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Welcome back to Field Research, the dark humor and satire publication written and produced by me,
.Today’s story is a real treat, and I’ve been eager to write it up for well over a month. It runs long but moves fast.
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Enjoy!
On a lovely spring evening Lincoln Park’s world-famous Apollo Theater played host to an all-important community meeting.
The issue: should the ÜMI Cannabis Company be allowed to open a dispensary at 2575 N Lincoln Ave, the heart of the Lincoln Avenue commercial corridor, the home of the once popular and now derelict Salt ‘n Pepper diner, and the heavily foot-trafficked locale opposite the wholesome yet decrepit Jonquil Park.
I entered the theater lobby ten minutes before showtime. It teemed with traditional Lincoln Park fare, including middle-aged White people, old White people, and super old White people. Errant goths and token minorities added touches of flavor to the menu.
I glanced around and contemplated making small talk. Nervous energy, pent-up agita, and palpable tension loomed over the crowd. These people weren’t in the talkative mood. They came ready for culture war combat. Plus, with my Havana hat, Avengers t-shirt, off-brand Lulus, fanny pack, and crazy eyes, I wasn’t exactly the picture of emotional warmth or psychological stability.
After several awkward, silent minutes eyeing neighbors whose politics I’d rather not know, we descended into the 440-person auditorium.
I took a seat dead center and unholstered my notebook. Two middle-aged couples sat in the row in front of me. To my right and left, middle-aged dudes sat multiple seats away.
My 43rd Ward Alderperson, Timmy Knudsen, and some try-hards from the neighborhood association who organized the event, stood on stage and gladhanded. They were flanked by two Black men I’d never seen before. The first was slight. He wore jeans and a sportscoat and rocked a tight beard and mini-afro. The second, significantly taller man sported a shiny bald head, a beer gut, and bulging biceps.
Oh snap. These gentlemen represented ÜMI. Christmas came early for Field Research.
The lights dimmed and Timmy — seriously, he goes by Timmy — kicked off the proceedings. He introduced the dapper gentleman as Akele Parnell, ÜMI’s CEO, and the former defensive tackle as Gary Little, ÜMI’s Director of Retail Operations.
Akele launched into a detailed presentation with multiple aims: introduce the ÜMI brand and its management team, discuss their experience and learnings from operating a dispensary in the West Loop, and explain the zoning and licensing requirements, the work done to date, the Chicago cannabis market, and why opening a legal marijuana dispensary in the vicinity of a public park wouldn’t turn this wealthy White neighborhood into Baghdad, or worse, the South Side.
It was as entertaining as it sounds, though much of the presentation discussed how ÜMI had already navigated red tape at the state and municipal levels. In essence, licenses had been granted, lease negotiations had been completed, and zoning maps had been amended. The final steps in the process would be for the Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA) to decide whether to grant ÜMI a special use permit to operate the dispensary, and for Timmy to sign off.
Of course, Akele’s presentation delivered a few memorable moments.
When he said ÜMI was a social equity company, and received priority in the licensing process, the anti-woke, anti-affirmative action contingent jeered.
When he said legalizing cannabis increased public safety and, counterintuitively, protected kids by preventing them from obtaining black market drugs, one of the women sitting in front of me burst into flames.
My favorite snippet was the slide featuring the neighborhood’s four main concerns, which were captured at the first community meeting last November:
Project Jonquil Park!
Protect our kids!
Increase public safety!
No double parking!
Objectively, double-parking on Lincoln Avenue deserves the death penalty.
Akele’s presentation lasted about forty minutes, which afforded ample time for Q&A. Timmy played moderator and called upon an elderly man, whom he knew personally, to lob the first question.
In a vacuum, that was fine.
In practice, it was the perfect start to ninety consecutive minutes of lunacy.
The elderly gentleman spoke slowly, and with extreme difficulty. He rambled. And forgot his question. Then remembered his question. Then circled back to his question. Then Timmy interjected and paraphrased for him. Then he spoke over Timmy. Then Akele tried to answer. Then the elderly man asked the same question. Then Timmy tried, as diplomatically as possible, to cut him off. Then he talked over Timmy. Then Akele tried to answer again. Then he changed his question. Then Timmy tried, as diplomatically as possible, to cut him off again. Then he asked the same question again. Then Akele didn’t bother answering. Then Timmy cut him off for good.
