Cannabis delivery services are popular, but questions remain about their legality in many adult-use cannabis states. For example, in Ca...
Cannabis delivery services are popular, but questions remain about their legality in many adult-use cannabis states.
For example, in California, where specific delivery license frameworks are in place, cannabis delivery is legal and widely used. Eaze, a San Francisco-based cannabis delivery app, reports that consumers order cannabis every ten seconds via their app.
In Washington state, though, cannabis delivery has never been made explicitly legal. There is no state license available to deliver a gram of flower and a vape cartridge. But that hasn’t stopped risk-taking entrepreneurs from serving the public demand.
Washington business tests the limits
Back in 2014, The Stranger, an alt weekly in Seattle, Washington, turned the spotlight on Winterlife, one of a number of semi-clandestine delivery services operating in the murky legal space that opened up after voters approved Initiative 502. By early 2016, Seattle officials estimated there were about 30 illicit cannabis delivery businesses operating in the city. Later that year Seattle Police created a sting operation and arrested a handful of delivery drivers in an effort to curb the practice.
Now delivery has returned to the Evergreen State in a very public way. In late December, billboards appeared along highways in south Puget Sound advertising Pelican, a new cannabis delivery service.
So, is delivery now legal in Washington? Maybe, and maybe not. According to Brian Smith, Communications Director for the Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board (LCB), state law “doesn’t prohibit [cannabis delivery], but it doesn’t allow it either.”
Last week Leafly tracked down Dave and Tina Comeau, who founded Pelican Delivers in Sept. 2019, and asked how they’re operating so openly—and how they believe it’s legal. The Comeaus own two state-licensed Better Buds dispensary locations in Port Hadlock and Silverdale. They have plans to open a third store soon in Longview, near the Oregon border. They say they decided to open a delivery service because so many of their customers have been asking for it—and because they believe they’ve discovered a way to do it legally.
“We thought about it—we know there is no legal framework for delivery [in Washington], so we looked at the laws and came up with a solution for delivery that works with the current Washington state laws and rules,” Dave Comeau told Leafly.
The revised cannabis delivery statute
Commercial cannabis delivery is not specifically allowed in Washington, but cannabis delivery itself isn’t outright prohibited. In 2017, Gov. Jay Inslee signed SB 5131 into law, which allows friends to share or gift cannabis to one another in select amounts. The pertinent passage in the law reads:
“The delivery by a person twenty-one years of age or older to one or more persons twenty-one years of age or older, during a single twenty-four-hour period, for noncommercial purposes and not conditioned upon or done in connection with the provision or receipt of financial consideration, of any of the following marijuana products, is not a violation of this section, this chapter, or any other provisions of Washington state law.”
One adult may deliver a gift amount of cannabis, for non-commercial purposes, to another adult—as long as it is less than “i) One half-ounce of useable marijuana; (ii) Eight ounces of marijuana-infused product in solid form; (iii) Thirty-six ounces of marijuana-infused product in liquid form; or (iv) Three and one-half grams of marijuana concentrates,” according to the statute.
The law was meant to allow friends to share a joint, essentially—or to help out a buddy with a spare gram or two. In fact, Leafly’s Ben Adlin looked into the question of friend-gifting and friend-delivery last year (see Buyer beware: Is it legal to pick up cannabis for a friend?). Smith told Adlin that picking up a eighth for a friend while you’re making a run to the local cannabis store wasn’t exactly legal.
“As innocuous as this scenario sounds, if it were allowed there’d be no way to prevent unlawful delivery services,” Smith said. “It would also complicate prosecution of unlawful possession with intent to deliver.”
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