Posted: 12/10/13 EST | Updated: 12/10/13 EST
In New York City, The Best Bud Is Just A Phone Call Away
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On a typical weekday afternoon,
Adam would bicycle past rows of Brooklyn brownstones with a half-dozen
plastic, orange pill bottles full of high-quality marijuana in the
pockets of his Carhartt jacket. He’d stop at an apartment building, lock
his metallic 9-speed Bianchi road bike on the sidewalk and call his
client to be buzzed inside.
Adam’s customer, who was always someone who’d been
referred by a friend or a prior client, could examine the 2.5 grams of
fragrant flower clusters before handing Adam $50 in cash. Adam wouldn’t
make much small talk -- on most days he’d have between 10 and 15 more
deliveries to make, meaning he’d often bike upward of 30 miles a day
during a typical nine-hour shift.
For nearly two years throughout 2007 and 2008, Adam
(whose last name has been withheld to protect his identity) delivered
weed for a small, illegal company he and a friend started in New York
City. His territory covered a wide swath of Brooklyn -- from the
neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Bushwick to eastern Bed-Stuy and down to
Park Slope -- and included lower Manhattan, too.
Delivering pot, Adam could make up to $250 a day, tax
free. At his previous job selling car rims, Adam had made about $66 per
day after taxes. So when the opportunity arose to pedal vials of
cannabis around New York City, it was a no-brainer.
“I enjoy smoking weed immensely,” Adam says. “It was
my way of meeting people and getting out and seeing and learning
everything I could about the city. I learned the streets of Brooklyn
like the back of my hand.”
It all started not long after Adam first moved to the
city after majoring in history at a college upstate. “The
gentrification happening in the Williamsburg, Bushwick, Fort Greene
area” during that time had created “an untapped market for selling
weed,” Adam said.
The work was physically taxing, and Adam lost several
bikes to broken wheels and thieves; but he says he loved the job,
particularly getting to interact with New Yorkers.
“I met people from all walks of life connected by
their love of weed. I’d deliver to fancy buildings with doormen in the
West Village and to artists living in brownstones. I got asked out on
dates and invited to dinner parties by my customers -- all kinds of
stuff,” he said.
There are more than a dozen marijuana home delivery
companies currently operating in New York City. There are bigger ones
like Safeway, whose voicemails sound like an actual Safeway supermarket,
and Sour Kush Cafe, which sends its customers alerts via text message
when a courier is nearby. There are also smaller, boutique services like
Fresh Direct, Jackpot, Exotic 420, Brooklyn Organics, Reliable and
Speedy’s Dogwalkers.
Such companies have existed since at least the late 1980s. Despite the dramatic rise in street arrests for marijuana possession in the mid 1990s, spearheaded by Mayor Rudy Giuliani and zealously continued by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the services have proliferated, offering residents a safe and private way to buy pot.
Many of the services, if not all of them, avoid
police infiltration with a simple but apparently effective system in
which new customers must be personally referred by existing clients.
Some services have code words: Customers of one
company must ask if a "rep" is available when they call and specify that
they need help with their "cookies programming" if they want to buy
edibles.
Communication between dispatchers and couriers is
often done using mobile messaging apps that are said to be more
difficult for the police to access.
Many services employ marketing techniques to increase
their customer base, like offering incentives for frequent customers,
customers who buy large quantities or customers who refer their friends
to the service.
Most of New York's cannabis couriers are
knowledgeable about their product in a way that suggests they cater to
buyers who take their pot seriously. Runners typically arrive with at
least three or four different strains of neatly packaged and labeled
bud, and they will explain its qualities like a waiter reciting the
specials at a fancy restaurant.
The weed itself -- usually ultra-potent buds grown
hydroponically or occasionally in outdoor gardens -- comes from
Pennsylvania and New England but also from the West Coast, British
Columbia and Quebec.
Most services carry both indica and sativa weed
varieties, as well as hybrid strains that incorporate qualities from
both, giving consumers a range of choices to suit their tastes.
