THE MARIJUANA
DELIVERY NETWORK
nience. “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 hardworking, often middle- or uppermiddle 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, Car-
HUFFING TON
01.12.14
toon 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
“Because it’s NYC, everyone
expects to have anything
and everything delivered to
their front door.”
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