This DC-based company sells juice and “gifts” marijuana on the side — and it may be legal

In Washington, DC, it is legal to possess, grow, and gift marijuana but not sell it. At the same time, it is legal to sell juice in the District.

HighSpeed, a delivery service, took a look at these two seemingly unrelated laws and saw a business opportunity.

Will Sommer reported for Washington City Paper:

On HighSpeed’s website, would-be smokers pick a flavor of juice to be delivered, along with a set of codewords for pot. There’s “just juice,” which, despite its name, comes with a randomly selected amount of marijuana that runs around a gram. “Love” will earn customers an eighth of an ounce of marijuana, while “lots of love” comes with an amount described as “slightly larger than an eighth.”

HighSpeed takes advantage of District laws that legalize the free exchange of an ounce or less of marijuana, but keep marijuana sales criminal.

For what it’s worth, a company representative told WCP that the juice is “really, really good.”

Is this actually legal? Ultimately, the DC police department and prosecutors will decide. But HighSpeed said it vetted its business idea with lawyers.

While the plan is creative, it’s also the kind of thing that some drug policy experts have been looking out for in DC’s model: a way that marijuana can be legal to possess and distribute — but not truly commercialized.

HighSpeed’s model no doubt makes a profit off marijuana, although through a fairly creative workaround. But one thing it seems to prevent is the mass production and commercialization of the drug, since it’s hard to imagine this little operation growing into a mega-conglomerate.

This prevents the key concern with legalization: that big, for-profit companies will get into the marijuana industry and market the drug in ways that encourage too much use and abuse.

This isn’t unprecedented. Big alcohol companies, for example, have successfully lobbied to block tax increases and regulations on alcohol, all while marketing the products to millions of people. Meanwhile, alcohol is linked to 88,000 deaths each year in America.

Or look at the ongoing opioid painkiller epidemic. In the past couple of decades, pharmaceutical companies marketed opioid painkillers to doctors as a safe, effective way to treat pain. Their claims turned out to be wrong, and they would end up paying hundreds of millions in fines for their fraudulent claims about opioids’ safety. Yet at the end of the day, they made millions of dollars as their marketing scheme worked — and tens of thousands of people got hooked on and died from their products. (Ironically, marijuana could be a safe alternative to opioids for some patients.)

Marijuana is not as dangerous or deadly as alcohol or opioids, but that doesn’t mean it’s totally safe. There’s some evidence that it can harm teenage brains. Some studies show it can trigger psychotic episodes for some people.

But a broader, more abstract problem is overuse. As Jon Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University, told me last year, “At some level, we know that spending more than half of your waking hours intoxicated for years and years on end is not increasing the likelihood that you’ll win a Pulitzer Prize or discover the cure for cancer.”

Yet it’s exactly these people — the heaviest users — that marijuana companies will try to market to. As a 2014 study of Colorado’s pot market found, the top 29.9 percent of heaviest pot users in the state made up 87.1 percent of demand for the drug. For the marijuana industry, that makes the heaviest users the most lucrative customers.

That doesn’t mean continuing to ban marijuana is a good idea. As I’ve written before, marijuana is relatively safe enough that even commercialization seems to be a better outcome than prohibition. Pot’s illegality, after all, has led to hundreds of thousands of racially disparate arrests each year and has created a black market for pot that in turn helps finance criminal organizations’ violent operations around the world.

But it’s possible to legalize marijuana in a more responsible way. DC’s model may be one of those more responsible approaches: It prevents the mass production and marketing of marijuana, but the drug still remains accessible through growing, gifting, and some other limited avenues of distribution.