This ordeal took seven minutes.
You don’t think seven minutes is a long time? Try counting to 420 without looking at your phone.
To be clear: I’m not poking fun at the elderly man! He had every right to participate and I’m glad he did. That said, there’s no better way to build tension — IRL, on the page, on the screen — than to have one person endlessly dominate a room. Especially a Reagan-era powder keg.
With cortisol levels elevated, Timmy moved to the second questioner, a woman who said she lived around the corner. She “wholeheartedly” supported the dispensary and desperately wanted the derelict diner to be replaced with a “going concern.”
This plot twist shook the auditorium, elicited wild applause from the libs and minorities, and further spiked the collective stress level.
The third questioner, a middle-aged man, lamented an alleged discrepancy in the zoning law. According to him, dispensaries couldn’t open within 500 feet of a school, but parks were exempted from that rule. According to his calculations, Jonquil Park is only 116 feet away from the proposed location. This man was certain people would smoke weed in the park, and wanted to know why that was “acceptable” to the ÜMI team.
This would become a consistent and persistent complaint, asked in a variety of ways, all of which Akele and Gary would dodge with executive grace and neoliberal finesse.
The unmedicated neighbor, unsatisfied with their answers — and certainly the entirety of his existence — pivoted to the problem of creating so much foot traffic at the intersection. And then doubled down on his insistence that people would smoke weed on the street and in the park.
Gary went into a long spiel about regulatory inspections by state officials and state police, and by city officials and city police, and reiterated how camera technology would be implemented to monitor all facets of the business and the surrounding area. He finished his soliloquy by stressing that the state levies a $10,000 fine on dispensaries if their customers consume in public.
“Do they have to prove they bought from you?” the unmedicated neighbor asked.
“The cameras are really good,” Gary said, celebrating the upsides of total surveillance capitalism.
The unmedicated neighbor just couldn’t let go. He did some multiplication and reiterated there was no way they could do 4,200 transactions per week and not destroy polite society.
Timmy interrupted and said the Q&A needed to move along. The unmedicated neighbor seemed sad. He should probably toke up.
Next, a middle-aged woman asked the first relevant questions by noting the train had left the station. She wondered when the first zoning amendment happened. She decried the lack of community engagement. She questioned whether anything being discussed at this meeting could change the trajectory of the universe.
Akele calmly re-explained the timeline of events, which included a two-year engagement process with community leaders.
The incredulous woman wondered aloud if former Alderperson Michele Smith was to blame for the lack of transparency. Akele confirmed they worked closely with former Alderperson Michele Smith.
They looked deeply into each other’s eyes, silently nodded, and tacitly agreed to blame former Alderperson Michele Smith — who was indeed trash — for debasing the community.
Another middle-aged woman, with three kids in Lincoln Park schools, said she was “excited” about the dispensary, and noted there were myriad liquor stores and bars adjacent to playgrounds with nary a complaint.
Surely Akele slipped her a dime bag before the event.
The ÜMI CEO smartly pounced on this moment and introduced his head of security, Dan Farrell, who was a former Lincoln Park resident. Dan launched into a persuasive argument explaining how dispensaries differed from liquor stores in their marketing and security protocols.
These included: the shelf accessibility of product, the multiple ID scans required to purchase product, the partitioned layout of the retail environment, and all those glorious cameras, which captured three angles of each customer’s face at the point of sale.
The Chinese government would be impressed.
The circus continued until an errant comment addressed the question I’d planned to ask: what’s the difference between this dispensary and the Chicago Cannabis Company, which opened a few blocks away at Halsted and Fullerton last year?
Before anyone on stage could answer a pothead in the crowd said the Chicago Cannabis Company doesn’t sell proper weed, but an unregulated derivative of THC. ÜMI would put that type of establishment out of business, he explained.
This information rattled me. I’ve been self-medicating with subpar drugs!
Another man frantically asked, “What, it’s better? It gets you higher?”
