I have a sore right thumb. If I were a cartoon character it would have stars and lightning bolts shooting out of it, that’s how much this thumb hurts. So I called a nearby relative, who is 70 and my go-to expert on pain. We come from a large clan in which the women start to get arthritic hands on the downward slope of 50.
“How about marijuana cream for arthritis? It’s supposed to be a miracle cure,” I said. “There’s a place in Kensington Market.”
“Raided and shut down the day after I bought my last batch.” This is unexpected. I am the younger, cooler relation. I had no idea Maryjane, we may as well call her — she’s a successful professional and prefers to be incognito — was an epidermal stoner.
“Of course I don’t get high.” My second newsflash from MJ: her cannabis-infused topicals, as they are called in the business, are non-intoxicating, with zero of the euphoria associated with most (but not all) joints and edibles. Marijuana sans buzz — that is, loaded with medicinal CBD but without THC, the psychoactive component in cannabis — is a fast-growing business that has lured a new batch of pain-wracked patrons like Maryjane, who’s tried and failed to retire, twice, and doesn’t have the time for or interest in getting stoned. Two-thirds of Canadians registered to take medicinal marijuana are using it for severe arthritis, according to Health Canada. And that doesn’t count the lucrative sales to senior citizens out of storefront dispensaries.
“Here’s a spot called Peace and Love on Queen.” I was on a website with a photo of John and Yoko in bed, holding flowers in their hands.
“Sold out.” This went on for a couple of minutes — doesn’t carry it, sold out, busted — until Maryjane lost patience. She was having 14 people for dinner and didn’t have time for me and my thumb. “You’d be better off going to Vancouver.”
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When I finally found a place that carried the cream, in the Annex just minutes from where we both lived and open 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily, I called Maryjane back with the news.
“Pick me up at 8:45 tomorrow morning,” she said, and hung up.
Our neighbourhood cannabis dispensary was fronted by a small retail operation. Inside, a broad-shouldered man in a weed-logoed baseball cap checked our photo ID and pointed us to a door at the end of a narrow hallway. “Have a good day,” he said. “It’s only going to get better.”
Paused outside the grim, gunmetal door — patrons are asked to knock first — I remembered the LCBO in my hometown of Grimsby, in the ’70s, which looked like a bank, except it was in a back alley. Customers wrote a number on a piece of paper and a man in a badly balled cardigan shuffled to the back and returned with a bottle of shame in a brown paper bag.
Here in the Annex, when the door swung open, the room sparkled as if Mr. Clean himself had gone at it with a scrub brush. Three pretty young women stood behind the glass counter ready to serve the customers, who were stacked up like planes on the runway at Pearson. It was 9:05 a.m. On a Wednesday.
Maryjane rummaged in her bag for her empty jar of cream, called High Relief. “I’d like more of this, no THC, please.”
One of the counter women arrayed our options before us. This one feels hot on the hand and this one, with cooling menthol, feels cold, she explained. This one came in a thick green paste, and this one in a lighter white cream. They were out of the Black Cobra Joint Rub, which I had never heard of but instantly decided was the only cream for me. While MJ compared CBD versus THC levels, the woman mentioned an itch cream. I was born itchy, so I asked if I could try a test sample.
Maryjane snorted. “We’re not in the makeup section at Holt Renfew, Cathrin.” Although we might have been, it was all so pleasant and pungent, and I’d already whirled down the same anxiety spiral I experienced when trying to choose the perfect lipstick: too many options, and what if I picked the one that didn’t change my life? While Maryjane honed in on the heating cream, I fiddled with a Dixie cup of what looked like magic beans. “Don’t eat those!” said the woman, and I hastily put the cup down. In the end we bought three creams — did I mention the prices reminded me of Holt’s, too? — all with the promise of disappearing our aches and pains, for a few hours at least.
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As we prepared to leave, our server wrote out the number of a support team in case we had questions. I had one right away: what happens to this store on Oct. 17, when the LCBO takes over the marijuana dispensing business? A silence long enough to drive a GO train through filled the store, until the dark-eyed woman at the far end of the counter closed her eyes, crossed both her fingers and held them in the air. The server next to her, though, said hopefully: “Bigger! More!” The answer is, nobody knows for sure.