The difference between indica and sativa, says
Abdullah Saeed, the former host of the Vice series “Weediquette,” is
that sativas “tend to make you feel more active and creative,” whereas
indicas are “nighttime stuff” that “make you feel more introspective and
sedated.”
"Everybody has their own personal preferences for
what works for them," said a wool sweater-clad Saeed, his hair in a
topknot, at the Manhattan loft where he works.
One of the only drawbacks to getting such good pot,
many New Yorkers will tell you, is that a standard “eighth” in the Big
Apple contains only 2.5 grams of pot (an eighth of an ounce of weed
should weigh a little over 3.5 grams.) But that’s the price you pay in
New York City.
Part of the reason is that customers are paying for
convenience. “Because it's NYC, everyone expects to have anything and
everything delivered to their front door,” Adam says.
Since the services have a relatively high buy-in threshold
($50 or $60 is the least you can spend) most customers tend to be
hard-working, often middle- or upper-middle class people.
"A lot of my customers were 9-to-5 people who just
needed that after-work break," Adam said. “If there's one thing I
learned, it's that weed knows no boundaries when it comes to who wants
to smoke. For the most part, people just want a little distraction from
their everyday struggle. I was more than happy to provide them with it.”
Remarkably, these illegal herb services are allowed to operate with near impunity.
Couriers who have been arrested report being let off with a relatively small fine.
In the last 20 years, there has only been one major bust involving a
delivery service. That business, known as the Cartoon Network, had been a
large and lucrative operation before it was broken up in 2005 by a team of federal and local law enforcement agents. According to court documents, Cartoon Network sold about 2,200 pounds of weed over a seven-year period, sometimes moving more than $12,000 of pot per day. Still, its ringleader, John Nebel, served just a
little more than four years of his five-year sentence.
For Adam, who is black, the statistical likelihood that he’d be caught via “stop and frisk”
-- the controversial New York Police Department (NYPD) tactic where
people are questioned and patted down on mere suspicion of criminal
activity -- was high. In 2007 and 2008, when Adam was delivering
marijuana three to five days a week, blacks in New York were about nine
times more likely to be stopped and patted down by the police than
whites, according to calculations based on data from the New York Civil Liberties Union and the U.S. Census Bureau.
Luckily, though, Adam was never caught. He believes it was because he didn’t "fit the prototype for a 'drug dealer.’"
"Even though I was a black male in his early 20s, I wore skinny jeans, glasses, and had a high-top haircut,” he said.
Part of the reason for the NYPD’s apparent
indifference to busting weed couriers is because of the small quantities
being sold. Runners use New York’s marijuana possession laws to their advantage by never carrying too much weed at any given time. Being caught with less than 25 grams is a violation, not a criminal offense, under New York state law.
“The people being prosecuted as dealers in NYC are
generally not those selling an ounce or a half-pound of weed, unless
they're also selling harder drugs,” said New York attorney Joseph Bondy,
who specializes in defending people who have been arrested for
marijuana offenses. “Unless you're doing a deal in broad daylight, and
you happen to get stopped by the cops, the police are not going to
concern themselves.”
The services themselves are also structured to prevent snitching.
"The system [used by weed delivery companies] is set
up so that they can't roll anybody up the chain. That's why it's so
resilient," said National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws
Executive Director Allen St. Pierre. "The delivery guys at the bottom
often have no idea who is providing the pot to them. They may know the
person, but they don't know their real name."
The NYPD's apparent apathy toward busting weed
couriers, St. Pierre says, is simply that it has more important things
to worry about: “Gotham has so many other things going on that should
rightly concern police than trying to get between two consenting adults
who are having private communications and doing their business in
private.”
Not only was Adam never arrested, he says his
parents never found out about his job. Eventually, however, he left the
weed service entirely to pursue a career in hospitality. But the company
he helped found in 2007 has grown and continues to prosper in his
absence.
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This was really informative the government has made weed delivery legal now you can easily order your weed at your place from The Quad
ReplyDeletenice discussion now we have delivery at home of weed because govt has made legal.alphacanna
ReplyDeletealphacanna