Kushism is my favorite weed dispensary in L.A. The employees are nice, the products are solid and the lines aren’t usually too long. Similarly, in terms of ambiance, it doesn’t feel like an overly sanitized Apple Store, or like picking up an eighth from a dealer; essentially, it feels old fashioned without being outdated, or at least as old fashioned as a legal pot shop can possibly feel.

When it comes to their transactions, however, Kushism is part of the cash-only culture that still dominates the industry (due to both federal law and the high price of credit-card processing systems willing to operate within the cannabis industry). In fact, I was recently waiting to pay for my King Louis XIII indica (earthy, piney, sleep-inducing) and my Jack Herer sativa pre-rolled joints (euphoric, joyful, clear-headed) at Kushism, excited to get back into the car and smoke the sativa, when my Visa was denied. “Cash only,” the attendant reminded me.

Another player in the industry, however, Alt Thirty Six, wants to alleviate the cash-only burden for dispensaries and customers alike — as well as the dangerous reality that my favorite budtenders at Kushism probably handle thousands of dollars every night, which not only makes them vulnerable to human error in terms of accounting and taxes, but also to armed robbery. A digital payments platform that facilitates payments from the business-to-business and business-to-consumer aspects within the cannabis industry, Alt Thirty Six uses cryptocurrency as an alternative to cash, allowing dispensaries to be able to pay and transact with their vendors, suppliers, distributors and customers digitally. In other words, duffel bags will no longer be essential to the industry’s banking process, reducing the need to figure out where to safely stash large amounts of cash.

“Right now, the cost of cash-handling equates to about 15 to 20 percent of the total revenues that cannabis companies are generating in a year,” explains Ken Ramirez, Alt Thirty Six’s co-founder and CEO. “In addition, a lot of time is spent on cash-handling activities like counting the money five different times and counting out your employees’ earnings down to the penny. If you’re a larger dispensary — say you do $350 million a year in cash with no banks — you run into a severe problems. We reduce those problems.”

He believes Alt Thirty Six’s value proposition is good for customers too: “The consumer benefit is they don’t have to pay in cash and make extra trips to the ATMs and pay those fees. They also get incentivized in the form of discounts toward purchases and discounts on products, such as $25 off their first purchase and ongoing loyalty programs paid out in digital currency.” (FWIW, I can relate: Earlier in the week, the ATM at Kushism broke, and I had to walk across the street and down to the meat market/liquor store hybrid to withdraw cash for my joints.)

Practically speaking, most of the process is routed through Alt Thirty Six’s partner — the blockchain project Dash Network. “Right now, Dash is 11th in the world out of 1,600 [cryptocurrencies], Bitcoin being number one,” Ramirez says. “Dash is a decentralized piece of software that sits on top of the internet, a fully decentralized network in comparison to the banks, which are a centralized network. This allows us full control of the funds — or the dispensary full control of the funds — without having to worry about government intervention.”

The company is in the process of obtaining its money transmission license in states with recreational or medical policies; as such, it’s currently awaiting final approval from California and Nevada, with plans to enter the market in Michigan, Washington, Florida, D.C. and Colorado shortly thereafter. They’re also already live in Arizona. And so, there, they’re in the process of “onboarding clients — including many brands, cultivators, manufacturers and dispensaries,” according to Ramirez.

“Since we’re dealing with two gray areas — cryptocurrency and cannabis — we put a large focus on compliance and strive to go above what’s described in existing regulations,” Ramirez continues. He also says Alt Thirty Six is “partnering with the largest government regulatory bodies” to help create standards for digital payments that go beyond the cannabis space. “Dash can be used in multiple industries, not just cannabis,” he claims. “We just created an application for operators to be able to use Dash within cannabis.”

Essentially, this is what differentiates Dash from other cryptocurrencies that are branded to appeal to the weed industry, such as Potcoin. “Those companies that have created their own token are called ICOs, initial coin offerings. Early stage companies do that in an attempt to raise money through their coin offering. But the downfall with ICOs is that that specific coin only has value within the cannabis industry, which creates little value from the global market. Dash isn’t an ICO. We’re not creating our own coin. Our whole goal from a consumer-adoption perspective is to attack the industry that has the greatest problem and then look at complementary and adjacent industries next.”

It might turn out then that my beloved Kushism will soon go from cash-only to crypto-only. Either way, my Visa is still probably gonna be completely useless.

Tierney Finster is a contributing writer at MEL. She last wrote about why it’s so difficult to bring the #MeToo movement to the porn industry.

More Tierney:

• Keeping Up With Dr. Miami
• Ketamine Could Be the New Depression Treatment of Choice
• A Conversation With Conner Habib, the Syrian-American Gay Porn Performer and Radical Philosopher
• The Great Disappearing Act of the ‘Most Downloaded Woman in the World’

The Company That’s Trying to Get the Weed Industry to Go from Cash-Only to Full-On Cryptocurrency was originally published in MEL Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve gone to therapy exactly once. I was glad I showed up, but when my session concluded, I shook my therapist’s hand and never saw her again. I assumed this was the complete opposite of what you’re supposed to do. But mental-health professionals who have integrated a single-session-therapy (SST) approach into their practice don’t actually consider a “one-and-done” session such as mine a failure.

Not at all, in fact.

Moshe Talmon, the founder and director of the International Center for SST who teaches his methodologies at universities and health centers around the world, is one such psychotherapist. Born in Israel and educated at the University of Pennsylvania, Talmon wasn’t long into his career with Kaiser Permanente in the Bay Area when he took notice of how many of its clinic’s patients didn’t come back for a second visit. Alongside his colleagues Michael Hoyt and Robert Rosenbaum, Talmon began following up with these patients and soon realized that many of them didn’t return because they hated the therapy or found it ineffective; no, instead, many actually thought one session was more than enough.

That, in turn, inspired Talmon to rethink his approach to his first encounters with patients, listening more deeply and actively from the very start of their communications and using his initial time with them to generate as much practical change as possible — rather than using that first session to develop a long-term treatment plan (per the industry standard).

Tell me more about how you became interested in single-session therapy as a treatment technique.
During [my time at Kaiser], I encountered this phenomenon of people who’d never seen a psychotherapist before. They came for what’s usually called an intake, which is just to gather information. They never, however, showed up for a second appointment. At the beginning, we clearly thought this was a failure of the therapist to connect well with the client. In the literature, we called these people “dropouts.” But when we started to follow up with them, we realized a lot of them felt that much had been accomplished with that one intake — much beyond what the therapist could anticipate.

This experience started a series of projects where we researched the possibility that one session may be enough from the very beginning, allowing both the client and the therapist to do whatever they can in that one session. For an early project, we essentially created two groups and compared them. One group was people who selected to come for only one session, who we then followed up with for three months, six months, a year and two years after that single session. We compared them to the people who selected to go to ongoing therapy. This comparison yielded surprising results. We found that many of the single-session patients did as well as the people who were doing ongoing therapy. People who only had a single therapy session weren’t just pleased and satisfied with their outcome, they also reported a better outcome than people in the long-term group, too.

All of which started to show us how to conduct a session in the here-and-now that allows people to choose for themselves whether or not they want to have that one session and then get back to the business of life without the help of a therapist. I published my first work about this in 1990 and was sure people would either not read it or reject it. Surprisingly enough, though, quite a few people picked up on it and research began in other states and countries, where the results proved similar.

After your initial research into SST, did the way you approached your new clients change significantly?
It made a huge change in my way of operating with people in both single-session therapy and in ongoing therapy. This, though, was very challenging. When we became clinical medical psychologists, the assumption was problems have a lot of layers and were very deeply rooted. We were taught to get the heart of the problem, and in order to do so, we needed to know a lot about the client. We needed to create what therapy calls transference and countertransference in the relationship, in which clients begin to project all kinds of feelings on you and analyze them and so forth.

SST helped me realize somebody can make a shift in their thinking, feeling or behavior at any given moment. Profound change can happen at any time, at any minute during any session, including the first one. So the most important thing I learned was to never underestimate my clients and never give up on them. When you look at studies of people with major depression over the course of 24 sessions, the research shows that those people who improved and got out of their depression did so during their first three sessions. Much of the power of therapy is in the beginning.

In other words, a deep contact can happen even if I might be missing a lot of information about somebody’s history. Not all of the time, but sometimes. It’s like the ability of people to fully love at first sight. There’s something meaningful and powerful that can occur during those first moments when someone is overwhelmed and comes in hoping for the best but preparing for the worst.

