Why bother? Focus on all the property crimes the police are now ignoring.

Funny, because when he brushed past me at the Mt. Calvary protest, he hella smelled like weed.

Lowest. Police. Priority.

Say it with me, Mayor.

There's graffiti in Fremont, Wallingford, and the U District.

Go after that.

I could not disagree more with Mr. Murray on this, it's a political mistake and will cause more problems than it solves. Going adversarial against delivery services is not the answer. If weed has taught us anything, it's that a lot of people will risk breaking laws they feel are stupid.



I personally feel that there's plenty of room for medical AND recreational, as well as the cottage industries that accompany them, such as delivery and weed locator services.



Marijuana is a product that has both medical and recreational applications. It will take time for people to wrap their minds around the implications of that because retail and medical are still relatively new. In time people will see that weed isn't anywhere near the threat they thought it was and that it's actually a helpful and potentially lucrative product.

The delivery services are providing quality product at honest weights with no regulation. Kind of like the free market is supposed to do. If problems crop up, then some governmental intervention may be required, but this should be minimal. Instead of unleashing SPD on the delivery businesses, why not lobby the legislature to provide more leeway in how marijuana businesses can operate. Free markets, minimal regulations, low taxes. These are, dare I say, Republican issues. This idea could have bipartisan support.

What a bunch of silly fucking nonsense cracking down on people delivering the beautiful, non-toxic, medicinal cannabis.

Murray's spokesman, Jason Kelly, is lying. Seattle's Initiative 75 is not specific to use and possession. It makes all marijuana prohibition offenses when the marijuana is intended for adult personal use the lowest enforcement priortiy:

The Seattle Police Department and City Attorney's Office shall make the investigation, arrest and prosecution of marijuana offenses, where the marijuana was intended for adult personal use, the City's lowest law enforcement priority.

Our police--by law--have better things to do.

It's a weed ....... It should be legal and untaxed .... I should be able grow it in my garden. You want to tax somebody? Look to the corporations that have been ripping us off for years.

@7 Possession is the lowest priority. It is to protect individuals and not waste policing resources. Running a black market businesses without a license and paying no taxes has nothing to do with individual cannabis use.

Even hot dog stands are expected to have permits and pay taxes.

@10: No, the law states that all "marijuana offenses, where the marijuana was intended for adult personal use" are "the City's lowest law enforcement priority." It is not specific to possession.

Our police do not have time to investigate the sale of marijuana to adults where the marijuana is intended for personal use. Our prosecutors do not have time to prosecute those offenses. Those are, by law, their lowest priorities. Wholesale sales? Maybe so. But sales to individuals? No way. Lowest priority.

An un-win-able battle, Mr. Mayor--lacking even clear principle. Leave it.

Murray, and the City, must be SEEN opposing the delivery services. Whether the SPD actually investigates or arrests is another issue.

Otherwise it will invite Federal attention and give this legalization effort a black eye. Remember, it remains a Schedule 1 Narcotic at the Federal level.

You wanna make money off pot how bout you make a reasonable price as opposed to $26 per GRAM. You can buy HEROIN FOR CHEAPER.
We now have legal weed, so now the capitalist system lays it's stain on the transaction by allowing douchebags like the guy who owns Ike's to cry about how he has to jump through hoops while these "black market" dealers are selling at a reasonable price without the hassle of all the state enforced BULLSHIT. Maybe instead of just jumping on the fuckin caboose of this train and bitching about the pioneers trying to make this a friendly system, how bout you get on the right tracks and help the movement make progress.
All these yuppie fucks want is money. So long as weed is $26 a gram there will ALWAYS be a "black market" aka, the ONLY market for it. Yuppie political fucksticks need to pull your heads out of your fucking asses if you wanna do this right. We're too fucking poor to wait for a $15 min. wage initiative to afford $26 taxed weed. It's not a luxury, it's a fucking plant, but so long as it's marketable you gotta have your greedy fucking paws all fucking over it. Fuck you. Let it be free.

