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Snoop Lion Eats BBQ, Smokes Weed With GQ Writer
When in the presence of Snoop Dogg, one imagines that it's easy to get caught up in his aura of coolness and relaxed weed-smoking. Snoop, one might suppose, affects everyone around him.
And indeed, in a recent interview with GQ, Snoop put writer Drew Magary under his spell. Magary met Lion at Baby Blue's BBQ in West Hollywood, and was immediately enchanted:
He arrives at Baby Blues with just a single bodyguard, whom he sheds before slipping alone into our reserved room at the back of the restaurant...And while his entrance is modest, his presence is not. Snoop has a tremendous ease about his own coolness, as if he long ago got used to being much cooler than everyone else he meets and is now cool with it.
From there, Magary tags along with Snoop to Alternative Herbal Health Services, located at Santa Monica Blvd. and Orange Grove Ave. The shop has been open since 2004, and according to Magary, Snoop has known its owner, Doctor Dina, for years.
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Magary describes the area on Santa Monica Blvd. as being all weed, all the time:
...this small stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard is a hot spot for California's kinda-legal medicinal-pot industry. Weed is in the air everywhere you go around here, wafting from the head shops and Russian dispensaries with their neon green crosses alight in the front windows. It's the scent of industry here, like chocolate factories in Hershey, Pennsylvania, or paper mills in inland Maine.
Maybe a bit of an overstatement, but OK, we'll take it. The writer and the rap-turned-reggae star then make their way through AHHS, stopping to finger some buds and take a look at new plants that Dina is growing. They also meet store employee Rachel, who entertains by doing a handstand and a booty bounce out of nowhere.
The pinnacle of the piece, though, might be when Snoop explains his plans to read a children's book about marijuana to his pee-wee football team:
Snoop tells me he's thinking of reading a book called It's Just a Plant: A Children's Story of Marijuana, to the 8- and 9-year-olds on the peewee football team he coaches. "Believe it or not," he says, "they need to know." (The book is about a little girl whose parents teach her about the awesomeness of weed. "This is a joint," her father tells her. "It's made of marijuana." It's a surprisingly long book. If you read it in Marijuana Time, it takes eight years.)
At any rate, by the end of the piece, Magary is high, Snoop is high, Dina is high and Rachel is high and everyone has had a lovely time eating and smoking their way through WeHo.
Which, when all is said and done, isn't a bad way to experience the city.
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