Are there certain types of clients that you think are best suited for single-session therapy?
We’ve spent a lot of time trying to answer that question, but we haven’t been able to come up with any clear or conclusive findings. That said, people who come in with a very real problem that they’re very aware of do really well in SST. An immediate problem. A painful problem. Something they want to solve, or something that gives them back the power over their own lives or their own choices in life. This sort of awareness going into a session does facilitate a more effective single-session therapy experience.

This is why there are therapeutic walk-in clinics all over the world now [and similarly oriented apps]. You basically walk into a place — it could be in a shopping mall, for example — and there’s no paperwork or exams to take before you meet with a therapist five minutes after walking into the clinic. You hit the ground running and try to do everything you can within that one hour. It’s a remarkable mindset that allows both the therapist and client not to bullshit each other too much.

Do you think that the opposite can be true, too — that SST can help people, especially men, who aren’t as clear about their problems or even that likely to try therapy in the first place?
It can overcome some of the fears people have that make them avoid therapy. It’s unfortunate that more than 50 percent of people who suffer from serious mental health problems still have never seen a therapist. It’s not because there’s a lack of therapists or a lack of people who want to provide therapy. It has more to do with the fears people have about how long, how extensive and how much it will require them to dig into things they might not want to deal with.

So yeah, SST is more likely to help people who aren’t interested in long-term therapy and more likely to help people who cannot afford long-term therapy. It also can allow people who aren’t interested in psychoanalyzing themselves to acknowledge a serious problem they want to cope with or solve.

In SST, we respect the focus or definition of the problem that the client brings into the session. We don’t say to them, “Oh, you don’t have any problem with your boyfriend. You have a problem with your father,” or “You don’t have a problem with your stomach. It’s a problem with your avoidance.” We aren’t trying to teach them a new language or a new way of psychoanalyzing themselves. I think that allows people to engage, to open up and feel like they were heard and understood. SST is effective at validating a person’s experience, which is sometimes all they need.

In that way, SST has taught me not to try to outsmart or “cure” my clients, but to be as useful and helpful as I can be during our time together and hope we can connect in a meaningful way. Sometimes this doesn’t even require a whole session. It can happen in five good moments — or just one good moment.

Tierney Finster is a contributing writer at MEL. She last wrote about why it’s so difficult to bring the #MeToo movement to the porn industry.

More Tierney:

• Keeping Up With Dr. Miami
• Ketamine Could Be the New Depression Treatment of Choice
• A Conversation With Conner Habib, the Syrian-American Gay Porn Performer and Radical Philosopher
• The Great Disappearing Act of the ‘Most Downloaded Woman in the World’

The Micro-Session Is the Newest Trend in Therapy was originally published in MEL Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Almost exactly two years before the start of #MeToo, accusations of sexual assault brought down James Deen, one of the most powerful men in porn. But despite all of the mainstream male power brokers who have fallen in Deen/#MeToo’s wake—from Harvey Weinstein to Kevin Spacey to Leslie Moonves—the porn industry still struggles to talk about sexual assault and abuse openly. For a couple of reasons: 1) When a woman has sex for money, people have a hard time accepting that she has the right to consent to what she does sexually; and 2) a lot of survivors and their allies stay silent because they don’t want to perpetuate negative stereotypes about the industry—that it’s amoral, that it’s unsafe, etc.

For an insider’s perspective on how #MeToo is affecting/changing porn, I recently spoke with three porn performers—Lotus Lain, Tasha Reign and Buck Angel—with particularly unique perspectives (and experiences) on the topic.

Lotus Lain is a porn actress, writer and activist who works with the Free Speech Coalition, the adult industry’s trade association. I specifically asked about her work as a sort of compliance manager, documenting reported incidents of harassment and abuse in porn and strategizing about how to prevent them from being repeated in the future.

Lain: There’s not an actual human resources department for the industry at large, so I have a lot of freedom to develop ways our organization can help performers, producers and directors alike navigate these different areas of consent, harassment and #MeToo.

A lot of what I do is listen to people’s claims, investigating them and figuring out how to best address the situations that are making people, especially women, feel uncomfortable. It’s an ambiguous role, but I’m happy to take it on because I want to make things safer and more equal for everyone in the business. I spend a lot of time then researching what’s being said in the media, what’s being said online and what’s being said within our own community.

There’s a huge tendency to not take women in porn seriously when they talk about sexual harassment. They’re often asked to explain why such-and-such sex acts were okay for them to do in one scene but not another. Or why they didn’t say something when they were on set as opposed to afterwards. People in our own industry don’t even support people coming forward. It’s messy. The way society treats us makes it harder to speak up, harder to be believed and harder to move forward after sharing our story.

For example, I’ve had so many instances where women tell me about situations through back-channels, in my DMs or whatever, but are like, “I don’t wanna say who it is unless I hear that it happens again.”

A lot of women in porn are quick to put each other on blast, too—like, “Oh, this performer was a bitch to me on set,” or “I don’t fuck with this girl, ‘cause I don’t like the way she talks or acts.” It’s sad that they’ll never speak out in the same way about production companies and directors, because they don’t wanna lose their money.

Speaking of which, women in our industry often keep their mouths shut, even more so than other industries, because we often don’t have an outside world we can turn to in order to make money. This may because of a lack of business skills, but even for super savvy women in porn, getting into other careers is hard because of how easy it is for people to look up your past and hold it against you. Basically then, if you need money and you don’t have a backup plan, you have to stay silent. You don’t want directors and producers to shun you. And while more and more women are creating their own content, not everyone has the capacity to do that by themselves.

The reality is, we’re all in the trenches right now. For instance, there’s this one person in porn I know personally who’s off their rocker. They’re cutting corners and putting performers in uncomfortable positions. The Free Speech Coalition issued an internal press release about it to warn this person and alert other performers. Now, the person is on warning. It’s like, “Third strike, and you’re out.” We’re not in a position to threaten people, but we’ve told them to act fucking right or we’ll continue to raise awareness about their behavior.

Currently in grad school, Tasha Reign and I caught up as she prepared for an afternoon class with a guest speaker directly involved with covering the Brett Kavanaugh hearing as part of Reign’s specialized journalism program. “It’s really gnarly,” Reign says. More generally, I ask her about how inclusive the #MeToo movement is of porn performers like herself, as well as how speaking out about being groped on a Stormy Daniels’ porn set late last year has affected her career.

Reign: I’m so grateful for the #MeToo movement, even if it’s not historically been inclusive of all women, including women in porn. The thing about me is that I include myself in anything I see fit. Even if I haven’t been asked by the #MeToo movement to use my voice, I hashtag #MeToo all day long when speaking about sexual assault, sexual harassment and women’s rights. I applaud any woman who’s brave enough to come out and share her story. I’ve heard a lot of porn performers say they feel left out of #MeToo, and even heard mainstream celebrities with sexual reputations such as Amber Rose say they feel left out, too, but I’ve noticed when you include yourself in things, you’ll begin to be included in return.

That said, we have so much further to go before we even get to a place where people understand sex workers are people who can be raped. And overall, I feel distraught. As a woman, I don’t feel safe inside, or outside, the industry. I have this heightened anxiety, because I’m so fearful of being groped in a public sphere—not just because I’m Tasha Reign and I do porn, but because I’m a woman. It’s so scary. And it happens all the time.

I have been able to find empowerment in some of the things I’ve done in the adult industry. And I’ve especially been able to be more open about sexual harassment within the industry than I was before because of #MeToo. Before #MeToo, you couldn’t come out and say, “I was sexually assaulted or harassed,” because it perpetuates the stereotype that everybody has of adult performers—that we’re all victims who are being trafficked. Or that porn performers can’t be sexually harassed or assaulted because of what we’ve agreed to do for work. #MeToo, however, has shown me that I can use my voice and tell my stories. I can fight for my rights because, guess what? Every woman is being sexually assaulted and harassed in every industry. So we don’t have to hide it anymore.

When you do talk about this, however, you have to be ready for all sorts of people to send you cruel and demonizing messages online. When women open up and tell our stories, especially women who work in the adult world, the messages we often receive are, “You’re a whore. That’s all that you are. You have no voice. We don’t want to hear anything about this. If anything happened to you, you deserved it. You literally asked for it. Fuck you, you’re a piece of scum.” These comments are so common they begin to feel regular, even though they’re horrific. It’s abuse, and it takes an emotional toll on us. I’m not a scientist, but I don’t think this is unrelated to the high amount of female suicides in the industry lately.