The plan looks something like this: On Oct. 17, Cannabis Day, this store and others like it in Toronto will be shut down and replaced by the Ontario Cannabis Store. (That’s OCS, people, work it into your vocabulary.) The OCS logo is as bland as a bowl of Cheerios and the first location is not much better. Ignoring customer convenience as the cardinal rule of retail success, only one store will open in Toronto in 2018, at 2480 Gerrard St. E. Like my Grimsby LCBO from the ’70s, the product will be behind closed doors, with none of the sampling now on offer at the glittering shrines to capitalism that define the modern LCBO. (My daughter Mary, when 6, explained to her teacher that the LCBO was her favourite place to go shopping with her mother.)
Although OCS stores — there will be 150 of them in Ontario by 2020 — will sell accessories, there will be no marijuana creams for arthritis, Nicole from the LCBO Press Office explained by email. “Cannabis accessories will refer to devices such as vaporizers and use materials such as rolling papers.” This was a blow to pain sufferers everywhere.
Maryjane and I had planned a cottage trip the weekend following our small spree, and we took our creams with us. They were packaged in a sleek black odour-proof bag, with a complicated child-proof zipper, which neither of us could open with our arthritic thumbs. “Grab the scissors,” said MJ.
“I just slather it all over my body,” she said, once the cream was freed from its packaging. We were sitting on lounge chairs on the dock overlooking a dark northern lake; this cottage was off the grid, and if felt like our voices carried for miles across the silent water.
“It says use sparingly.” I dabbed some on my right thumb.
“I don’t pay any attention to that,’ said MJ. I dabbed a little more, and waited.
My mother and her two sisters’ pain set in about the age I am now. “Oh, my aching thumb,” my mother would say, cradling her right thumb in her left hand. My Aunt Helen would wince when you shook her hand but was too proud to complain. Ditto on both counts for me today, although I found these women and their ailments faintly ridiculous when I was 22.
They often came to Toronto for the day to shop at Eaton’s. Maryjane would insist we take them to the chicest spot of the moment for lunch, even though it was like taking out three yipping coyotes, the racket they made. They weren’t used to being served, and they wanted everything just as it was at home. One of these lunches was at Three Small Rooms, an upstairs eatery at The Windsor Arms Hotel that featured foie gras and smoked sturgeon, which was radical for Toronto then, let alone for my lot from the Niagara fruit belt. They went off-menu.
“I will have toast,” my Aunt Helen would begin. She weighed 16 pounds and lived on biscuits. “Burnt, and cold, with the crust cut off. Butter on the side, please, and it must be hard and cold.”
“Tea! Piping hot!” Aunt Mary would say. My mother ordered the garlic chicken without the garlic, naturally. Nothing was ever right, and they would leave a terrible tip, dramatically. “That’s what I think of that service,” they would say as they huffed out. Maryjane stayed behind to supplement the quarter on the table.
They brought news of their own miracle cures, copper bracelets or magnets under the bed. On this outing to Three Small Rooms my Aunt Mary pulled out a pale brown lump a bit bigger than a toonie. “What do you think this is?” she said, not just to us but to the entire restaurant, holding out the poo-like object to her broader audience. Cutlery paused in the air.
“It’s a petrified potato.” She beamed. She always wore a terrifically fetching hat. This one was a tailored grey fedora with a single navy feather just visible above the crown. “Whenever my hand hurts, I hold on to it for a few minutes and the pain is gone just like that.” She handed it around. “Go on, try it!”
By the time they were in their 80s and 90s, they had put aside miracle cures. “Everything just hurts, all the time,” said my mother at 91. The brave part I see now was not getting through the pain. The brave part was to let go of the idea that there was a cure for it. My mother and her sisters did not yield. Wear out, don’t rust out, was their mantra. Mostly, they accomplished it.
“I think we may be in petrified potato territory here,” I said to Maryjane on the dock. After a surge of liberation, my thumb was throbbing again.
“Likely,” said MJ. She had bought us two matching red Speedo bathing caps, “to cover our ears.” She slipped off the dock quickly, and I followed slowly down the ladder into the cool July water. Maryjane sang “Bye-Bye Blackbird” as she swam. “Pack up all my cares and woes/Here I go, singing low.” She did the crawl with her head above the water, the same way she has since she was a girl, her forearms sparking in the sunshine. I joined in, and we tried a little harmony.
“Feels good, doesn’t it?” she said. I had to say, it really did.