Akele jumped in and said it was a gray area. ÜMI sells highly regulated, thoroughly tested cannabis. Those other purveyors take hemp, do some “special science” and “synthetic processing” and make their product analogous to delta-9-THC. “It’s a night and day business model,” he said. Smart consumers (e.g., not me) would know where to find the good stuff.
The mic passed to a middle-aged Asian Dude in a drab suit.
Quick sidebar: I met this guy, his wife, and one of his three kids at a spring meet and greet with our elected representatives. His wife took a liking to me — I’ve been an object of fascination for middle-aged White women since 1994 — and his teenage son thought I was a far out old man who traversed the city and posterized local politicians.
I told Asian Dude I was a writer and he asked me, with dripping condescension, “Do you have any books published?”
When I explained I’d be shopping my first novel this summer he scoffed. He did take my Field Research business card, adorned with a QR-code that simplifies the sign-up process, but never subscribed. Okay, back to the story.
Asian Dude came prepared. This event was his moment to shine. Remember that lesson in tension?
First, he asked for a show of hands: how many members of the ÜMI management team lived in the 43rd Ward?
No hands.
Next he read from the ÜMI website:
ÜMI is a cannabis lifestyle brand powered by the plant that connects cultures, people and communities across the world.
He let that information sink in, then asked “Mr. Parnell” to explain how ÜMI would “celebrate” and “propagate” their “cannabis ethos” on the people, children, and culture of the 43rd Ward?
Akele deftly explained he’d read the product brand statement, not the retail distribution strategy.
Undeterred, Asian Dude said if one googled “Nature’s Care Cannabis” — ÜMI’s parent company — and “Yelp,” they’d be greeted by the following obscene advertisements plastered on garish neon windows.
You’re dope.
Weed be great together.
Come say high.
The crowed murmured and chuckled. Annoyance and nervous energy escalated. A girl shouted, “What’s your question?!”
Asian Dude continued. “May I inquire—”
“We’re going to limit everyone to one question,” Timmy said.
“—will you deploy such overt and conspicuous advertising techniques at this location?”
Akele laughed nervously and said those campaigns were used at retail stores in New York City. “I literally had nothing to do with that.”
Asian Dude neither approved nor understood. He remained depressed and alone in a world he no longer recognized.
Time to light up.
A youngish girl noted the “demographics” of the West Loop were quite different from Lincoln Park. This was another recurring motif. She blathered on about security, and the city being “down two thousand police officers,” — Thanks, Biden — and wanted to know what the discussed safety measures were really meant to protect: your product, your business, or the people who actually live here?
Akele astutely said, “All of the above.”
Let that be a lesson to all you citizen journalists and New York Times reporters out there: don’t ask multipart questions, and force the subject to deliver a clear, meaningful, unambiguous answer.
Another middle-aged woman grabbed the mic. She spoke slowly and deliberately and chose her words carefully. She asked Akele to discuss the “average income” of the people who frequented dispensaries, and inferred the community might be afraid of the type of people who would come here to buy weed. She cautiously noted these wouldn’t be teenagers and you know…
“Great question,” Akele said.
“Upper middle class,” Gary said. “It’s not what you guys think it is.”
In case that wasn’t clear: Gary not-so-subtly assured the crowd “Blacks” and “Browns” from the “inner city” wouldn’t be invading the North Side and defiling daughters to get their fix.
“It’s an expensive bottle of wine. I’d never share a hundred-dollar bottle of wine in the park,” Gary added, semi-subtly.
“Kids are going to buy it!” a woman shouted.
Timmy sensed chaos and swooped in. He asked Akele and Gary to defend their choice of the proposed location. And to reassure everyone kids wouldn’t buy from their dispensary.
Akele, for the dozenth time, said you had to be 21 or older to buy legally, and kids will procure cannabis on the black market if they’re so inclined. Legalization reduces the commercial power of the black market.
“How do you know that?” the woman shouted.
“I used to be a kid,” Akele said, and laughed. He also told everyone ÜMI’s weed was way too expensive for kids to buy.
At that moment a wretched and truly haggard woman began screaming into the auditorium. She called the small group of Black and Brown people in the corner of the auditorium a “posse” and said, “None of you people live in the Forty-Third Ward!”
