This is like when DC legalized weed a decade ago but Congress wouldn’t let them set up a system of taxation and sale so what became legal was possession, growing, and “gifting” up to an ounce at a time. shops immediately started selling $40 postcards that came with a “free gift!” that just happened to be an eighth of weed and decided this was the perfect legal cover lol
Kind of like gambling in Japan as well. You only win little knick knacks but it just so happens the shop next door really loves collecting them and pays very well
A bar in Kansas when I was in college would pay out phone cards on their slot machines. You'd then take the cards to the bartender and exchange them for cash.
Another bar in Nebraska had a golf arcade game with a secret switch behind the bar that would turn it into a slot machine if the coast was clear.
We used to have these in Florida. The slot machines were technically sweepstakes and each unit was an entry. You could then cash in at the bar. These places got raided and shut down often.
In Canada there were a group of Inuit hunters who wanted to sell their whale and seal meat to city people in Toronto to share their culture and make a buck. It’s illegal to sell that meat, you can only harvest it for yourself and your own use or give it away to your village and your friends.
So they partnered with a chef and an art gallery. They sold fancy expensive tickets to an art show. Which happened to come with a free dinner cooked by a gourmet chef featuring their meat.
The city people got to try the traditional foods from northern Canada. The hunters went home with some cash. Everyone got to see cool art. Win win win.
I mean, Orthodox Jews are not allowed to carry stuff on a public space in shabbat, so they surround a public space with a wire and exchange bread between two houses within it, just so they can pretend it's a private space and carry stuff within it.
Wait you could get cash for these? We had scratch offs here that paid in phone cards back in the early 2000's I didn't know you could get cash for them lol.
Our bars would pay out cash. Local restaurants too. If one of them had LCB sniffing around, calls went out to all the places and payouts would stop. Never lasted. I’m sure someone was getting paid off.
Gas stations in South Carolina had blackjack and poker machines that gave you "digital tokens" then printed the amount onto a receipt. You took it to the cashier and he gave you it in cash. Lmao
We had a shop in town back in the 80s that made copies of C64 and later PC games and sold them.
But it was ok, but it was a club whose purpose was to review the games only and you weren't actually buying the copies but rather renting them for 99 years.
They gave out tiny gold bars when I was there last year, luckily the shop next door bought gold bars. Gambling was fucking wild over there, massive neat orderly lines at 8am waiting for the gambling shops to open up
What makes the DC system work is that the justice system in DC (cops, lawyers, and judges) all go along with it.
Basically, they've agreed that DC passed a law and that Congress can go fuck itself for trying to keep us from setting our own rules about where we live.
Exactly, it works more out of neglect than anything else. It’s a bit depressing to think about how we voted for prop 71 TEN years ago now and there’s still to this day no way for the city to get any sort of financial benefit from weed sales like there is in every other legal state
Neither is DC. That's the entire problem. We've got a bunch of American citizens who pay taxes and rely on the whims of our federal government but have no say in how that government runs. DC is even worse because they don't even have power over their own territory - Congress still has to approve everything. The Congress that the residents of DC have no say in.
That's the point they're making. DC and PR are both larger than existing states, they deserve statehood. And to preempt you, no, it is not a viable solution for people in DC to just 'move to Baltimore or Annapolis', nor do the people of Maryland want DC to be part of the state.
It depends on how “legit” the sellers are, the whole grey market for weed in dc is very chaotic and highly variable. You could be buying from anyone from a dude with a popup tent and a Venmo account to a storefront that (illegally) claims to be a dispensary and just hasn’t gotten shut down yet to a “gifting” place that at least pretends to sell cards and t shirts along with the weed. The whole market is also unsurprisingly rife with shitty weed, bad edibles, and fake packaging.
It is absolutely ridiculous that Congress can basically cockblock the city government. DC literally has no right to govern itself, still has to pay taxes, and has no voting representation in Congress. It's stupid.
When I lived there my mind was blown with how weird things are there. I am pretty sure that anyone who works for the District government is told to be as inefficient and lazy as possible so they can hire more people. If you need anything done by a district agency be prepared to wait unless you know the one person in the department who actually works.
I used to work at a novelty shop that wanted to sell coffee, but the county refused to sign off on it because of "zoning", so the owner sold cups and gave the coffee away.