I’ve obviously spoken out about my own experience of harassment on set, and for the most part, I feel supported by my peers. In particular, I was sexually harassed by a camera guy on a Stormy Daniels set. I told her, but she didn’t do the right thing. She didn’t report it to her boss at Wicked Pictures. She didn’t kick the man in question off the set. She denied my claims publicly on Twitter and said I made it all up. The man in question admitted what he did, saying it was just a joke, but I told him that was sexual harassment. She was there when he admitted that. I don’t think it’s strong or empowered of her to say that I made it all up. But I also get why she doesn’t want to own what happened—it would give her a bad image, when like I’ve said, women in porn face so much already.

That’s why I have mixed feelings when the name Stormy Daniels is brought up. On the one hand, she represents me. I know her, not just through actually working with her, but because she’s a representative of adult women in the mainstream world, of which there are very few. Stormy has become one of the few porn performers who gets treated respectfully by mainstream press. So if people say something mean about her, like in a class of mine, I’m the first one to defend her. That’s because their comments often have nothing to do with Stormy Daniels, they’re about porn stars. I’m very close to my identity as a porn star so I always speak up and let people outside the industry know that they don’t know anything about it when they make certain comments.

I only publicly tweeted at her about my experience in response to her tweet about feeling bad for men and what they have to experience as a result of #MeToo. I saw that tweet, and I was like, “I can’t hold it in. If you’re gonna act as though you’re a feminist and that you represent women in the adult business, only to say something as disgusting as this when you’re in the mainstream media, fuck you lady.”

Stormy Daniels on Twitter

Instead of thinking"what a great time to be a woman"all I find myself thinking is"what a terrible time to be a man". How horrifying to have a penis tonight at Golden Globes.Not all men are monsters.Making EVERY award about your agenda is not right. Its like Kanye/Taylor on repeat

Tasha Reign on Twitter

@StormyDaniels Are you kidding? Please don't get me started about the environment on your set. No one thinks all men are monsters. Women are finally able to speak their truth about sexual harassment. Not supporting this movement speaks volumes to misogyny. Our industry is no exception. #Metoo

Stormy Daniels on Twitter

@TashaReign If you are questioning my integrity as a director or "the environment" on my set, you and I are going to have a HUGE problem. And you will have zero chance of finding anyone to say they've been treated poorly on one of my shoots EVER. Take your agenda elsewhere.

Tasha Reign on Twitter

@StormyDaniels I was innapropriately groped and sexually harassed by one of the men on your crew November 15th right before my BG scene. Which you were then made aware of that day. You continued to allow him to stay on the set with no reprocussion. I never questioned your directorial skills.

Stormy Daniels on Twitter

@TashaReign You were not. I was right there...as were several other people and NONE of them will agree with you. How dare you try to undo 15 years of my reputation and his career. I will not allow it. Find me one person who will state otherwise. Best wishes

Tasha Reign on Twitter

@StormyDaniels He grabbed my ass and then made Sex humping noises from behind. He then admitted that he was "joking" right infront of you. I then was shaken up about the entire event all day. Why on earth would I make that up? I have no ill will, I simply want to speak my truth.

Still, this incident has directly impacted my career. A few months back, I got booked to do a shoot with a female director, someone I’d worked with before a few different times. I showed up to set and went straight to hair and makeup. Two hours later, I’m ready to shoot. It was an anal scene. I go downstairs, and that’s when I see the guy who grabbed me on Stormy’s shoot.

I came back upstairs and approached the production assistant. I was like, “Hey, I don’t know how we can best communicate this, but I don’t feel comfortable with this guy filming me today. I know there’s a few camera guys down there. I didn’t know he was gonna be on set, but I’m the performer here, I’m the woman and I shouldn’t have to work with this person.” He told me he was going to go take care of it for me. Fifteen minutes later, he comes back upstairs and tells me I have to leave. He’s like, “Yeah, we can’t lose him for the day. He’s shooting the majority of the scenes. We need him, and he’s threatening to leave if you’re even on set, period.” Somebody escorted me to the car, and later the male talent I was supposed to be working with told me a lot of people on set were speaking badly about me the rest of the day.

Unfortunately, stories like this show other girls in the industry that if you speak up, you're going to be fired. That was the message I got. The director never reached out to me. She never texted. She never called. She never emailed. I reflected and wondered what message I could take away from my experience, and it was that when you speak your voice, you’re going to be fired.

Buck Angel is a legendary queer porn performer often marketed as the “man with a pussy.” I spoke to him about the state of the industry and how he’s leveraging his status—as both a male and a porn legend—to amplify the voices of female porn performers who have spoken out about sexual harassment.

Angel: If you look at the world of pornography, it’s run by men with money who don’t care about anything except for making even more money. You know what comes with that? People who don’t care about how their porn sets are run, and people who don’t care about making performers feel safe. If sexual harassment or assault had more of a direct financial impact on their business, I guarantee they’d care more.

This is where I struggle with my industry. We could have a great, powerful and completely consensual industry where we police ourselves to make sure these things don’t happen, but outside of queer porn, which is the space I mostly operate in, it seems like nobody wants to do that. At least not the men. The queer part of the industry acknowledges all of this bullshit. We don’t want it to happen, and that’s why we speak out. We want to clean up the industry.

It takes a lot for a woman to speak out against men, just in general, but as a porn performer, you’re usually not taken seriously by a lot of people, which only makes it harder. I’m not taken seriously for being a man with a pussy who does porn. People are just like, “C’mon, dude! You’re exploiting yourself.” It takes a lot of, for lack of better term, balls, to get yourself out there and to speak out against someone in the industry who pays your rent.

As a man, I amplify women in the industry who call out rape, sexual harassment and other abuses. I have the privilege to have my own platform. I don’t have to worry about whether I get hired or not. I’ve created my own space within the industry, which gives me a lot of power. That’s why some of these people are scared of me, because I will speak out about this. I’m friends with a lot of the straight female performers, and so, their experiences are frequently spoken about. (It seems to be more prevalent in straight porn, but at the same time, I do think it happens in gay porn, too. The thing is, men don’t speak out about these things, whether they’re in porn or not, so that conversation isn’t happening yet.)

And while we definitely do much more talking about consent before a scene compared to when I first got started, this doesn’t mean nothing bad can happen—especially for a woman. I’m thinking about the story of Leigh Raven, a hardcore performer who was assaulted on set by a performer who she not only considered a friend, but had worked with a number of times. She made a video about her experience, filmed by her wife Nikki Hearts, who is also in the industry.

The sad part, though, is that people really wanted them to take the video down. She got pretty much talked down to by the entire industry. In fact, she had to disable the comments because they were so violent, disparaging and disgusting. Leigh is known as a super hardcore performer who regularly shoots intense scenes that may not always seem consensual to every viewer, but are usually consensual situations in which she earns her living. People need to understand that. When people outside of porn don’t understand that, it makes them believe performers are knowingly putting themselves in these violent situations when that’s not the case at all. It’s like saying if you’re wearing hot pants and a halter top, you’re asking to get raped. It’s the same bullshit behavior.

And so, in some cases at least, we need to clean house—and how do you start? You expose the dirt. You get into those nooks and crannies, because if you don’t, the dirt is still going to be there.

Tierney Finster is a contributing writer at MEL. She last wrote about how “genital steaming” is the hottest date in town.

More Tierney:

• Keeping Up With Dr. Miami
• Ketamine Could Be the New Depression Treatment of Choice
• A Conversation With Conner Habib, the Syrian-American Gay Porn Performer and Radical Philosopher
• The Great Disappearing Act of the ‘Most Downloaded Woman in the World’

Why It’s So Hard to Bring the #MeToo Movement to Porn was originally published in MEL Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The motto at Tikkun Spa in Santa Monica is, “Heal your asshole. Heal yourself. Heal the world.”

At least, it should be.

The holistic spa’s actual motto is “Heal yourself. Heal the world.” But the spa boasts a signature “A-steam” treatment that makes the asshole-healing addition just as accurate.

An “A-steam,” or “P-steam” as it’s known at some spas, in honor of one’s perineum (i.e., taint), is the equivalent of the yoni steam for people without yonis (“yoni” is the Sanskrit word for female genitals). Yoni steaming is an ancient health-and-wellness practice that’s experienced a resurgence in popularity in this post-Goop age, in which consumers like myself—relentlessly desperate to be healthier and happier—will try any method of detoxification, purification and activation that’s sold to us as both historically viable and celebrity-endorsed.

Sure, gynecologists have spoken out against the necessity of vaginal steaming, describing the vagina as a “self-cleaning oven,” but what do they know? Besides, as we’ve reported over and over and over again, most men totally suck at cleaning their ass.

