Crandall looked at the photos one by one, hung her head, and paused before she spoke.
“Nick, for fuck’s sake, you left the lens cap on again. Look, this isn’t some grand conspiracy: I gave you an F in photography class because you don’t understand a single thing about photography. The fact that you actually took the time to develop these all-black photos in a dark room only raises more questions.”
Nick narrowed his eyes and pondered some questions of his own:
When did Crandall have access to my camera, he wondered, and what’s a lens cap?
Was that helpful? Who knows! See you next week.
Thomas K. Chimchards is RFT’s resident cannabis correspondent and amateur lens cap photographer. Email him tips at tommy.chims@riverfronttimes.com and follow him on Twitter at @TOMMYCHIMS
e head shop vibe of Nature Med Dispensary is strong, with cases full of gear. | COURTESY NATURE MED
buds smelled citrusy and piney, almost like Pine-Sol, and they crumbled easily in my fingers on breakup. When I took a hit, the lightly sweet smoke imparted less flavor than I would have expected based on its smell, but still had hints of the citrus. This hybrid strain delivered a relaxed, calm bu , pretty well balanced between sativa effects and indica ones, and I found myself repeatedly misusing words in conversation due to its satisfyingly brain scrambling nature.
Sour Tangie was next on the list. My budtender had mentioned this was one of his favorite strains — he’d even picked up an ounce just for himself — and it’s easy to see why. Rated at 1 . percent T C and, like the others, also coming via Flora Farms, this weed was an absolute delight from start to finish. pon opening the bag I was hit with a fruity tangerine smell like a punch in the face, its beautiful, bright lime green buds covered in a fine dusting of trichomes and an abundance of orange hairs. On breakup it had a dryish, almost styrofoam like spongy crumble, not too sticky, but with a good amount of keef. On inhale it had a delicious sweet taste, with the tangerine flavor popping up prominently on exhale and lingering there. As for effects, I found it to be an energetic and creative high, and soon I found myself pacing my house and racing through ideas in my mind, though I didn’t feel any of the anxiety that might usually come with more of an “upper high. All told, it was simply phenomenal. I really can’t say enough good things about this strain, and it will certainly be in my regular rotation going forward, as long as I can get my hands on it.
And the only reason I tried it at all is the simple fact that I could speak so freely with the employees at Nature Med about the dispensary’s wares. For as much as I might nostalgically pine for a sneakier time in cannabis culture, I can’t deny that being able to speak so freely has resulted in me getting my hands on some really incredible weed. And in the end, isn’t that what this is all about? n
An ‘Exceptional’ Case
A er nine years in prison for weed, Trevor Saller prepares for freedom
Written by DANNY WICENTOWSKI
On May 24, 2011, two young men faced felony drug charges after police tracked several pounds of marijuana arriving by mail to a home in Warren County, Missouri, about an hour’s drive west of St. Louis.
One of them, Trevor Saller, is still in prison.
“I was young and dumb, and when you’re 21, I feel like a lot of people make decisions they feel poorly about later on in life,” Saller says in a phone interview from the Algoa Correctional Center, describing the period of his youth when a series of drug charges — along with Missouri’s harshest drug law — derailed his future.
Now 31, Saller is among the more than 200 Missouri prisoners currently serving “enhanced” sentences under a law that for decades targeted low-level drug offenders with mandatory prison time ranging from ten years to life.
The law, passed in 1989, applied a unique designation to its incarcerated subjects, marking them as “prior and persistent” drug offenders.
For the last nine years, that label has defined Saller’s life. In 2012, Saller was sentenced to thirteen years in prison, and he’s now approaching his “conditional release date” set for August 4, 2022. The benchmark is one that most inmates never reach, because the vast majority of the state’s drug prisoners are released to parole after serving a portion of their total sentence.
But Saller and the other “prior and persistent” offenders are not eligible for parole. As RFT has reported extensively, the law’s provisions were designed to take a drug crime that, by itself, would carry only a couple years behind bars and multiply the punishment into decades, even life, in prison.
“The state of Missouri has decided to make me exceptional in this terrible way,” Saller explains, and points out that in the intervening years Missouri both repealed the statute behind the “prior the persistent” law and legalized medical marijuana.
Neither development affected his case.
