Illustration by PJ McQuade

See also:
*10 Awesome Photos of L.A. Pot Shops
*A Pot Brownie Marijuana Entrepreneur

There needs to be something wrong with me. That's the only way you can buy pot legally, even in Venice Beach.

And so I sit in the doctor's office and ponder the form I've been told to fill out: What am I suffering from?

"Anxiety," I write. "And hemorrhoids."

I didn't need an appointment to visit the Green Doctors, a shabby, open-air storefront "clinic" that has been operating right off the beach since 2005. Nor was there much of a wait once I completed the paperwork. Once inside the medical man's office -- no door handle, particleboard desk -- Dr. Lieberman, an older guy with a thick gray mustache, listens to my heart and lungs and glances at his clipboard. "Hemorrhoids?" he asks thoughtfully. "Does smoking marijuana help with that?"

He's the doctor. Shouldn't he be the authority? But I play along, as if I know. Indeed it does, I assure him.

Thanks to a combination of contradictory factors -- the L.A. City Council's attempted dispensary ban, its reversal last week in the wake of a citizen referendum, a series of raids by the federal government, state law be damned -- Los Angeles is in pot purgatory. The result is an elaborate pas de deux between doctors and patients. In some ways, buying pot these days is akin to filling your prescription for Prevacid. In others, it still feels criminal, as my buddy Keith and I discover on a Saturday morning when we set out to explore the state of the scene.

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Ryan Mungia

Marijuana dispensaries are a part of L.A.'s culture. They are hidden away in your neighborhoods and many people don't even give them a second glance due to their familiarity. The L.A. City Council has begun trying to erase pot dispensaries from the city's existence but a few thousand signatures have been gathered for a referendum to stop the ban.

With all the commotion surrounding pot shops in Los Angeles, it is time to take a break and reminisce on the good times (lighting up is optional). Here is a look at 10 of the best photos featured in Ryan Mungia's zine, Pot Shots , and what he has to say about them.

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Nanette Gonzales

Big Sexy with his wares

"I'm sorry, I'm just texting my butter maker," says the man in the black XL Rocca Wear shirt. He goes by "Big Sexy," and with a filled-out, 6-foot-5 frame, he lives up to that moniker and then some.

"It's more than a name," he says. "It's a lifestyle. Try to say 'Big Sexy' without smiling." The 32-year-old puts down his iPhone and looks up with a disarmingly youthful face. "I'm doing things that make me happy."

What makes him happy is food, specifically "handmade artisanal treats." He makes dark acai fudge brownies, white chocolate popcorn, cinnamon toast crunch crumb cake and six-ingredient, gluten-free granola. With favorites such as "caramel seduction" and "dark acai attraction," Big Sexy says, the "names of treats are flirtations," intended to "add a positive to your life to ease pain and anxiety."

The secret is in the butter. Cannabis-infused butter -- aka cannabutter -- goes into all of his muffins, cookies and brownies. Which might explain why the founder and head baker of Big Sexy's Sinful Sweets insists on going by a nickname. (He gives his real name only as "Joey.")

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"Fail again. Fail better," goes the well-worn Samuel Beckett quote former actress Heather Donahue chooses to open her new memoir, Growgirl. As epigraphs go, it would be hard to find one more appropriate.

In 1999, Donahue starred in cult hit The Blair Witch Project, only to watch her meteoric rise to fame crash and burn as soon as the hype surrounding the movie did. Ten years later, faced with a moribund acting career and zero marketable skills, Donahue fled Los Angeles to spend a year living off the land in Northern California. There, like any respectable Hollywood has-been, she rented a house in the woods near a place she calls "Nuggettown, CA," and set about writing a book.

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Paul T. Bradley

Jo O'Boyle holding Mr. Gray's "Nug Study #4"

Bongs -- their size, complexity, and generally mythic qualities -- have been the subject of skits, Onion satire and every manner of terrible college comedy. There's that one that was four stories high, or there was that impossible Rube Goldberg device your stoner cousin once built out of his Dodge Dart. Recalling smoking devices has become it's own folklore.

Jo O'Boyle can recall many smoking devices she once saw -- as the curator of Long Beach's Goosefire Gallery, it's basically her job, since Goosefire specializes in glass art, mostly of the, ahem, functional variety. But make no mistake, this is hardly the stuff of post-munchy legend -- this is earnest art and Ms. O'Boyle takes her job seriously.

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This weekend, John Mauceri leads his orchestra in a rousing production of Fantasia at the Hollywood Bowl. The event promises clips from the film, never-before-seen animated segments and fireworks to "complement the spectacular beauty of this cinematic triumph."

I want to know who thought this was a good idea. Somebody should have told Mauceri about our list of the top five childrens' movies that might not be suitable for actual children.

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Courtesy of Jodi Wille

Eat you heart out Harry Potter -- this is what witches and wizards really look like

The full moon was in Aquarius and Mercury in retrograde as members of L.A.'s cosmic mafia -- a fashionable collection of white witches, black wizards, Crowleyites, healers, shamans, alchemists, magicians, cult members, Aquarians, Santeria priestesses, bohemian artists, mystically-minded musicians, pagans and acid hipsters -- gathered at Cinefamily on Saturday for a crash course on witches, and why we love to hate on them.

The night was sold out, which was no surprise -- magic and occultism are alive and well in Los Angeles, and in the popular culture in general. Black mass images, upside-down crucifixes and pagan imagery have infiltrated fashion magazines everywhere, not to mention musicians' minds -- take witchhouse artists Salem, demon rappers Odd Future and even Lady Gaga, all of whom have been borrowing from the grand library of the occult.

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Elizabeth McDonald

Liz McDonald practices yoga on a beach in Brazil while smoking a fat cartoon joint.

Take a nice deep inhale, press the feet, elongate the neck and allow any sort of tension to just drop out of the head, but don't think about food. We'll be needing to relax the booty muscles, to slooowly roll down one vertebrae at a time, to find your breath and allow it to move your body, but really, don't think about food.

You're at the 4:20 Remedy Yoga Class at Brazilian Yoga and Pilates in Atwater, stoned and lying contorted on your yoga mat in a spacious warehouse with hardwood floors, a wall of mirrors and natural afternoon light, so take two more breaths here and then "step into your back foot like you're squishing a grape," as Stefani Manger instructs the class.

But you weren't thinking about food.

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