Fed up with the tacit turned overt racism, I shed my independent, journalistic veneer and said1, “I live in the Forty-Third Ward!”
Akele pointed at me and replied, “He lives in the Forty-Third Ward!”
This prompted significant agita from both the old bigots and the young bigots alike and relative chaos ensued. Timmy chastised the Brown v. Board of Education dissenters and told everyone not to “finger point.”
More people asked the same dumb questions and received the same calculated responses. Then we ventured deeper into the gutter.
A balding dude in a mismatched suit with no tie, who resembled a flaccid, anthropomorphized penis, commandeered the microphone. Remember that lesson in tension?
“I don’t know if you’re aware of this,” Dickhead said, “but the dispensary’s going to sell a controlled substance.”
Just, chef’s kiss. Pitch-perfect tone-setting for what followed.
I don’t know if you’re aware, Dickhead started again, but parents actually tell their children they don’t want them to smoke marijuana. That they should steer clear of people who smoke marijuana. That they should stay away from friends who have marijuana. That parents do everything they can to keep their children away from marijuana.
The proposed location will expose children from St. Clement and Alcott Elementary (my kids’ school) to pot, Dickhead warned.
There could be people smoking pot outside the shop.
People smoking pot in the park.
The last thing parents want is for their kids to see examples of people doing the thing they don’t want them doing.
And in this neighborhood, with the money these kids have, they will buy weed from your dispensary, Dickhead explained.
If that’s not enough, Dickhead said, switching his cadence, we’ve already seen this with homeless people buying alcohol for Francis Parker students at 7-11. Plus, there was that whole vaping phenomenon.
If that’s not enough, Dickhead said, I drove by your Randolph Street shop and saw multiple groups of men and women smoking pot outside the store. There was a security guard on her phone but she wasn’t paying attention.
If that’s not enough, Dickhead said, I took a picture of the location—
The girl from before yelled, “What’s your question?!”
“There’s not going to be a question,” Dickhead said.
The crowd went wild.
Everyone started talking over each other and the event basically devolved into the “beaches are closed” scene in Jaws.
After a few moments of chaos, Asian Dude said, with a straight face, “Alderman Knudsen, aren’t you going to impose order and justice on these proceedings?”
This elicited laughter from everyone in the crowd, including Timmy. Sad, stoic, sexless Asian Dude looked stupefied and lost. He definitely needed a gummy.
Timmy went back to Dickhead and asked if he had an actual question.
He said no, and continued to proselytize about the desecration of Western society. A dude in the audience said, “Can you shut off his microphone?” Timmy said use the mic or lose it. Akele and Gary didn’t say a goddamned word during this entire exchange. I quietly laughed my ass off.
Dickhead started again by referencing Asian Dude’s incorrectly attributed “You’re dope” marketing campaign. “All these people are interested in doing is selling as much pot, and pot-related merchandise, as they can,” Dickhead said, stating clearly the central paradigm of market-based capitalism. “Who needs that? We sure don’t. It benefits them at our expense.”
I’d bet good money Dickhead sells mortgage-backed securities at his day job.
Akele acknowledged Dickhead’s concerns regarding kids consuming cannabis and revisited his talking points about legalization reducing black market consumption, and children being exposed to “way more bars and liquor stores” in the community.
Dickhead began yet again and Timmy finally imposed order and justice on the proceedings and moved to the next questioner.
In quick succession a young dude asked, “What are we all afraid of?” and thanked ÜMI for their presentation. Timmy reprimanded him and said the mic was for questions only.
An old White dude, with five kids, sitting amongst the melanin-heavy crowd, said his greatest fear was one of his children buying street weed laced with fentanyl. Our kids will be exposed to this stuff whether we like it or not, he said.
One of the Browns said he didn’t have a question, but pointed out alcohol companies spend millions of dollars advertising to kids, and he didn’t see the difference. It’s billions, actually. The dark-skinned savages hooted and hollered like the animals they were.
“The difference is we’re used to one, and it kills a lot more people,” Akele said. Zing!
A man next asked if there was a “requirement” to be a resident of the 43rd Ward to own a business in the 43rd Ward. Akele coolly noted that would be “unconstitutional.”
