Vancouver pizza joint lets you have your pot and eat it, too

Decisions, decisions. Do you top your pizza with pineapple, mushrooms, chorizo — or marijuana? @

At Vancouver's Mega iLL restaurant, pot on your pizza is an actual topping option. Fork over an additional $10, show your medical marijuana card — and hand over some of your medically-prescribed pot — and the cooks will transform your favourite pie into something "medicinal."

(Don't most of us self-medicate with pizza anyway?)

The marijuana is either sprinkled on top of the pizza before baking, or infused in oil and drizzled over the pizza.

Also see: More info about marijuana in Canada

"Basically we infuse it through an oil extraction process, where we drizzle the oil onto the pizza and it medicates you when you eat it," employee Anthony Risling, who uses cannabis for pain management, tells CBC News. "It's a little different effect from smoking it. It takes maybe about a half hour for it to activate."

The Toronto Star reports that only the person with the prescription can eat the marijuana-added pizza — no, you can't order an extra large to "share" — and Mega iLL's delivery service only applies to pizzas without pot.

But does it taste weird?

Apparently not.

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One customer tells CBC News that the marijuana oil adds "a little bit of a tangy flavour," but otherwise doesn't affect the taste.

Mark Klokeid, who co-owns Mega iLL with Rocky Tolfree, battled Stage IV cancer 10 years ago. He tells the Vancouver Sun that cannabis helped him get through chemotherapy, a bone marrow transplant and problems with Type 1 diabetes.

"(My daughter) was definitely an inspiration for me to want to live," he says. "Cannabis has been shown to shrink tumours and cancer cells in multiple studies. I had cancer in the bone marrow, and tumours in the neck and head."

He continues to take 20 grams of prescribed cannabis a day — his only pain medication, he says.

Tolfree is also a cancer survivor.

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The restaurant owners consider themselves activists, trying to legalize marijuana and better inform and educate people about its benefits.

"We have federal patients here in Canada like myself," Klokeid tells the Toronto Star. "Where are we supposed to medicate?"

The restaurant, which was initially inspired by a pizzeria in Cambodia called Happy Place, which adds THC to its pies, is an "18-plus environment" and doesn't serve alcohol.

"We don't serve alcohol. Even recreationally, I think it's a better alternative," he tells the Los Angeles Times.

Even with pot on the menu, Klokeid says that about 98 per cent of his pizzas are "not medicated."

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"We really do have an awesome pizza outside of the weed thing," he insists.

"I've worked in the service industry for many years but people who come here are like none other. There's such unity and it's so peaceful. People take their masks off. They come in and feel right away like they're home. It's that kind of vibe," says Mega iLL chef Jesse Sindayen.

Klokeid hopes to eventually expand his "pot-pizzeria" to include a Toronto location.

"We're definitely going to expand," he says. "I really want to do Toronto. I love Toronto."