Nov 21, 2005
3 Million people use cannabis every year in the United Kingdom
alone. Any businessman will tell you that's one hell of a healthy
market. Unfortunately for users, the little matter of its
illegality in almost all of the world's nations means that hashish
and marijuana is still relatively difficult to get hold of. Today's
globally-mobile culture has forced a lot of us to spend less time
in the same place, so finding a reliable supplier is a conundrum
which we have all faced at one time or another. Venture into the
streets, and you're liable to be sold a bag of kitchen herbs or a
chunk of wood, or worse still, get robbed outright or even
arrested. Ask around too much and you might attract the wrong type
of attention.
But the enormous advances in technology over the last few years
have not gone unnoticed by the stoners who seek a solution to these
problems. Growers and suppliers have been turning to the world's
biggest high-street, the internet, to peddle their wares, and the
consumers have followed. Though hard to find, mail-order cannabis
or "E-Weed" websites have been doing a roaring trade for some
years, and while some have been shut down by police struggling to
keep up with encryption technology and the vastness of the web,
more and more dealers are finding the internet a safer and more
lucrative way of doing business.
The police crackdown on internet weed dealers has been felt hardest
in the United Kingdom, where online dealers Pepe and BudMonkey were
closed down in late 2003 and early 2004 after a major operation by
the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit. Pepe and BudMonkey had been
relatively brazen in their approach: though not advertised on
search engines or open forums, word of their sites spread quickly
among the online cannabis community in Britain. Their sites openly
declared their products, a variey of strains of high grade herbal
cannabis and hash, with photographs to illustrate the quality.
Although both sites introduced password protection and a strict
members-only policy after a few months of open operation, the
damage had been done. The vacuum-packed, Amsterdam-beating packages
had been so popular that keeping the business secret had quickly
become impossible, particularly after a
national
newspaper article in which an Amsterdam-based dealer,
Hermes The Hash Trader, criticised the openness of
the UK sites. Payments had been made by online
payment systems such as PayPal and NoChex and the paper trail
clearly showed the scale of the online operations.
In the wake of these "Independent" e-weed sellers, the market was
left relatively open. An invitation-only forum, NoSoap, which had
been instrumental in spreading the word about BudMonkey and Pepe,
stepped into the breach. The success of the two pioneers had
already attracted a raft of UK dealers who wanted a piece of the
action, but didn't want the unwanted attention a personal online
store would attract. The NoSoap administrators responded by opening
their "Online Cannabis Marketplace"; a forum which allocated proven
reliable dealers their own threads to advertise strains and used
the forum's private messaging system to provide payment details to
potential customers. The separation between site admin and the
sellers meant strict regulation of the service of the dealers; too
many complaints and a seller would be removed from the forums.
NoSoap avoided the police well for some time, with forum members
now cagey about discussing site details with others. However, when
a forum member separated from her husband and he threatned to
inform on her and her online suppliers, the site admin took no
chances. Despite promises of a return, the NoSoap marketplace now
looks to be gone for good. Interestingly, its "front", an identical
forum without the marketplace section intended to be linked to from
the real address when site admin feared investigation, is still a
lively discussion forum on marijuana.
Another site without the strict seller-vetting procedures of
NoSoap, and therefore a lot more "scammers" on its "classifieds"
page continued to operate without police interference for some
months after the NoSoap closure, but complaints from users and
growing references to its existence on open web forums have
recently forced it to shut down the advertisers pages. The rest of
the site is still a popular resource for cannabis users.
The activities of the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit have, in fact,
more or less driven e-weed out of the UK. A number of small-time
online dealers still operate on a much reduced scale, often only
using an encrypted e-mail account, passed around by word of mouth,
as their outlet, or only selling to medical users with a doctor's
certificate. But the major online suppliers are now international
businesses, based in countries with more favourable views to
Cannabis policing. The long arm of the DEA means that many of these
will not ship the the United States, but an enterprising surfer can
find a number of suppliers who will ship to the UK with no fears of
reprisals. While customs officers do regularly search packages from
known drug-producing countries such as Holland, many slip through
the net, especially if sent from less obvious points of origin. The
new breed of e-weed companies are ethical organizations, often
non-profit, with proceeds from sales going to Medical Marijuana
charities. Prices are low, quality is nearly always way above UK
street-dealer standards, and the paper chain is avoided thanks to
the advance of E-Gold, an untraceable "E-Currency Exchange" system
which makes payment more secure.
The unstoppable rise of E-Weed is evidence of the massive market
for Cannabis among people who are either unable to locate suppliers
or are uncomfortable with the criminal element so intrinsically
linked with street dealers. The modern Cannabis user is becoming
more law-abiding, upstanding, employed and intelligent. The days of
fiddling with folded notes on street corners or visiting dingy
flats to indulge one's secret vice are rapidly going. Cannabis
users want the convenience, reliability and service that the E-Weed
companies provide, which is why they will continue to thrive.