How To Get a Marijuana Prescription in San Francisco

Always held back from getting a medical marijuana prescription? People, it’s like the easiest prescription you can get in California. Getting a California medical marijuana card in San Francisco is the most lax, hassle-free experience you will ever have in the US healthcare system. It can be knocked out quickly as an afternoon errand. You can walk in to a San Francisco medical cannabis referral clinic with no appointment, no primary care physician, no health insurance or medical documentation of any form and still be out with a valid card in a half-hour’s time. (Though it does helps to have those things.)

Is it sketchy? Your experience getting a medical marijuana card will reflect the neighborhood in which your San Francisco medical marijuana evaluation clinic is located. If the clinic is on skid row, it’s more likely to feel like a free STD clinic. If it’s on condo row, it’s more likely to feel welcoming and fabulous and have pretty furniture out to chill on.

Be warned that they all only take cash. And they all have ATMs on the premises.

YOU HAVE TO LIST YOUR SYMPTOMS

You’re handed roughly three pages of paperwork to fill out. I didn’t have to give my Security Security Number or anything too compromising. You aren’t required to prove health insurance, but if you don’t have it you’ve got to initialize a non-binding agreement that says you promise to get around to it one of these days. You have to list your symptoms. I chose snoring, because that seemed like a pretty low bar.

“Snoring doesn’t count,” the doctor told me when I got in to see him just three minutes after handing in my paperwork. “Snoring doesn’t count, so you only have two [symptoms]. You need three.”

I couldn’t see the cheat sheet, so I had nothing. After 20 seconds of silence, the doctor suggested I might have back pain for sitting at my desk all day. YES! That was the ticket! I had a laminated California medical marijuana prescription card moments later.  In all the visit lasted about 20 minutes.

YOU CAN EVEN GET YOUR MARIJUANA CARD AT AMOEBA RECORDS

These days they even have a medical marijuana doctor’s clinic in Amoeba Records on Haight Street.  Green Evaluations is in the upstairs of Amoeba Records that you’ve never otherwise been to. The wait tends to be a little longer, because of the iconic location and the per capita rate of stoners in that neighborhood. But you can say you got your marijuana card at Amoeba Records, and that is just hilarious.

THE SPECIAL MAGIC OF UNLIMITED LEGAL MARIJUANA

You will never forget the first time you buy weed legally at a well-lit store or just over your smartphone. (OK sure, we always called our dealers on our smartphones.) But our dealers never offered a choice of 50 different strains, no option of ‘just a $5 fatty’ or ‘I’ll take an ounce’, no endless buffet of cookies, rice krispie treats, hash oil, shatter or wax to choose from.

The dispensaries and delivery services all offer this, and they’re way more solid than your flake-ass dealer ever was. You will be super happy to have that marijuana referral card, and you can probably get it more quickly than you can get ahold of your dealer.