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Movement-averse stoners across the city will be shedding a collective tear today as word spreads that the popular marijuana delivery service Speed Weed will soon be no more.
City Attorney Mike Feuer announced Friday that his office had secured the shutdown of Speed Weed within a month, which they alleged violated the voter-approved Proposition D.
Proposition D, which was passed overwhelmingly by no-fun Los Angeles voters in May 2013, limited and further regulated medical marijuana businesses across the city, and also prohibited delivery services.
Speed Weed, a.k.a. the Postmates of marijuana, has been delivering all things THC to an estimated 25,000 customers across the Greater Los Angeles area since 2014.
As we wrote when news of Speed Weed's possible shuttering first broke back in February 2016, the service was pretty epic, bro:
To get medical marijuana from SpeedWeed, the process is done almost entirely online. You submit identification and doctor's recommendation online, and they approve it—no in-person confirmation is required. One user tells LAist, "You basically fill up your cart like on Amazon. They have edibles, flowers, ointments and other stuff I don't use. Then someone brings it to your house in about an hour." According to their website, the service will allow you to "be treated like a Hollywood VIP."
Speed Weed is the second pot delivery service to be shut down by the city under Proposition D. Feuer first made his stance (hint: not a fan!) on weed delivery services clear back in 2014, when he targeted Nestdrop and ultimately succeeded in halting its services.
"The voters had in mind that there would be in some circumstances the need to transport medical marijuana but that's where Proposition D begins and ends when it comes to delivery," City Attorney Mike Feuer told KPCC in December 2014 just after the Nestdrop decision.
According to the L.A. Times, Speed Weed was first founded in 2011 by A.J. Gentile, who does not appear to have been stoned at the time. Quite the opposite, in fact:
...Gentile studied operation manuals for Domino's Pizza, Papa John's Pizza and FedEx. He learned how to build a network of hubs to limit the amount of marijuana or cash that any one driver carries, a precaution against robbery.
Despite being responsible for the company's shutdown, the city attorney's office was complementary in their assessment of Speed Weed's business acumen, calling the company's services "sophisticated and wide-ranging" in a press release. The city attorney's office also noted that deliveries usually occur within an hour of being placed, although some Yelp commenters may beg to differ. The pot delivery business is booming across the country—according to California Lawyer, the number of pot-delivery services nationwide nearly tripled between 2012 and 2015, going from 877 to 2,617.
Meanwhile, here in the birthplace of Jeff Spicoli, the 420 Games and Cheech & Chong' "Cheech" Marin, things aren't looking quite so rosy. According to his office, 763 medical marijuana businesses have shut their doors since Feuer took office.
LAist reached out to the city attorney's office to see whether they were concerned about any public safety issues that might arise when already stoned people drive to buy more weed since they can no longer have it delivered, but we have yet to hear back. We will update the story accordingly.
Sidenote: Whatever happened to drug dealers? Do they still do home deliveries? Mine never let me pay with a credit card, but at least we could sometimes make out.