Another woman circled back to the most relevant question: is this a done deal?
Timmy assured everyone corruption was not a problem in the great city of Chicago, and community feedback was instrumental in a functioning democracy. Someone asked if he supported the dispensary.
Ever the adroit politician, Timmy said he was “pretty agnostic” as to which business occupied the vacant space, but was adamant a commercially viable enterprise needed to get in there. Fair enough.
Another quick series of volleys.
A Block Club Chicago reporter asked about next steps. Boring.
A man asked if the surveillance footage was reviewed “every single day.” Yes.
A woman asked if they could “find another location,” because that didn’t feel like a big ask. It sure was.
At last the mic came to me. With my question about the fraudulent Chicago Cannabis Company answered, I considered the next obvious query: how long had ÜMI leased the property? The longer the lease, the more likely this charade was moot.
But I second-guessed myself, and asked Timmy an unrelated question: since the Chicago Cannabis Company opened, and since it’s much less regulated, and features much less security, have there been any documented incidents of kids getting access to product? Or increased crime or foot-traffic on Halsted or Fullerton? In other words, are any of the things “we’re” concerned about actually happening?
Timmy said there was an increase in crime south of Fullerton, but couldn’t point to “anything related to that business.” He quickly pivoted away and mentioned the city council recently imposed a moratorium on those gray market operations, which exploited a regulatory loophole.
A pothead in the crowd said a new one just opened up at Lincoln and Fullerton. This revelation surprised Timmy, and sent the audience into another crowd-sourced exposition on the differences between legit cannabis and adjace cannabis.
The next questioner asked how long the lease was for. Sigh.
The owner of the property, the shitbag who intentionally sat on the vacant Salt ‘n Pepper lot for almost ten years to exploit a gratuitous tax loophole, and who was in attendance, said ÜMI “owned” the property.
The crowd gasped and clutched its pearls.
Akele clarified: ÜMI secured a ten-year lease with an option to buy.
You don’t take a ten-year lease unless you know you’re in business.
At this point the overwrought spectacle took a byzantine turn.
One guy asked what would happen to the location and special use permit if the weed business suddenly died out. You know, if people finally realized drugs were bad.
A woman said her consultant husband was overseeing a bevy of cannabis bankruptcies and pitched his business in case ÜMI wanted an expert opinion. She knew stuff because she was a former reporter.
Another dude, who claimed to be an investor in a multi-state cannabis enterprise, said the Illinois market was strong, but nonetheless encouraged Timmy to have the license revert to the city in the event of ÜMI’s bankruptcy.
A concerned citizen asked if ÜMI would subsidize a private security group to patrol within a “reasonable” distance of the dispensary. This doesn’t work. Our dipshit neighbors have one. The security person spends all night sleeping, masturbating, or smoking weed.
Another triggered taxpayer went back to the West Loop nightmare. This is a family neighborhood, he said. You don’t want to change the fabric of this neighborhood, he said. We don’t want to become the West Loop, he said.
Finally, a young girl changed the pace. She didn’t understand the fuss. Sure, Lincoln Park is a family neighborhood, but it’s also a college neighborhood, she said. She reminded everyone DePaul students walk around drunk all the time, with open cans in their hands, and encouraged people to move if they didn’t like it.
The olds were not amused.
Finally, a middle-aged man asked the last question of the evening. How far was the closest [legitimate] cannabis dispensary?
Wrigleyville. Depending on your exact location, about 1.3-1.5 miles. The man seemed satisfied. He thought he proved Lincoln Park didn’t need a dispensary because there was already one close by.
But he failed to consider the inverse: there was already a dispensary close by, and the North Side hadn’t turned into a dystopian, crime-ridden hellscape, like it used to be in the good old days.
The meeting adjourned. Nothing was accomplished, and the culture war lived to fight another day.
I walked down the aisle to the stage. Akele was entertaining a murder of anti-abolitionists. Gary idled alone. I approached the big man, shook his hand, and wished them luck.
“Tough crowd,” I said.
Gary sighed then smiled. “We’re used to it.”
That’s me with my arm raised in the shitty Zoom video embedded in the shitty YouTube video.