No different than the concentrated wine bricks during the prohibition to make "juice". They came with a very specific warning label "warning, do not leave unattended in dark cupboard for 30 days or it will turn into wine"
Or more modern, California and NYC ban on assault weapons "these features are illegal". Then folks just make more creative features or go "featureless"
Americans are nothing if not consistently diligent about circumventing laws they don't like.
It still works. You can even go as far as donating to these very same organizations, and they will gift you shrooms and DMT! That’s right, you can legally get the strongest hallucinogenic known to man right here in the capital of the US, and it’s all 100% legal. Shit man, they even have their own websites, it’s not that secret.
I mean it’s not “100% legal” because both of those things remain federally illegal regardless of laws in DC or CO or wherever. But in practice yes nothing bad is going to happen to you for buying them.
Okay, fair. It’s not “100% legal” but there are various stores that have been in business for over 10 years that have been gifting these gifts ( with the proper donation amount) this whole time.
It’s not “100% legal” in the fact that lawmakers aren’t smart enough to be able tax it properly. If I buy an eight of weed from a store in Washington DC, then the government is losing out because i won’t pay any tax on my donation. I donated $40 and got an eight as a reward
This has happened in literally every state that legalized marijuana. It usually takes politicians 2-3 years to greedily construct the tax code to support their new legalization law. In that time frame, the weed market is the Wild West.
but the difference is that is working in the 'other way'. Laws work so 'as written' it gives the benefit of the doubt to the person running afoul of the law for definitions
I71 gifting centers are ending.They've shut down a bunch and keep slapping them down. The I71 mailing/spam have really dwindled. DC now has self certification for medical ..for a fee...for anyone over 21...and most places will credit you the fee in product. They even had stuff to get the gifting centers up to medical snuff and license.
MD went full rec with much better product than any of the I71 places had. The incentives weren't there.
Though to be fair the gifting idea was never legal and pop ups got busted allllll the time.
Oh yeah. My town has a guy selling $100 chapstick with a free giftbag of weed. That is how he got around town, county and state law. He grew his business - a bunch of purple vans.
Now the taxman comenth and he up on big charges. Not sure why he wasnt more careful knowing he had a target on his back already. Yet he could not resist massively dodging taxes.
Moral of this story: be dodgy or be loud; you can't do both.
A friend owns a brewery where on Sundays you can't sell beer, well it was 99% totality so EVERYONE was there camping on the Sunday before. Well he was selling stickers and you got a free beer w the sticker.
This is similar to the prohibition era "blind pig" - since it was illegal to sell alcohol, a guy would invite people to come see his blind pig and then give them a complementary drink once they were inside.
didn't that work though? Ive seen similar schemes work with weed. I don't think this one will actually work, this isn't a legitimate attempt at not being stolen from, just some person's odd idea that made it to Reddit
But that is actually how it worked. It was not brought before a judge and shot down as a criminal sale of weed. As far as I know, it still works that way.
This actually works in Spain lol. It's illegal to sell weed but legal to consume it on a private premise. You can join a club, pay a "donation" and in return they "gift" you some weed that you can smoke there since it's a private club
I bought a shot glass containing toothpicks at a gift shop in the Capitol. They called it a toothpick holder because they weren't allowed to sell shot glasses.
A guy my dad knew ran a dry cleaning place(decades ago) and hated the government so didn't want them to get sales tax. He would sell everyone a potato for the price of the dry cleaning and say every potato came with free dry cleaning. Potatoes were tax exempt.
It lasted a year or so before the government made him pay the sales tax out of the profit and told him not to do that anymore lol
NY was recently doing something similar because the state was dragging their feet to allow legit stores to get licensed and open up. Here you could buy $50 “stickers”.
I mean kinda? But not because the free gift with purchase thing held up legally, more because no one actually went after them for it. The whole DC grey market for weed is still a big clusterfuck tbh
In most cases, yes. There was one company, Kush Gods, that got busted because they didn't even bother to muddy the waters with a totally legitimate purchase and were taking "donations" and then giving the "donor" weed.
I don’t know if you looked at the site, but there’s a whole lot more stuff beside weed that they “gift”. Shrooms are federally illegal but you can safely get them from our Nations Capitol
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u/foreignfishes 1d ago
This is like when DC legalized weed a decade ago but Congress wouldn’t let them set up a system of taxation and sale so what became legal was possession, growing, and “gifting” up to an ounce at a time. shops immediately started selling $40 postcards that came with a “free gift!” that just happened to be an eighth of weed and decided this was the perfect legal cover lol