After 17 years of half-hearted attempts to fit medical marijuana into L.A.’s mainstream economy, the optics of hustle culture still shroud the weed market. In Forefront this week, Zak Stone travels from massive growing operations in suburban shopping centers to the Venice Beach Boardwalk to find out how, and to what extent, medical marijuana will shape the city’s economy.

Sickness is everywhere in Los Angeles. Many people are looking to heal. Three of them are on the boardwalk in Venice Beach. They’ve taken the bus here from UCLA, where they’re freshmen, and they’ve just emerged from an office called The Green Doctors with medical marijuana cards in hand. To get those prescriptions, they’ve paid somewhere between $40 and $250 — depending on how well they negotiated with the medical assistant — for a doctor to briefly examine them and record their complaints about anything from PMS to glaucoma.

Now they look bored as they stand next to a comedian named Eugene Meaux, who is shilling DVDs of his stand-up comedy routine to passersby while coordinating the free shuttle service for a nearby marijuana dispensary called the Beach Side Collective.

The Beach Side Collective is no longer beachside. New zoning rules forbidding collectives from selling weed on Venice’s historic boardwalk pushed it ashore. These days the dispensary buses people directly to its new premises, several blocks inland, the exact moment they walk out the doors of The Green Doctors with pot cards.

“I met an actress and she was looking to just get people to get on the shuttle,” Meaux says, explaining how he got hired. “This is a hustle job for me.” He’s convinced the students — two guys, one girl — to go for a ride.

What did the taller boy get his card for? “Depression, anxiety, insomnia,” three of the more common reasons marijuana gets prescribed. Back pain is the most.

“Ahh, I could’ve said back pain,” his friend realizes.

“But I think if you’re an 18-year-old guy…” the first student replies with a shrug.

Meaux tells them they just give you options. It doesn’t matter which one you pick. Then he notices a man with a Bluetooth headset in his ear a half-block farther down the boardwalk. “Oh, the ride is here.” He corrals the kids and two other shuttle passengers and leads them to the driver. The students follow him toward the street, disappearing from the boardwalk, the crush of tourists and the palm tree-filtered sunset over the Pacific on an October afternoon. If all goes as planned, they’ll board the shuttle, descend at Beach Side and buy weed legally for the first time with immunity under California’s 17-year-old medical marijuana law.

Back at the entrance to Green Doctors, two more touts, dressed in acid-green medical scrubs with a weed leaf and company logos on their shirts, work the boardwalk. “Come on in, guys,” one yells at a pair of bathing suit-clad pedestrians strolling by, arms intertwined. “Couples that blaze together, stay together.” As I watch her work, her colleague briefs me on the ethics of the job. It’s an industry faux pas, for example, for doctor’s offices to direct patients to any one dispensary in particular, which would be anticompetitive. (Meaux is not part of their operation — at least, not officially.) “You give them the options,” he says, “tell them about Weedmaps, THC Finder,” two web start-ups that function as Yelps of the dispensary world.

The missed opportunity to profit off referrals is no big deal. “At the end of the day, it’s not about making money,” he says, with a surfer’s twang. “It’s about helping the patients.”

But everywhere you look in the world of medical marijuana, it’s a little bit of both.

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