The A-steam and V-steam are facilitated in the exact same way at Tikkun, which is owned by Niki Han Schwarz, a reiki master, and her husband Charles Schwarz, an orthopedic surgeon. First, you slip into a stately, sleeveless robe with a velcro strap that adjusts around a man’s waist and a woman’s chest. Next, you spread your gown and cheeks as you take a seat on a luxurious throne. The throne looks like a toilet, but it’s padded with towels and outfitted with an infrared light that sends extreme warmth up and around your respective cavities. The light is what heats the steam, which isn’t simply water but an herbal tea made of mugwort, an herb with healing and antibacterial properties. Meanwhile, your feet rest on a towel-lined block that heated steam is also funneled through.

At Tikkun, four or five of these thrones are permanently installed in a single speciality steam room, with walls made of beautiful green jade, where you’re served tea (a Lipton-equivalent, not the same one that’s infiltrating your anus) and offered magazines while you wait. You’re not encouraged to relieve yourself on these spa chairs nor to get off of them if the sensation is too warm. A remote controls the heat on your bottom and feet, allowing you to alter the intensity throughout the 30-minute session. (If you need to cool down a little, you’re instructed to fan yourself with your gown.) If you have a dick, you tuck it away from the hot seat to ensure it won’t dip into the water and get hurt (as well as fuck up your fertility).

I decided to go steam with my boyfriend, Bryan, 29, on a Wednesday evening after we completed our long days of work and school. Bryan had never been to a spa before, never waxed and probably never thought he was going to fall in love with someone who constantly insisted on trying new ways of healing. But after sending him a Wikipedia link about vaginal steaming and asking if he wanted to try out the male equivalent, he hit me with a simple, “Sure babe.” I booked our appointments immediately.

“It feels like a fire has been lit under your ass, and your whole bottom gets warm and makes you sweat like crazy,” Bryan says. I certainly can’t refute his description. It was hot as fuck sitting on that throne, but there was something sacred-feeling about the experience, too. “This is a magic room,” the spa’s manager told us at the start of the session, emphasizing that the space was for both hygiene and releasing stress and emotional trauma.

“Doing it with a partner is such a great experience,” Bryan reports. “It feels so intimate to communicate with each other while going through the process together. In a weird way, the steaming really made me relax and be reflective about all of the positive things I appreciate about my life, as well as what I want out of it. The gown they gave us also gave me a feeling of royalty that was fun.”

The royalty thing is no coincidence. Although Gwyneth Paltrow has popularized yoni steaming in recent years, its process was actually formulated for a Chinese emperor. As expected, though, his methodology was a little more rustic, as he sat atop a steaming bowl of herbs while seated on his actual, ruling throne.

Either way, the potential positive side effects are enormous and wide-ranging. For one, mugwort is known to regulate digestion, alleviate stomach discomfort and cure hemorrhoids. It’s also said to reduce muscle tension and inflammation, improve one’s cardiovascular capacity and provide an energy boost. Not to mention, it’s similar to melatonin in its natural ability to induce an extremely restful sleep. And obviously it can steam-clean your ass as well, in preparation for a dick, sex toy or fingers to enter more tidily.

On the esoteric side of things, your ass and vagina are both associated with your root chakra, the lowest of your chakras, which relates to your sensations of groundedness and primal foundation. A blocked root chakra is often the result of time spent in “survival mode” without a sense of having true roots. Thus, healing your root chakra with your partner accesses powerful feelings of bonding and unity. It certainly did for me. Bryan also told me my yoni tasted more watery after the treatment, meaning by receiving oral sex later that night I was actually hydrating him with the tea steam. That’s the new foundation to our love.

I didn’t have hemorrhoids to heal in order to track any instant effects, but Bryan and I both enjoyed the best sleep we’d had in some time that night, waking up bright-eyed and refreshed. Our skin looked great, too, from all that steam. And even if nobody could see it—besides maybe each other—we relished the new day knowing our bottom bits were sparkling clean. Whether it was the presence of all that jade, the sinus-clearing properties of the steam room, the emotional intimacy we felt sitting on those thrones or the clay and quartz rooms we meditated in afterward, it was definitely the best, and most healing, date we’d been on.

So again, I can’t say it enough: “Heal your asshole. Heal yourself. Heal the world.”

Tierney Finster is a contributing writer at MEL. She last wrote about whether or not there will ever be a booze that can get you high.

More Tierney:

• Keeping Up With Dr. Miami
• Ketamine Could Be the New Depression Treatment of Choice
• A Conversation With Conner Habib, the Syrian-American Gay Porn Performer and Radical Philosopher
• The Great Disappearing Act of the ‘Most Downloaded Woman in the World’

‘Genital Steaming’ Is the Hottest Date in Town was originally published in MEL Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ross Hunsinger, the director of food and beverage innovation at True Terpenes, describes himself as a “high-level beverage guy.” He’s a longtime brewer and creator of avant-garde cocktails, with a history of running conceptual bar programs at super-fancy, James Beard–level restaurants such as Aviary in Portland — including figuring out how to work weed into the mix. “I tried to be provocative and definitely toed the line of legality with some of my cocktails pre-legalization,” he says. “Once, I made bitters out of trim leaves, seeds and other parts of the plant. Another time I used a small, smoldering bud of hemp as a table garnish.”

I first met Hunsinger when he was tending bar at a “Cannabis and Caviar” event I attended last month celebrating the launch of High End Creatives, a cannabis consulting firm and creative agency. His bar program was certainly the highlight of the evening. We were at Clark Gable’s 1928 home in the Hollywood Hills, and the moon was nearly full as it shone above Hunsinger’s outdoor setup. He was making lemon drops mixed with True Terpenes (and weed vodka), among other drinks, including a champagne topped off with a different True Terpene offering.

“Terpenes are an oil, but True Terpenes has worked them into a water-soluble format that works incredibly well in cocktails,” he explains. “Our terpenes function like bitters and are easy to add to literally anything. My big project right now is introducing folks to the ways they can use our water-soluble terpenes in simple cocktails.”

He had me convinced. My lemon drop was one of the prettiest drinks I’d ever been served, even though it was just a basic lemon drop — and that was before he dropped in a voluptuous red flower (not the weed kind) to match my dress. “My personal favorite is the spin on the French 75, which we call French 420, specifically infused with eugenol terpenes, which are known to be immune boosters,” says Valery Sepulveda, the co-founder of High End Creatives, tells me. “We kept this in mind for our guests to help fight off any effects from having one too many!”

“I love designing drinks that people really interact with,” says Hunsinger. “I’m super interested in how people react to things tactically and the feedback I get. I love people to have cool experiences through something I made. If through gaining access to cannabis and these chemicals can be impactful to others in a positive way, I want to be a part of that, because it’s been massively impactful in my life. It might create access to and push the conversation forward in places where it’s not happening at all.”

Speaking of larger and ever-evolving conversations: Even though Constellation Brands, the corporation behind Corona, Svedka and a number of other alcohol lines, is behind the largest investment in any cannabis business in history — investing $4 billion in Canopy Growth, a Canadian, publicly traded cannabis company — the marriage between the booze and industries isn’t exactly what you’d expect. The liquor industry recognizes that Americans are drinking less beer and voting in favor of progressive pot laws at a rapid rate, but by and large, cannabis is entering the alcohol space not in hopes of increasing a consumer’s level of inebriation, but instead, enhancing the flavors consumers get to experience.

“We’ve been sought out by people I never would’ve thought would recognize what we do as a ‘special sauce’ or a lever that they could pull. Huge companies that have insane amounts of money to put toward things like lobbies, meaning major influence,” Hunsinger says, without being able to name names. “They’re seeking us out to push them into the space. I’m super thankful for it, but it does seem counterintuitive sometimes. It’s like, ‘Man, I really thought you guys would’ve been light years ahead of us and would’ve seen this wave coming. Instead, we meet these major players and the first thing they ask us about is our compliance department.”

He continues, “These are companies with huge compliance departments that operate at a huge scale and deal with the feds on a regular basis. Our compliance department is just a couple other guys and myself responding to questions. It’s just strange.”

Terpenes aren’t regulated in the same way as cannabis and aren’t at the forefront of the normalization and legalization conversations, so having major players interested in entering the space could seriously influence future regulation on using these compounds as flavoring, especially amid a culture increasingly interested in natural flavorings as opposed to synthetic ones.

Just to be clear, too, terpenes alone don’t get you high. (They interact with THC and CBD, and together an “entourage effect” is produced, meaning even when the individual compound isn’t psychoactive, it informs the overall effects produced when someone ingests the plant.) That’s why the terpene cocktails Hunsinger made me didn’t give me any effects besides being typically tipsy. That’s also why the Humboldt’s Finest Cannabis Vodka he used in them didn’t differ much from any other fine, small-batch booze.

