WOODY HARRELSON'S WEED LOUNGE

My mission to have an extremely stoned chat with Woody

LA is the kind of city that doesn’t lend itself well to party-hopping, but the other night, I found myself tearing away from the art world cool kids at O-Town gallery’s holiday party and barreling over to The Woods—a West Hollywood weed lounge owned by Woody Harrelson. The occasion was a Budist party called Fleur Nouveau, which was highlighting growers from Emerald Triangle and Sonoma—regions in Northern California known for their rich harvests of sun-grown, organic weed.

I had one goal that night: to get a quote from Woody for my book Weed: Everything You Want to Know But Are Too Stoned to Ask. (First round copies are selling out, so I’m working on an updated edition!) I have also been dying to check out The Woods, a stoner Shangri-La that looks like a spa in the jungles of Bali. I mean, it's astonishing that weed dispensaries can even look like this:

Pulling up to the spot at 9pm, I realized that I had perhaps lingered too long at the earlier art world fête: guests were leaving in droves, and the door girl gave me a pitiful look as she told me the party was basically over. Resigning myself to the fact that if Woody had stopped by the party, he was probably long gone, I sighed and snatched up a gift bag before stepping into the lounge to make my rounds. The Woods was as gorgeous as it looked in photos: a plant paradise with a serene koi pond, towering glass cabanas for smoking and chilling, and even a parakeet or two (or so I heard…)

As I navigated the jungle-like maze, I came across incredible weed treats around every corner: one guy was offering brown pills that combined cold-water hash with caffeine (a perfect wake and bake), while in one cabana, I came across the Mogu Magu girls doing Chinese tea pairings with Moon Made Farms weed smoked from a geisha bong. The party felt like a glimpse into a California weed scene that’s refreshingly optimistic, decadent, and community-minded. But still, no sign of Woody…

Still, the people were pretty groovy: a weed sommelier named Colleen told me she was trying to make it over to traditional grows in the Middle East to sample some ancient strains before they get overrun by Cookies—the extremely popular American brand founded by the rapper Berner that represents everything cringe about stoner-bro street culture. Later, a hippie-ish woman gifted me a 1/2 ounce bag of some of the fruitiest flower I’ve ever smelled, telling me that it came from an off-grid solar-run farm called Arcanna in Mendocino county where she has lived for decades with her family. With all the ways that legalization has decimated the underground and turned the weed industry into a capitalist race to the bottom run by MSOs and straight-up scammers, these people felt like a rare and perhaps dying breed.

As I turned the corner to peek into the next room, a gnarled-up older man caught my attention, simply because he bore a strong resemblance to a gnome. I glanced at the person whose ear he was whispering into, and with a ripple of excitement, realized the man in a brown corduroy suit was Woody fucking Harrelson!!!