Buying weed online is a cherished tradition as old as the internet itself. Before Silk Road and bitcoin, there was searching Craigslist for “420” and nervously arranging a furtive meet with someone you hoped wasn’t a police officer. It was sketchy—somehow even sketchier than wandering around and looking for shoes hanging from overhead wires—but trust us, it worked… to a degree. What a seedy bag that was.
These days, of course, cannabis is legal in places like Oregon, where anyone aged 21 or over can buy recreational marijuana in a licensed store—but why bother with all that when you still have Craigslist?
As the Statesman-Journal discovered, legalization has meant boom times for the online marijuana marketplace. On Craigslist, the Portland, Oregon-area offerings include a $20 jar of butter and a $300,000 investment opportunity in a soon-to-be-licensed grow. Check out our recipe for Cannabis-infused Coconut Oil.
It makes perfect sense—marijuana is legal, Craigslist is legal—so why not use Craigslist to buy and sell marijuana and marijuana-related products, be they commercial-grade kitchen equipment for edibles, concentrate extractors, real estate or $100 ounces of Zkittlez?
One particularly enterprising woman has put together marijuana-themed “gift boxes” just in time for the holidays, complete with “body butter,” massage oil, and a big fat Rice Krispie treat, the newspaper reported. At $100 for the box, it’s a home-grown marijuana-friendly Williams-Sonoma competitor.
But as the killjoys with the Oregon State Police are demonstrating, you can’t actually buy or sell marijuana without a state license. That’s what burned 29-year-old Jason Owen, who thought he was going to trade a pound of cannabis for a snowmobile in October. The snowmobile’s owner was a state trooper, who met with Owen and gave him a citation instead, the newspaper reported. How lame.
You can give marijuana away in Oregon no problem, but all marijuana sales require a state Liquor Control Commission or Health Authority dispensary license, the newspaper reported.
You can gift marijuana, but it has to be a straight-up gift; no bartering allowed. Marijuana products in Oregon undergo strict tests for potency as well as pesticide and mold contamination—which, if you’re buying something off of Craigslist, was probably dispensed with.
The same is true in other recently legal states like California, where the Adult Use of Marijuana Act allows you to give marijuana away no problem, but prohibits for-profit sales without a license.
Speaking of licenses—you can buy those on Craigslist, too. If you have a spare $150,000 lying around, you can buy a permit for a Los Angeles medical marijuana collective.
Craigslist also technically prohibits the sale of “controlled substances,” though obviously that ban isn’t very stringently enforced. A prosecutor with the Marion County district attorney’s office told the newspaper that there wasn’t any investigations of Craigslist’s cannabis cornucopia that she knew of—meaning, try as it may, the Statesman-Journal has yet to ruin a good thing.
The Hawaii Cannabis Organization does not recommend buying weed from Craigslist in Hawaii.