“It’s similar to gin in that we take a neutral spirit and infuse it with botanicals,” explains Abe Stevens, the founder and distiller of the vodka. “Similar to a compounded gin where they add those botanicals after — instead of during — distillation. We infuse cannabis into our vodka following distillation and use the fresh plant, so it’s not very pungent. As an organic vodka and rum distiller based in Humboldt, I kept getting the same question, ‘You’re from Humboldt County, when are you going to add some local flavor to your vodka?’ We’re federally regulated and use a strain of hemp that provides us the terpenes we need to derive aroma and mild flavor, but none of the psychoactive properties of the THC.”

Thus far, it’s been a hit with the drinking crowd. “Mixologists love having a new tool to work with, with a unique herbal and aromatic quality,” Stevens says. “Humboldt’s Finest won us a double gold medal at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition, which is one of the more prestigious cocktail events. And there’s definitely a lot of consumer interest in the flavor components of using cannabis.”

He cites the new hop-flavored sparkling water by IPA-giant Lagunitas as an example. Hops, like cannabis, contain terpenes, and as Stevens explains to me, cannabis and hops are both part of the same category of plants. So pairing his vodka with this hoppy, bubbly water has become a favorite among a small sect of craft bartenders. That said, he doesn’t expect a psychoactive version of the product to be available anytime soon. “There’s not a mechanism to mix these two drugs together in the same package anytime in the near future,” he says. “I know some bars that use CBD, but even if cannabis eventually becomes legal at the federall level, it’s illegal to mix the two at the state level here in California.” Overall, he adds, “As the industry becomes more regulated, it’s very clear that it’s illegal to mix marijuana and marijuana products.”

As for his weed vodka, Stevens’ colleague, the brand’s California sales manager, Myles Lawrence Briggs, tells me, “We’re using cannabis that’s been grown specifically at a very low level of THC. It’s hemp that’s also used to make clothing. That ensures that our final product is always under the 30 parts per million THC threshold. We’re trying to demonstrate to people there’s a wide-ranging set of possibilities with cannabis besides just smoking or imbibing it and getting stoned. There’s all kinds of cool flavors and a whole universe in the culinary aspect that’s going to be open to us now that wasn’t before, which we’re very excited about.”

In other words, cannabis is about to take up more space in the food-and-beverage industry, but as a natural provider of a variety of flavors, not as something that gets you high. Luckily, you can always bring your own THC-tincture and dose yourself.

Tierney Finster is a contributing writer at MEL. She last wrote about her mornings on “Dopamine Bean.”

More Tierney:

• Keeping Up With Dr. Miami
• Ketamine Could Be the New Depression Treatment of Choice
• A Conversation With Conner Habib, the Syrian-American Gay Porn Performer and Radical Philosopher
• The Great Disappearing Act of the ‘Most Downloaded Woman in the World’

Will There Ever Be a Booze That Gets You High? was originally published in MEL Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m on hold with Paypal to cancel a transaction, answering a dozen automated questions before they connect me to an actual agent. I’m speaking calmly, providing answers in my speaking voice rather than the temper-tantrum tone I normally save for such computer-mediated situations. I sent money to the wrong username. The typo was my fault. Still, I want my money back because somebody else could have this username and transfer the funds to their bank account — and suddenly, my little error would launch an entire investigation in which I’d have complete all sorts of bureaucratic bullshit. Somehow, though, I’m taking deep breaths and envisioning a helpful agent taking perfect care of me any minute now.

It probably helps — and is obviously worth noting — that I’m also high on macuna pruriens (aka dopamine bean).

For the uninitiated (which is pretty much everyone), Macuna pruriens is a legume that grows on trees, indigenous to Africa and Southern Asia. The basic idea is that it contains an immediate precursor to dopamine, a neurotransmitter in our brain called l-dopa that boosts our moods and improves our sleep. Studies also have shown it to reduce stress, increase testosterone and improve the semen quality of infertile men.

I’ve been taking macuna pruriens for a week. I became curious after a friend mentioned she’d incorporated them into her own wellness routine. “I take it about two or three times a week via smoothie,” she said. “If something is natural and people say it’s going to help lift my spirits, my thinking is ‘Why not just try it?’ I take medication specifically for depression, so why not supplement it?”

Another friend told me she began taking macuna pruriens after a healer recommended them to her: “The results were almost immediate. A lot of it could have been general excitement about being on a regimen to help my mood, focus and sad-induced weight gain. My brain had been so foggy, and I was having a hard time finding any motivation for anything. A lot of that changed after I started the regimen. I had more energy, was more focused and making better choices about what I put into my body. I guess I didn’t realize how down I was until I noticed how much more up I felt afterward.”

All sold out at Erewhon, the boutique health food store in L.A. that makes Whole Foods look pedestrian, I went to Moon Juice to purchase its variety of macuna prurien powder, which it hilariously and falsely describe as tasting like “caramel.” Moon Juice is the brainchild of Amanda Chantal Bacon, who throws macuna pruriens into pretty much everything, especially mood-boosting tonics and mylks (the appropriate way to spell diary-less milks). Moon Juice is a boutique juice, snack and supplement chain that, in terms of organic eateries/juice bars/boutiques, is at the fully Goop end of the spectrum.

The macuna happened to be on sale, so I got a few bucks off its typical cost of $36 for 1.3 ounces. (The cashier told me a lot of her customers begin taking it when getting off of Zoloft.) After dosing my coffee with a splash of the brown powder, along with Moon Juice’s “spirit dust,” which was recommended as a companion supplement, I begin searching for other supplementheads on Reddit, because if perusing Reddit has taught me anything, it’s that men love nootropics, which they lovingly refer to as “noots” while biohacking their health and performance.

Sure enough, macuna pruriens proved to be a hot topic. One thread is about macuna pruriens as part of the ayurvedic nootropic lifestyle. (Ayurveda is a holistic medical approach ancient to India, which is where many of the popular brands like Sun Potion source their beans). Another is titled “Mucuna Pruriens (L-Dopa) Makes Me Feel So Good That It’s Scary,” in which after taking mucuna, the user describes feeling “back to normal like how I felt when I was 14 years old again. I’ve been living in a daze the past 7 years it seems.”

Of course, within Reddit’s nootropic community, users aren’t always dealing with depression but looking for ways to improve their own performance. After all, macuna is sold in healthfood stores as “a neurotransmitter that ignites the brain’s pleasure centers” — hence the nickname, “dopamine bean.” “A lot of people think of dopamine as a neurochemical reward, but it’s really the attention to reward-related cues and the anticipation of engaging motor activity toward that end. Like you want something, you see something, you move toward it. You go from distal, to proximal, to interactive. Dopamine is really involved in that anticipation of engaging motor activity toward the reward,” neurobiologist Jim Pfaus once explained to me.

Dopamine is involved in lots of other bodily processes too, which might be why I vomited a few hours after first trying it. In fairness, that also could have been because I took too much of it. Regarding serving size, Moon Juice suggests “1/2 teaspoon (2 grams) to water or tea!” and adds that it’s an “excellent addition to milk potions, elixirs, smoothies, raw treats, busy schedules, soup and everything!” Scared after my initial negative reaction, however, I’ve kept it down to a quarter of a teaspoon (or about half the recommended dosage).

Online, there’s a ton of debate about how much — and how often — you should take mucuna pruriens. I blame it on bodybuilders who experimented with super high concentrations in in the 1990s. “The theory is that taking this supplement increases levels of dopamine, which then translates into the behavioral benefits,” says Dr. Jamin Brahmbhatt, MEL’s go-to urologist. “In the case of fertility, there are three studies that have shown an improvement in semen parameters by reducing the effects of stress on the testical and production of sperm. The dose used in this study was five grams daily.”

Fertility expert Dr. Brian Levine, the founding partner and practice director of CCRM New York adds, “As a Western-trained physician, my experience with mucuna pruriens is limited. In fact, I’m neither trained nor familiar with its preparation or use. That said, any agent that can help reduce stress can improve semen parameters. It’s been known for more than 20 years that there’s a profound inverse relationship between semen quality and specific aspects of psychological stress. As such, it doesn’t surprise me that the administration of mucuna pruriens in a subset of infertile men has helped improve their reproductive potential.”