“I’ve watched everything shift, I’ve felt things change,” he says of society’s evolving perspective on marijuana. He describes watching coverage of Colorado’s early legalization efforts on a prison TV, and then following the news closely as multiple states began addressing the damage wrought by the War on Drugs.
“It’s difficult to process, he reflects. “If I sit and I think about it, I just go, ‘Wow, why am I still in this position?’”
The answer lies in a mix of legal and legislative obstacles. Although the Missouri legislature repealed the “prior and persistent” law in 2017, the state’s Supreme Court rejected arguments from current inmates who believed that the repeal should extend retroactively and restore their eligibility for parole. The high court’s ruling was followed by action by Missouri Governor Mike Parson, who has vowed to address the state’s backlog of clemency applications. His attention fell repeatedly on those cases from “prior and persistent” offenders left behind by the repeal.
Over the past year, Parson has issued a flurry of commutations that restored parole to the “prior and persistent” offenders otherwise barred from early release. The clemencies led to the release of eight drug offenders, while a ninth, Robert Franklin, had his parole status restored by a governor’s commutation in May and is awaiting a hearing with a parole board.
However, Saller’s clemency applications have returned only silence from the governor’s office.
“It’s like the governor is my parole board, and that’s a tall order,” Saller notes. “Bless him for doing the clemencies, that’s wonderful that he’s been benevolent enough to do that for others, but it feels like there’s a disconnect in that I should have an opportunity somewhere to reap the benefit of the personal growth and personal change that I was able to do.”
Saller’s case isn’t unique, but he is also an example of the struggle weighing on offenders trapped in lengthy sentences while dealing with addiction and mental-health challenges — issues that are made much harder, according to Saller, when you don’t have any hope of being able to demonstrate your rehabilitation to a parole board.
“I haven’t always been successful in my prison time,” he acknowledges, adding that he struggled with depression and “issues with opioids” that he obtained illicitly during his first years inside prison.
“I’ve had violations for drugs,” he continues. “I’ve fallen victim to demons from my past, but thankfully they haven’t swallowed me up like my friends.”
One of those friends was Ty Kruse, Saller’s codefendant in the bust of the marijuana shipment in May 2011. While Kruse and Saller faced identical charges, only Saller had the prior felony history to make him “prior and persistent.”
Kruse, meanwhile, fled the state, only to be extradited in 2014 to Warren County and sentenced to five years probation. In 2017, a probation violation briefly sent Kruse to prison, reuniting him with Saller in Algoa.
“It was like seeing my brother for the first time in five years, Saller recalls. “I was just happy to see him outside of the drugs and partying and all the stuff we used to do. It was like getting to know him for the first time again.”
Saller says he and Kruse committed themselves to “a lifestyle of fitness and health. But Saller still owed at least five more years in prison. Kruse, who retained his parole eligibility, was soon approved for release.
It wasn’t the first time Saller had watched someone with similar drug charges walk out of prison, leaving him behind. In the fiscal year of 2019, Missouri’s epartment of Corrections released 626 nonviolent felony drug offenders after an average of under four years behind bars. According to the prison data, 93 percent of those drug offenders passed through a parole board on their way out.
But Kruse had his own demons, and, in 2020, his life outside prison ended in a fatal opioid overdose. For Saller, the fate of his friend was a tragic example of drug addiction, but the divergence of their cases is also a reflection of Missouri’s failure to correct the damage of its previous drug laws, which, despite the 2017 repeal, continue to trap hundreds of people in prison.
Saller can only wait until his time is up next summer. He knows that other “prior and persistent” drug offenders — some trapped in multi-decade or even life sentences — aren’t so lucky.
“If I’m being honest,” he says, “there’s been a lack of people taking responsibility for the way Missouri used to be. There’s a vacuum, and people aren’t standing up and saying, ‘We need to right these wrongs.’” n
In prison since 2012, Trevor Saller watched as Missouri legalized cannabis medicinally — the same drug that landed him a thirteen-year sentence. | IMAGES COURTESY OF LISA KELLEY
Saller describes watching Colorado’s early legalization efforts on a prison TV. “It’s difficult to process,” he reflects. “If I sit and I think about it, I just go, ‘Wow, why am I still in this position?’”
