Secret Medical Marijuana Community Thriving in Central Florida

Just up the road from Cassadega, Florida, “Psychic Capital of the World,” there exists a tiny little community of septuagenerians who are defying Florida law in order to make their lives more tolerable.

“Hemp Hollow” is what the residents there affectionately call their little hamlet. You won’t find it on any map, and unless you are one of “them,” you would never even know it exists. But every day, the smell of brownies fills the air as 70+ year old grandmothers spend their mornings cleaning marijuana buds and incorporating them into some of the best baked goodies you’ve ever had.

Lola Lipshitz, (not her real name) a transplant from Long Island, New York, has been living in Hemp Hollow for close to two years now and says if it weren’t for her finding the place, she’d most likely be living, in her words, “a crappy existence in one of those state-run assisted living facilities playing bingo every Wednesday night and eating beanie-weenies out of a can.”

Lipshitz, together with her life partner Wanda Wolfshitz (not her real name either) founded the colony of elderly potheads after they visited Lola’s daughter in San Francisco and found a doctor who would prescribe medicinal marijuana for their various ailments.

“I had a bad case of the shingles,” said Lola, “and my daughter took me to a doctor who told me point blank, “you need pot, honey.” At first, Lola said she was dead set against it, but with a little coaxing, she ate her first pot brownie and from there it was like a whole new world opened up for her.

Lola and Wanda grow their own medicinal marijuana in a large storage shed that stands in the middle of a wooded area out back of their home. “Fortunately, we live quite a ways away from an incorporated area. We grow prize roses,” said Lola, “and, so far, we’ve been lucky. Everyone thinks that’s why we have all that fertilizer and potting soil.”

Wanda says they don’t know what they’d do if either of them got caught, “cause we have about ten of our neighbors who are counting on us for those brownies.” But both agree that living on the edge being “ganja grannies” as those who know them have so dubbed them, is way better than bingo, beanie-weanies and bedsores any day.