There’s Something in the Air--and It’s Marijuana

It’s the perfect Southern California story.

It’s set in the perfect place, on the sixth-floor patio of an office building near the trendy Brentwood intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Barrington Avenue on Los Angeles’ Westside.

There, a one-inch-long glass slide is coated with Vaseline and positioned to attract tiny pieces of weeds, trees, grasses and molds from the air. Then, the folks from the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America analyze the slide in order to explain why we can expect to sneeze more, or less, in the coming weeks.

In its most recent slide analysis, the foundation discovered that 40% of the weed pollens in the air were coming from a single, surprising source.

Hemp.

That’s right, marijuana.

But before Mike Royko races to his typewriter and begins to pound out another I-told-you-they’re-zonked-out-there column, a moment of calm should prevail.

You can still breathe the air on the Westside without fear of feeling bad or, for that matter, good, counsels Scott E. McCreary, executive director of the asthma and allergy group’s Los Angeles chapter. Marijuana must be dried and then smoked or eaten for its intoxicating effect to take hold, he noted.

Officials of the organization, which distributes literature about asthma and allergies and awards research grants to study them, admitted Tuesday that they don’t know quite what to make of the high levels of marijuana pollen.

“It may be simply a seasonal possibility,” said Bonnie Ank, the laboratory technician who analyzes the particle samples and is sure of her numbers, if not their meaning.

This happens to be the time of year when there are few other kinds of weed pollens in the air, Ank said. And since we had a cool summer this year, the marijuana season may be peaking later than usual. Normally, she said, the pollinating season would come earlier, and the marijuana pollen would be much less prevalent among such evils as sage and ragweed.

Second Year of Sampling

This is only the second year that the foundation has been sampling pollen levels. (A second station measures pollen levels in the San Fernando Valley.) Ank said readings taken at this time last year did not reflect high marijuana levels. The first time she encountered a substantial one, she said, was last July, when she found that about 10% of the weed pollens were marijuana.

The high reading is of no help to law enforcement officers who might hope to pinpoint a cultivation site. Pollen can travel 20 to 30 miles from its sources, McCreary said.

Besides, according to both police and advocates of marijuana use, outdoor cultivation in urban areas is minimal.

Bruce Margolin, attorney and coordinator for the Los Angeles office of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said he, too, is mystified by the finding.

Harvest Should Be Over

“The harvest season usually happens in September or October; it would be over by now,” he said. “Maybe they (the monitoring station) should check their next-door neighbor.”

And so the questions about the high marijuana finding will persist. And so, too, will the bad jokes. A popular one seems to center on speculation about whether Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg was in the neighborhood.

“People are coming up with great lines,” McCreary said. “Our lab technician says she’s sneezing, but she doesn’t mind.”