Is DC’s gray marijuana market the best of all possible marijuana reform worlds?
In upper Northwest Washington, marijuana buds the size of zucchinis hang drying in a room once reserved for yoga. In the Shaw neighborhood, pot grown in a converted closet sits meticulously trimmed, weighed and sealed in jars. Elsewhere, from Georgetown to Capitol Hill to Congress Heights, seven-leafed weeds are flowering in bedrooms, back yards and window boxes.
Welcome to the first crop of legal pot in the nation’s capital — where residents may grow and possess marijuana but are still forbidden to sell it.
In recent weeks, a small army of mostly novice gardeners who took up growing when the District legalized marijuana in February have begun to roll, pack and smoke the joints, bongs and bowls of their labor. By one estimate, they have collectively grown upward of 100 pounds with a street value north of a half-million dollars — far more than most of these amateur cultivators are likely to consume on their own.
All of which presents a thorny question for District leaders and police in a city where cultivation and possession are legal but sales are not: How the heck will all this pot get from those who have it to those who want it?
A fitness instructor who took up the hobby six months ago has amassed enough pot to make tens of thousands of dollars selling it. Instead, he’s begun giving away a little bit to anyone who pays for a massage. The instructor asked not to be named out of concern that he or his home, where he sometimes serves clients, could become targets for criminals.
A T-shirt vendor in Columbia Heights who declined to comment may be working in a similar gray area. College students say the roving stand has become known to include a “gift” of a bag of marijuana inside a purchase for those who tip really well. And recently, dozens of people paid $125 for a class in Northwest Washington to learn about cooking with cannabis from a home grower. Free samples were included.
Andrew Paul House, 27, a recent law school graduate, may be the best early test case for whether home growers can find a way to make money from their extra pot. House has started a corporation and a sleek Web site to order deliveries of homegrown marijuana to D.C. residents’ doorsteps — “free gifts” in exchange for donations to the company, akin to a coffee mug given to donors by a public radio station.
“I believe we are following the letter and the spirit of the law,” House said of the business he has named the Premium Club. “There’s this gap period where there is no retail and there is no regulation. My purpose is to step into that in-between time when there won’t be enough marijuana for adults to use recreationally and allow for the legal transfer under the initiative.”
None of this is what advocates for marijuana legalization who authored last year’s overwhelmingly successful ballot measure intended. They anticipated that if endorsed by voters, the D.C. Council would go the way of Colorado and Washington state and set up a legal system of sales and taxation.
Instead, conservatives in Congress blocked the city from doing so using their federal oversight of the District’s affairs. But Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) and Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier went forward with what the letter of the ballot measure allowed, legalizing everything but sales. And they insisted in February that, despite the legal limbo, a gray market for marijuana would not be tolerated.
But a lot has happened since then, namely a 40 percent spike in homicides that has monopolized the attentions of both Bowser and Lanier and led to a reorganization of the city’s narcotics investigators to focus on major streams of drugs into the city. That has left untouched a cottage industry taking root from the inside out, said Delroy Burton, head of the D.C. Police Union. Marijuana has become tolerated in the city so much that the D.C. State Fair added a marijuana-growing competition to its lineup of events Saturday. The “Best Bud” category joined the fair’s growing list of competitions.
“People are disguising sales as thank-you gifts, but they are being smart about it, distributing in a way that they cannot be charged with distribution,” Burton said.
Lanier’s department directed questions to the Bowser administration. Kevin Donahue, the city’s deputy mayor for public safety, said the administration remains focused on those trying to push the envelope of the new law. Representatives of the city’s health and police departments, as well as its licensing and business agencies, have met every other week since February, but the group has yet to identify anyone operating outside the bounds of the law….
“Keep in mind that the spirit, intent and letter of the law is supposed to decriminalize a practice that can lead to overpolicing and overincarceration,” Donahue added. Asked about the Premium Club, Donahue said it didn’t necessarily sound like strict “home grow, home use” — Bowser’s mantra for what’s allowable. Despite a promise to do so, the administration has not yet launched a public awareness campaign around that message….
Under the ballot measure, District residents are allowed to “possess, grow, harvest or process, within the interior of a house or rental unit . . . no more than six cannabis plants, with three or fewer being mature, flowering plants.” If more than one adult lives in the residence, the upper limits are twelve plants with six being mature at any one time. Those rules are among the most liberal in the nation; the District assigns, for example, no definition for the size of a full plant — as California and other states have….
Another grower who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of concerns about security has built an even more sophisticated growing room and expects a yield of medicinal-quality marijuana to “share” with friends suffering from a variety of ailments. The grower went through a months-long process of applying for a city building permit and having contractors and electricians outfit a new $6,000 room constructed in his Adams Morgan home solely for growing pot….
Adam Eidinger, the face of last year’s Initiative 71 campaign, was among those with a meager harvest, but Eidinger has no shortage. He has been gifted marijuana constantly as the harvest has come in. Eidinger said he has found pot on his doorstep, joints rolled up in tin foil and left on his car and bags simply handed to him walking down the street. “I think it’s a sign that people feel good about themselves and what they were able to grow when they give to me,” he said….
House, who launched the Premium Club, declined to say how many home growers he is working with or how many donations or deliveries have been made since the Web site launched last month. He said “business is good — definitely better than expected,” and he is finalizing the launch of a mobile app with real-time information on deliveries.
Already in business for more than three weeks, House advertises that a portion of each $100 donation to the business will go to local charities. He hasn’t given away any of the money yet, but he said in an interview that he will begin to later this month. Of the remaining half, he takes a cut of each donation as his salary. Through a system he described only as “complicated and time consuming,” he said he directs the rest back to home growers.
I am not familiar with any traditional drug dealers who worry about “following the letter and the spirit of the law” or who makes plans to give a portion of his earnings to local charities. Similarly, I am unaware of any traditional drug dealers who plan to give away their product to “friends suffering from a variety of ailments.” Thus, compared to the regular black market, the DC legalization initiative reform seems to be an improvement with respect to who is involved in marijuana dissemination.
In addition, unlike in Colorado and other full legalization jurisdictions where there concerns about the emergence of a “big Marijuana” industry that will actively promote marijuana products and profit from marijuana abuse and addition, the DC legalization initiative reform seems to be producing only “mom-and-pop” marijuana producers who should have limited ability to promote and profit considerably from their efforts. In this way for those most concerned about the potential harms of marijuana reform, perhaps the DC gray market is to be preferred to the “white markets” that continue to develop and grow in other legalization jurisdictions.
Like Voltaire, I am talking up the prospect of DC being the “best of all possible marijuana reform worlds” with my tongue planted somewhat in my cheek. Indeed, among hard-core pro-reform and anti-reform advocates on both side of the usual marijuana legalization debate, I suspect that the DC middle-ground seems like it could be among the worst of all possible world. But as the labratories of democracy keep experimenting with reform, I think it ultimately quite valuable that we are seeing many different marijuana reform worlds emerging so that we might be better able to assess effectively which are proving to be the best of the bunch.