"dangerous" pot, lol

I really hope that over the next couple years people start to realize how ridiculous it is to have the medical marijuana system and recreational marijuana system continue to exist as separate entities. There's what, probably ten times as many dispensaries than I-502 stores in the city, and we're supposed to believe that medical marijuana patients represent ten times the demand for weed that the rest of the weed-smoking adults in Seattle do? That's preposterous. I should count how many dispensaries I'd pass on my bike/on a bus on my way to the nearest I-502 store some time. I bet the result would be hilarious. Unless you live right by Uncle Ike's and don't mind paying a huge premium, why would you even consider buying I-502 pot? No one I know does.

The city should have just opened up dispensaries for non-medical patients while leaving the possession limits and personal-growing rules laxer for patient: would've saved a lot of effort and money and would've actually made even a tiny dent in black market sales, but it also would've required acknowledging that adults in Seattle actually want to smoke weed in significant quantity. The insultingly low caps at every step of the process in the I-502 system show that the people in charge just aren't ready to do that. So as long as there's two dispensaries per block in the U-District and no legal store for miles, we'll continue to shake our heads, laugh, and go to our dealers.

I agree with #13, shaking your fist at weed delivery services and maybe making a few token busts will give Seattle the appearance of cracking down on the black market which will (hopefully) keep the feds off our back.

Its really easy to bust every delivery service in the city with minimal police effort. All they need to do is open up Leafly and place a bunch of orders using any telephone from the precinct. Really not difficult. If they were serious about it we'd already see a line of couriers in handcuffs.

This is absolutely ridiculous.

What @8 said

Do we have to defund the SPD pot busts too?

We can do that by city proposition too, if you don't back down and only go after dealers & those selling to kids ...

>The pot they sell is untested, it's dangerous, it's a public health hazard.

LOL okay, now that legal exists, illegal pot is all scary!

The black market has thrived everywhere in the united states forever, and even the most heavy-handed law enforcement has never put any long term dent on it. But Seattle thinks they'll stop this super convenient and easy manifestation of it with an arrest-free bust or two and a press release?

The way to either get rid of those businesses or integrate them into the legal system is to make the legal system convenient and reasonably priced so as to outcompete them. That includes having delivery services, as we have for everything else.

@14 you need to shop around a little. Ocean Greens right now has a 22%THC strain listed at $15 a gram. That's getting down to black market prices, yo AND you know what you're really buying.

All the potheads need to help invest in the community and start paying taxes. Were #1 for alcohol tax, and #6 for cigarette tax. C'mon bend over and smile. The Stranger should be supporting this wholeheartedly as they do all taxes.

Instead of maintaining artificial scarcity, restricting the count of stores in Seattle to 21 or to 200, the state board of alcohol and cannabis trade should grant a license to anyone who pays the fee and demonstrates ability and willingness to abide by the rules.

gay mafia thinks they don't make enough.

@22 - But still, taxes bring it above the black market prices..

I'm curious if the guy on the Ave selling untaxed weed by the gram will end up being put into a deadly chokehold by a white cop.

@27only if he's a black guy

Boy, am I ever looking forward to The Stranger's explanation of how 1,000 feet adds up to "3 or 4 city blocks."

Heidi, do you have any idea what a city block looks like?

Did you just look out the window of The Stranger's office, see a soccer field with Capitol Hill avenues at either end, and extrapolate from that?

Tip for living in the big city, Heidi: when urban-type people use "city block" as a unit of measure, they're talking about the long side of the block. And that's typically 600 to 900 feet.

As a lad raised in a real American city, I learned that there are, as a rule of thumb, about 8 city blocks to a mile. Which would put 1000 feet at a block and a half.

Also, looking forward to the in-depth reporting on where the no-scrip-required mobile marijuana salespeople are sourcing their product.

Totally none of them are supplied by blood-tainted organized crime networks, because The Stranger went way deep and checked all that out, right?

Oh come off it: "There is no protection for minors. The pot they sell is untested, it's dangerous, it's a public health hazard."

Untested pot? has that ever been a problem ever in recorded history?