Nonetheless, while many medical traditions have found mucuna pruriens helpful throughout the years, Western science doesn’t consider the bean to be as sound of an elixir for mood disorders as it has other conditions (e.g., Parkinson’s), where there’s an actual lack of dopamine receptors. In other words, while people such as myself may like the sound of increasing our dopamine levels, it doesn’t mean we’ve actually had our dopamine levels tested to know they are, in fact, low.

If anything, there’s a potential risk in experimenting with your brain chemistry without the supervision of some kind of medical professiona — be it your regular physician or a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioner. Speaking of risk, studies have shown mucuna pruriens may actually increase risk-taking behavior. Case in point: This study explores how many people who treated their Parkinson’s with drugs containing mucuna pruriens became compulsive gamblers. “Degeneration of the dopaminergic system in Parkinson’s disease and longstanding exposure to dopaminergic drugs may cause reward system malfunction,” it reports. “This may manifest as addiction to l-dopa and behavioral disturbances associated with the impulse control system. These disturbances include: gambling, excessive spending, hypersexuality and binge eating.”

For the sake of transparency, I’ll admit that after taking macuna pruriens every morning for a few days, all of my blissful productivity took a high-spirited turn. I wound up at two strip clubs in the same night, spending all the money I’d been paid in cash after a recent job. So yes, while experimenting with macuna, I spent excessively, broke my “Sober September” no drinking pledge, got all horned up at two different exotic establishments and ate a lot of pizza.

But hey, I was really, really happy the whole time.

Tierney Finster is a contributing writer at MEL. She last wrote about how weed is the one vice that Sin City hates.

More Tierney:

• Keeping Up With Dr. Miami
• Ketamine Could Be the New Depression Treatment of Choice
• A Conversation With Conner Habib, the Syrian-American Gay Porn Performer and Radical Philosopher
• That’s My Fetish: Cakesitting
• The Great Disappearing Act of the ‘Most Downloaded Woman in the World’

My Mornings on ‘Dopamine Bean’ was originally published in MEL Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Even though local laws prevent states from advertising their marijuana offerings to potential visitors from states without recreational marijuana policies, more and more people are flocking to them to enjoy a vacation with all the protections (and consumer options) adult-use weed laws allow. That is, while nascent, weed tourism is becoming a thing. In particular, people working in the industry and search engine analytics both report increased interest in marijuana-friendly activities, lodging and transportation in Colorado, Washington and California (states, of course, where recreational weed is legal).

However, there is one state — well, one city rather — that refuses to let weed tourism alter its well-oiled hospitality machine: Las Vegas. Despite the ubiquity of alcohol, tobacco, sex work and trans-fat-laden buffets, weed is the one sin that Sin City won’t allow (even though it’s probably the least wicked of them all). Cannabis became legal for adults in Nevada in 2017, a full year before a similar recreational law became effective in California, but Vegas specifically has yet to leave its 420-unfriendly disposition behind. That’s not say people aren’t buying legal weed in Las Vegas. In fact, cannabis sales there have averaged a million dollars a day, outpacing other cities; the problem is there really isn’t anywhere for tourists to smoke it.

Worse yet, the city has a long reputation of arresting people for trace amounts of weed. Even Paris Hilton’s arrest for cocaine possession in Vegas in 2010 was the result of officers first seeing a small amount of marijuana smoke emanate from her Escalade. “They find you with a nug and they got you locked up for six months,” my own stoner father tells me. But now that tourists of age can purchase weed on the Strip, as well as enjoy a 24-hour dispensary — the aptly named Oasis — Sin City’s current prohibitionist weed policies at its hotels and major attractions are beginning to make less and less sense.

Basically, weed can only be legally consumed in a private residence or a residence in which the owner gives you explicit permission, which, right now, none of the hotels on the Strip will do — even The Cosmopolitan, which is branded as the strip’s most youthful, sexy and glamorous hotel. “Possession and consumption of marijuana remains illegal under U.S. federal law. As such, guests aren’t permitted to possess or consume marijuana in any form for medicinal or recreational use at The Cosmopolitan,” its communications manager writes to me via a brief, yet definitely conclusive email.

In other words, The Cosmopolitan, like many others, are waiting for the federal government to make the first move.

For some more insight into the weed tourism business overall and why the Vegas’ biggest players seem so reluctant to add weed to their menu of sinful options, I talked to Mike Eymer, the founder and CEO of Colorado Cannabis Tours. Eymer led his company’s first tour in Colorado by himself in a stretch Chrysler. Focusing on the horticulture of marijuana, Emyer brought a whopping four tourists to check out industrial grows on a tour that was among the first of its kind back in 2014. A green thumb himself, he assumed the grow-tour would be the heart and soul of his business, but he quickly realized that Colorado tourists preferred more social cannabis experiences — a la party buses and group activities, where they could meet new weed enthusiast friends.

Today, his Colorado tours regularly fill 34-seat Tiffany Limo buses, often two at a time, and get tourists more lifted than the Rocky Mountains. He offers similar services in Washington and California as well as in Boston and Washington D.C. In all, he says, “Our company has touched between 150,000 and 200,000 people since our company’s launch in 2014.”

The situation in Vegas seems different than in cities such as L.A., Oakland and Seattle, where the cultures were already pretty progressive about cannabis use. Have the major hotels and nightclubs there become any more flexible about weed?
I can tell you a story about being at a Mandalay Bay pool party last year. This was while we were still running our Puff, Pass and Paint program in Vegas, a cannabis-inclusive art class we launched in Denver in 2014 and currently have going in a few different cities. I was there with my business partner Heidi Keyes and the instructor who taught the class in Vegas. We’d been invited as guests because they wanted to talk to us about what we were doing and how we could help drive tourism to their establishment.

We were out by the pool, and soon enough, security stops this instructor for having a vape pen. He explains to them that it’s a CBD vape pen and how it isn’t illegal and that it doesn’t get you high like marijuana. But they don’t give him two seconds. They did the whole Vegas thing where they muscled him out — they grabbed him, escorted him off the property and banned him from the Mandalay Bay for a year because of the CBD pen.

Is this why you don’t offer the same range of services in Vegas — e.g., 420-friendly party buses, tours and even airport pick-up — that you do in other cities?
Honestly, most of our Vegas offerings aren’t active right now. I’d say our main hubs right now are Denver, San Francisco and L.A. Vegas should be on that list. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be there. We anticipated it would be and went there early, even before we went to California. But you know, Vegas plays by its own rules. This story isn’t as much about what’s happening in Vegas as much as it is about what’s not happening. The City of Las Vegas started issuing people cease-and-desist orders and wrote a letter to most of the companies providing cannabis services there, besides the dispensaries, and told them to shut down. We left before we received one.

The only real part of our business in Vegas at the moment is our lodging options, all of which are condos. You can have an Airbnb within the City of Las Vegas, but not in unincorporated Clark County. You can set your own policy in the Airbnbs, and that’s where a 420-friendly accommodation can be worked out. We normally work toward offering hotels, but the condos are the best way to keep our business going while we’re trying to get that.

Colorado was easier for us. It was the dawn of legalization when we started talking to these hotels. We started with bed and breakfasts, and then, within the first six or seven months, we added large, nationally known hotels. They adjusted to the legislative change quickly and started to form policies with us. The big guys in Vegas will eventually adjust, but we aren’t as concerned about the hotels there as we are about getting our tourism activities back online. We get far more interest for activities than we do for hotels. Overall, Vegas is a teeny, tiny market because its laws don’t allow for social consumption.

Why isn’t Las Vegas at the forefront of social consumption laws?
The problem with Vegas is that it’s built on hospitality, whereas other jurisdictions are just happy to take the additional tourist dollars. You imagine Vegas would be happy to take those, too, but it’s a work in progress. There’s also more work to get tours online in Vegas than in other cities. We have to deal with the Public Utility Commission, which is stricter because of how big the limousine business is there.

There are good people out there, including senators, who want to work with us to make this happen though. In the next couple months, we’ll be bringing over a specialized limousine party bus that’s been designed specifically for cannabis tours — the first of its kind, in fact — to show regulators. It’s basically to say, “This is what we’re recommending as regulations for these vehicles moving forward. Take a look, and let’s start talking about how we incorporate this into the law.”

Do you think then that social consumption laws will change in Vegas quickly?
Quickly? No. Vegas is moving very slowly, and a lot of things on the social consumption front have been moving slowly all over. We don’t really have clarity about social consumption here in Denver, even five years later. We’re attempting to establish that clarity now through a lawsuit we’re taking against the City of Denver. We hope that that lawsuit will determine our social consumption policy. Social consumption is the hottest button in cannabis right now. We’re at the tip of the iceberg because nobody has passed true social consumption laws yet. For us, the future is basically helping to shape what those regulations look like.

