THE GREEN GODDESS - PART I

"Get your hands back up in the air!" hollers a female cop. "Face the wall!"

As night falls on Venice Beach, my compassionate caregivers - my friends - are perp-marched down Windward Avenue like criminals: The security guy from the front desk, followed by a patient with his hands cuffed behind his back, pushed from behind by a helmeted cop in riot gear. "Keep going! Come on, let’s go..."

One of my caregivers walks with her arms held out in front, a beefy cop at her side, his hand on her arm, hustling her along. Another caregiver hurries down the street with her hands over her head. A young man in an orange T-shirt, hands up in the air, steps sideways, already facing the wall.

All of them are paraded conspicuously under the Italianate arches of Venice’s famously funky tourist district, and lined up against the wall to face the closed gate of a tattoo parlor.

My caregivers. My legal caregivers. Up against the wall.

On September 10, 2010, at 7:45 PM, they busted the Green Goddess. "They handcuffed everybody in the building - patients and volunteers," said a legal spokesman for the Green Goddess Collective, seated at the empty front desk in the empty dispensary. "Everybody was held for an hour in handcuffs. They took all our medicine. Emptied all the buds into one bag."

Only a week before, I stood at the little glass counter with these same good people, overwhelmed and excited, as always, by the variety and the energy of their medicine.

"And it was all a mistake. Their mistake," he emphasized. "They thought we weren't on the list of people - 186 clubs - who registered in 2007. But we were. We should be open again by the middle of next week.