We’re in the midst of talking to some of our competitors to form a larger company and use that funding to shape the laws as they need to be shaped, specifically in markets like Vegas. That should be exciting. Dealing with these legislative issues has brought us a lot closer to our competing companies. Our adversary is the same adversary cannabis has always had — the government. They’re not our friend. We got legalization through constitutional amendments brought by the people. But once the government gets their hands on it, they fuck it up.

Tierney Finster is a contributing writer at MEL. She last wrote about how there’s a surprising amount of mushroom-shaped sex toys.

More Tierney:

• Keeping Up With Dr. Miami
• Ketamine Could Be the New Depression Treatment of Choice
• A Conversation With Conner Habib, the Syrian-American Gay Porn Performer and Radical Philosopher
• That’s My Fetish: Cakesitting
• The Great Disappearing Act of the ‘Most Downloaded Woman in the World’

Weed Is the One Vice That Sin City Hates was originally published in MEL Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Here’s the thing about mushroom cocks — like the one purportedly belonging to the president, at least per Stormy Daniels and her incredible Toad pwn yesterday: Some people (though not Daniels, obviously) think they’re really hot.

So hot, in fact, mushroom-topped and mushroom-shaped sex toys are a staple in any adult product line — from dildos to butt plugs to cock rings. That’s right. Fungi dick lovers enjoy the shape so much that they pay for plastic or silicone molds of it. For instance, Doc Johnson’s 10.5-inch Giant Cock, “a hulk size dong with a fat mushroom head and smooth shaft” that, according to the Doc Johnson website, is “a size queen’s wet dream.” Meanwhile, another Doc Johnson product, The Mystical Mushroom C-Ring, speaks more to the psilocybin crowd: “You will fall in love with the Magic Mushroom cock ring for its regal look, storybook design and curvy cap at the tip that was made for pleasure. Take the fantasy with you.” (All that fantasy and love comes — yes, pun intended — courtesy of the cock ring’s mushroom cap tip, which presses up against your partner’s clitoris while you fuck.)

Given everything above — and, of course, Daniels’ recent comments about the presidential member — I consulted the good folks at Doc Johnson, aka the “First Family of Dildos” and the largest sex-toy manufacturer in the country. In particular, I spent a few minutes on the phone with their longtime chief product designer Anjani Siddhartha about the ubiquity and appeal of mushroom-shaped sex toys. Here’s what she told me:

“A big part of my job is research. I spend a lot of time reading things online, interviewing people and going to trade shows and conventions. I also do a lot of research on shapes, especially penis shape. The mushroom shape is very common in real life. A lot of men relate to that shape. That’s why it’s not surprising to see so many models of them in sex toys.

“People particularly love this type of penis shape when performing oral sex. They like the way their lips fit around the mushroom head or the way their tongue feels moving around it. Most people don’t prefer it for penetration — at least in my unscientific research — because it’s so wide. So even though mushroom-shaped toys are very common, I’m more frequently asked to design models with leaner heads. Most people newly experimenting with toys for penetration want something more pointy, because it’s easier to get inside compared to the wider mushroom shape.

“That said, the people who want larger mushroom-shaped products are into them because once they’re inside of you, their shape provides a little more sensation. Generally speaking, in the last few years, we’ve seen the market shift and demand larger and larger products. For example, we used to make double-penetration products, but now I’m making triple-penetration products. Some of our products are as thick as beer cans now.”

Don’t be surprised then if the next mushroom-shaped sex toy is modeled after the armillaria ostoyae, or as it’s more commonly known — the Humongous Fungus.

Tierney Finster is a contributing writer at MEL. She last wrote about erectile dysfunction, depression and everything else men are using hypnotherapy for.

More Tierney:

• Keeping Up With Dr. Miami
• Ketamine Could Be the New Depression Treatment of Choice
• A Conversation With Conner Habib, the Syrian-American Gay Porn Performer and Radical Philosopher
• That’s My Fetish: Cakesitting
• The Great Disappearing Act of the ‘Most Downloaded Woman in the World’

There’s a Surprising Amount of Mushroom-Shaped Sex Toys was originally published in MEL Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Remember the hypnotherapy scene in Good Will Hunting? Although the movie is a serious conduit for many of man’s emotions, Will can’t take the idea of hypnosis seriously and supplies his therapist with bullshit responses to the scenarios he proposes instead of letting him in.

IRL, though — or at least IRL in 2018, admittedly 20-plus years since Will Hunting essentially told his hypnotherapist to go fuck himself — the male embrace of hynotherapy is growing (if only with a certain type of male). “My male clients are the sensitive boys of the world, usually in their 30s and 40s,” says Andrea Iya Young, a Canadian hypnotherapist who conducts sessions both in person and on FaceTime, Skype, etc. (She describes her practice as a mix of hypnosis, hypnotherapy and career coaching.) “They’re band boys, painters and healers who are open and curious about self-work. A lot of them are sick of complying with certain stories about how men should act and what roles they should serve in the world. I’m getting more and more men who want to focus their sessions on how to take up space in a gentler way, how to not take up as much space and how to better respect their partners.”

Moreover: “I have patients who come in for erectile dysfunction, and we end up talking about the real nature of their intentions within that relationship, which they may have never done before with their partner. I have patients who practice polyamory but are struggling to integrate their ideological values into their own emotional lives and feel destabilized,” Young continues. “A lot of times in hypnosis, we go back to the traumas at the root of what they’re currently experiencing. Maybe they were humiliated for not being man enough as a tween, or had an emotionally challenging sexual experience as a child or teen. We go back and re-experience those memories through regression therapy and try to restore the innocence that was bruised by a traumatic experience.”

To hear it from men themselves, I spoke to two guys Young has treated about their experiences under hypnosis, and whether or not they fall on the Will Hunting or “sensitive boy” side of the spectrum when it comes to believing that hypnotherapy can help heal what ails them.

Eric Digras, Massage Therapist

Some people are more resistant to the process than I was because they’re worried a hypnotist will get in their brain, scramble things up and make them do things against their will. But I find hypnosis very interesting. I’d done behavior therapy, like normal shrink stuff and found it helpful. Typically, when you go see a psychologist or behavioral therapist, you intellectualize your problems, which is great — you get to see yourself in a bigger picture.

However, that remains an intellectualization of who you are. If the intellectual realm is the surface of the water, then with hypnosis, you go diving into it — straight into the subconscious. During hypnosis, you’re dealing with more of a mythological landscape within yourself rather than that literal, intellectual layer. You go deep right away. You’re changing things more directly rather than letting those things trickle down and slowly change your consciousness via the intellectual route. And so, when you come out of it, you feel like something has switched right away.

Some people come in with objectives as specific as quitting smoking, but for me, it wasn’t like that. It was more about dealing with some aspect of myself that was bothering me. At the start of a session, you’re talking, trying to figure out exactly why you’re there and what you want to do before you get into the hypnotism process. I mean, she doesn’t dangle a watch in front of your face or anything — you become hypnotized just through listening to her voice. You’re usually sitting in a chair, because if you’re laying down, you’re likely to fall asleep. You kind of just succumb. You go off on your journey — whatever that may be.

If someone is feeling frustrated and can’t seem to find a solution to their problem or a type of therapy that resonates with them, I’d definitely recommend hypnotherapy. I know a lot of people think it’s bullshit, because we’re used to people making people bark like dogs on stage and stuff, but it’s actually a viable healing modality that’s been around for a long time.

Sam Walker, New Media and VR Artist

I’ve only had one hypnosis session so far, but I really enjoyed it. I’d done therapy before. I studied psychology at university and had access to some free psychotherapy. I thought it was constructive and interesting, but just sort of stopped doing it.

Andrea, however, was interested in my work in VR, and I asked her to do some voiceover. I was looking into the whole idea of the voice and the idea of narration being a conduit toward a deeper consciousness. Still, I didn’t necessarily think of hypnotherapy as an example. When I started talking to Andrea, though, naturally I was interested in trying it. I wouldn’t call it depression, but I had some life stuff going on and I wanted to explore my own personal development as a person. Basically, I was curious about looking into what was making me feel sad.

I went into the session as deeply available as possible. I remembered in the past, when a psychotherapist told me, “We’re going to do a little role play.” I was like, “Oh, fuck. This is going to be stupid. I don’t know if I can do this.” But I realized that role play is a powerful thing. Everybody loves to role play for a reason. We just tap into it super quickly as humans. It’s the same reason why we like movies and books and stuff.

More largely, psychotherapy is like a discussion; hypnotherapy feels more like a narrative. At the beginning of a session, a hypnotist will count you down. When I did it with Andrea, she says that you’re going deeper and deeper and deeper as she counts down. In that way, hypnotherapy felt like more of a connection with metaphor. Andrea uses a lot of mythology and imagery. For me, that has a way of helping me approach a subject that might be hurtful in a way that feels safe. There’s a video game aspect to the experience. It’s that whole idea of entering into a situation in third person and seeing it from the outside. It’s a virtual storytelling thing.

I went into the session hoping to address my artist’s block, but there were some underlying issues going on that I was more hesitant to get into. Objectively, my aim was increasing my productivity, but it quickly became about more than that. I meditate when I require it — or at least when I remember to — usually in moments of crisis or mourning. But I took away some tangible exercises involving visualization and breathing from my hypnosis. For example, whenever I feel like I have a creative blockage because of my own doubt or fear, I visualize something that I went through in the therapy session that allowed me to reframe the way I look at that doubt and/or fear — especially in regards to regressing to an earlier childhood.

She made me feel like I was a child watching myself in the third person and now I can act like a guardian to my child self. She told me to tell my eight-year-old self things were going to be okay and not to freak out. In that moment, I felt like I was encountering my own essential self. It was really powerful.

Tierney Finster is a contributing writer at MEL. She last wrote about how she strapped herself into a compression suit for an afternoon of “lymphatic drainage.”

More Tierney:

• Keeping Up With Dr. Miami
• Ketamine Could Be the New Depression Treatment of Choice
• A Conversation With Conner Habib, the Syrian-American Gay Porn Performer and Radical Philosopher
• That’s My Fetish: Cakesitting
• The Great Disappearing Act of the ‘Most Downloaded Woman in the World’

Erectile Dysfunction, Depression and Everything Else Men Are Using Hypnotherapy For was originally published in MEL Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m sitting in the chillingly air-conditioned SaunaBar, a semi-New Age spa concept in L.A., checking off boxes on an intake form as to why I’ve elected to have a lymphatic massage. I opt for “stress relief,” “detoxification” and “increased bone density.” The latter I’m particularly interested in as I broke my right leg pretty badly a couple of years ago and equate the severity of the injury with how weak my bone was. (SaunaBar’s lymphatic massage promise: “[To] reduce the appearance of cellulite, slim down by eliminating water retention and enhance detoxification.”)

Aesthetically, SaunaBar is a cross between the 1999 Disney Channel original movie Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century and a cozy grandma-style cafe gift shop in its assortment of creams, vitamins and other beauty and wellness products — with a dash of tanning-salon vibes thrown in. Given this unexpected trifecta, I feel very much at home as I read about hydrogen-infused water and food-sensitivity programs while waiting for SaunaBar founder Joseph Harounian.

Most captivatingly, I watch a fiftysomething woman stand on a jiggling platform as she holds on to its handles. The platform isn’t springy or anything like that. Nor is it rocking like a roller coaster, wave machine or even a Stairmaster. Its vibrations are faint, and the lady standing on its scale-like structure is calm, though pulsating a bit while staring at herself in the mirror. This is a procedure called “whole body vibration” that supposedly burns calories without any major exertion or fatigue.

Harounian is a petite man with glowing skin who opened SaunaBar more than a decade ago as a spa and weight loss center. In terms of his own personal regimen, he receives at least three lymphatic compression massages a week, following them up with time in one of SaunaBar’s sauna pods, which are lined with jade stones and contain pouches large enough to hold a human. The “compression” aspect of the lymphatic massage means that instead of a human massage therapist administering the bodywork, SaunaBar clients like myself lay on a massage table and get strapped into a multi-piece compression suit. Think of it like having compression socks all over your body.

“The lymphatic system is comprised of tissues and organs — vessels, ducts, lymph nodes, the spleen, the thymus, the adenoids and the tonsils — that help to store, produce and carry white blood cells also known as lymphocytes,” MEL’s resident holistic esthetician Andrea Amez explains to me before my trip to SaunaBar. “In other words, our lymphatic system is integral to helping our bodies fight bacteria and infection. It’s our body’s filtration system, plain and simple. If the lymph or white blood cells don’t flow freely, the waste and toxins build up, causing a severely weakened immune system and health complications.”

Basically, if your lymphs aren’t working properly and this liquid fails to filtrate properly, it congeals until it becomes thick, creamy and gross. This means toxic cells, which could potentially include cancer cells, get stuck in your body because it doesn’t have a pump to loosen that stuff up. Amez says bloating, dry skin, acne breakouts, fatigue, water retention, chronic colds and sore throats and cellulite are all possible signs of lymphatic congestion. Same for stiffness, brain fog, “sluggish bowel function” and shoulder pain.

Hence, a lymphatic massage. It essentially forces all that nasty shit from your lymphs, and in theory at least, cuts off at the pass all that bloating, dry skin, acne breakouts, fatigue, water retention, chronic colds and sore thoats, cellulite, stiffness, brain fog, shoulder pain and sluggish bowel funciton — and anything else anyone ever has said blockage in your lymphs is to blame for.

According to Harounian, lymphatic massage is nothing new, but that interest in the procedure, which is SaunaBar’s most popular offering save for the actual saunas, has grown considerably due to the prevalence of influencers, especially those in the wellness space, talking about massaging and draining their lymphatic systems (#LymphaticDrainage). (There are also, he offers, more low-tech ways jar loose the crap in your lymphs — from those foam rollers at the gym, to dry body brushes, to trampolines.)

Instagram is definitely what brought me to SaunaBar. I wanted to treat my lymphs because after a few years without any biology classes, I’d completely forgotten what my lymphs even did. All I knew is that many women are opting for lymphatic massages — both for their bodies and faces — as part of their beauty routine.

Wearing socks, pants and a loose T-shirt per SaunaBar’s instructions, Harounian encourages me to lay strapped into my compression garments and massage table for the full 35-minute session recommended for first-timers (retail price — roughly $70). “It may feel a little claustrophobic at first,” my attendant warns me once in the room.

“Great,” I gulp.

The room’s lavender aromatherapy relaxes me a bit as the pulsating massage begins. I feel like I’m strapped into one giant blood-pressure sleeve, but instead of crushing my entire body at once, it treats me body part by body part — from my ankles, to my feet and lower legs, to my thighs, hips and stomach. (The upper body isn’t part of the standard procedure.) At first, the intense compression bothers me, but it’s never exactly painful. My thighs hurt the most, which makes sense given that they’re thicker than the other parts of my leg. I feel the most relief in my sacrum area, the lowest part of my spine, and hips, where most people — but especially those of us with uteruses — carry a lot of stress.

Going in, I was aware I was a little depressed and agitated. Mostly because I’d abandoned meditating for a couple months, and aside from some peaceful ocean swims, I’d also avoided spending quiet time with myself to simply release and surrender to the circumstances of my life. In short, I was all yang and no yin, which was harming my mood. But as I lay strapped into this weird, velcro-lined compression space suit, I feel physically restricted in the most soothing way — kinda like being tucked into bed as a child or tied to a bedpost as a consenting adult. I’m not claiming a single lymphatic massage will transform my mental health in the long run, but it definitely does in the moment (which is all we should worry about if we’re really living in the present, right?)

Aside from relaxation, my favorite part of the treatment is that the remaining scar tissue from my broken leg now appears to be considerably less prominent. It went from a mountain on my shin to a hardly perceivable hill. (That’s probably why it’s highly recommended for those who have undergone plastic surgery, particularly liposuction and tummy tucks; conversely, those with lymphatic disorders, such as lymphedema, are recommended to receive such massages in hopes of avoiding surgery on the lymph nodes.)

“Look at you, you’re glowing,” Harounian says after my treatment.

I appreciate the sentiment as much as the treatment. Admittedly, though, it’s hard to tell if he’s right or not — though the compression massage did increase my circulation, so I guess I could look noticeably rejuvenated compared to when I arrived. Either way, again, I’m just trying to stay in the moment. And at the moment, I’m very interested in unclogging my lymphs much more frequently.

Tierney Finster is a contributing writer at MEL. She last wrote about how much time you should spend with your significant other.

More Tierney:

• Keeping Up With Dr. Miami
• Ketamine Could Be the New Depression Treatment of Choice
• A Conversation With Conner Habib, the Syrian-American Gay Porn Performer and Radical Philosopher
• That’s My Fetish: Cakesitting
• The Great Disappearing Act of the ‘Most Downloaded Woman in the World’

I Strapped Myself Into A Compression Suit For An Afternoon of ‘Lymphatic Drainage’ was originally published in MEL Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.