LUKAS KUBEJA
NYC weed delivery serves: literature review
Lukas Kubeja, November 25, 2024
Early in the morning on November 14, 1990, undercover New York City police officers arrested two bike messengers and two dispatchers at 120 Walker street under the suspicion that they were employed by a weed delivery telephone service, “1-800-WANT-POT”. That same day, the police conducted a raid of Michael “Mickey” Cesar’s comic book shop on 13th and Hudson in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village neighborhood. They seized seven pounds of weed and $3k in cash while arresting Mickey and three more of his messengers. Mickey was well known amongst activists in the village in the late 70s and 80s as the flamboyant and cockeyed optimist who to the dismay of law enforcement often sold weed openly at political rallies and touted the legalization of weed as the only sane path forward. He made himself difficult to miss, often appearing in a bishop’s miter with a giant embroidered weed-leaf covering the front of the headpiece. He was known to many as the pope, heading “The Church of Realized Fantasy” which was self described as “a communal marijuana sex church” where members believed they should be able to get whatever they wanted so long as it didn’t harm others.
Mickey’s weed telephone service was a testament to that. In the late 70’s and throughout the 80s, Mickey had been arrested three times on various drug related state charges and done stints at Rikers Island. Despite the complications with the law, Mickey tirelessly believed in his vision. 1-800-WANT-POT was his third attempt at a weed delivery service after “DIAL-A-JOINT” and “777-CASH” in the lower east side were closed by police. And it was this resilience that ultimately led to his famed success. In the words of Clayton Patterson, lower-east side documentarian, “Even in those fuckin’ days, Mickey sold to everybody. The mayor might not be talkin’, but he probably might be smokin’.” Various Puerto Rican and Italian gangs in downtown Manhattan tried to squeeze in on his profits, robbing messengers and shooting Mickey six times with a .22 when he refused to pay for their protections. But Mickey was able to continue his business successfully, owning not only a large home in New Jersey but an apartment on the Upper East Side while providing his employees solid wages and healthcare. Mickey believed he was bringing in about $20,000 per day at his peak in 1990. Believing money to be “like manure … meant to be spread around,” he gave free weed away often, paid for the medical bills of those with AIDS, and leant his phone centers and spare apartment out as places for the houseless to squat.
Then, to the disdain of any narcotics dealer, his operation got too popular. It wasn't long before his arrest in 1990 that Howard Stern found his ad in a New Jersey newspaper and decided to give the number a call while on air. After the call, Stern remarked that it would be too easy for the police to simply call the number and arrest whichever low-level crook showed up on a bike. And that’s exactly what the police did. The cops made multiple calls to the 800 number from September up to the pope’s arrest in November of 1990. He was ultimately sentenced to a 15-year bid for possession and distribution but unfortunately passed away in 1995 from liver cancer. In his time, Mickey Cesar unknowingly blazed new ground with the establishment of the first weed bike messenger service, an NYC tradition that carries on to present day.
The messenger infrastructure and labor force that Mickey used to distribute his weed was well established already though, and thriving as a critical component of New York City business. Bike messengers first appeared in NYC in the late 1960s and by 1985 the city was supporting a population of 4,000-7,000 couriers (the numbers are difficult to estimate because messengers were considered independent contractors), far more than any other city in the United States. Before the fax machine and before email, the technology gap that prevented major industries like finance, advertising, and legal services from moving data quickly could only be remedied by physically transporting documents from A to B. It was this crossroad of the information age that birthed the bike messenger boom. Given the variability of automobile traffic, limited parking, and just how slow the subway can be, the bicycle became the perfect solution to the productivity needs of evermore rapid-paced business.
The expectation for businesses in choosing to send parcels by bike was speed. Most everything was time sensitive. Documents needed to arrive before wall street closed or the law office locked its doors. However, it was this propensity for speed that earned bicycle couriers their antisocial reputation. Because historically messengers have been paid a piece-rate per delivery, the messenger's income was entirely determined by deliveries per day. The motivation of the dollar, combined with the expectation of speed from the dispatcher created this “by any means necessary” mentality amongst messengers in the city. Couriers would choose lines that could be seen as reckless, weaving through crowded midtown traffic, parting seas of pedestrians to get to the drop-off and on to the next pick-up. And this complete disregard for traffic laws made them public enemy #1. Numerous opinion pieces throughout the 80s and 90s tout messengers as things like “law-flouting, obscenity spewing, bath-needing, wild-riding, pedestrian-smashing madmen” (Bob Levy, Washington Post, 1989). Messenger received accusations of homicides, bike theft, and the killing of innocent squirrels (1991). The City began to take legitimate legal actions against messengers in 1986, increasing the number of citations for traffic violations. In 1987, Mayor Koch passed a bill banning bikes on Fifth, Madison, and Park Avenues from 31st to 59th between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. directly targeting messengers in midtown.
All while messengers were transforming into villains on the street and in the press, they were also becoming cultural icons. In 1986, Kevin Bacon took on the role of a former stockbroker turned dare-devil messenger, living on the edge of society with a contempt for authority. They were regarded “as the ultimate urban man– tough, resourceful, self-contained, riding against the odds the city stacks against everybody” (Smith, New York Magazine, 1986). It became something of a hip-job for lower-east side derelects and artist types. “They live the life you may have dreamed of but never had the courage or foolish disregard to try… You have a primal dream about it… You go to the parties the straights have never heard about… You have the kind of sex they would give their fortune for” (Cheney, Toronto Star, 1993). Messengers were becoming the outlaw heroes of the street, living against the flow of traffic, engaging with the urban death maze only as much as necessary or as much as they can.
The reputation of this job attracted very particular types of individuals. Messaging was a job that could provide a liveable wage (messengers earned about $100 per day in 1990 or about $240 in today’s cash) to someone without education, without citizenship, a green card, or working visa, without any prior work experience, with a criminal record, and who may be struggling with drug and alcohol abuse. Messengers historically were independent contractors and, even in New York where legally companies must file their riders as employees, messengers still behave and are treated as de facto contractors. This means that messengers have the freedom to decline runs, decline days of work, and basically come and go as they please. However, this also means messengers have no job security, no steady income, no benefits, and no health insurance, a risk in and of itself considering the job entails nonstop high speed cycling in manhattan traffic. Still, as long as you could pedal from A to B, you could work as a messenger. This kind of work attracts people living on the perimeter of society either by choice or out of necessity. Many messengers were homeless or squatters, drug addicts and alcoholics, who chose this life because of the freedom it offered and their general disregard for authority. It’s not a stretch to assume that a group like this would be down for weed. And that is exactly the crossroad where Mickey Cesar’s 1-800-WANT-POT existed, creating the blueprint for weed courier services for decades to come.
As public drug markets in New York were shut down throughout the late 80s and into the 90s, drugs had to find a new, more inconspicuous way of moving through the city. From 1990 to 1999 the narcotics squad of the NYPD grew by 137%, Rudy Giulianni graduated from his position as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, taking his tough on crime policies to the mayor's office, and weed markets had to adapt. This meant that the trade went underground. Weed doesn’t come into the city by the ton on boats and trucks like it used to. Instead it starts with small amounts, grown regionally, moving through multilevel distributors. This 21st century distribution style resembles the internet in its decentralization and many pockets of activity, making it difficult for the cops to connect the dots. Sellers moved to pagers, cell phones, and PDAs to create sophisticated, difficult to track networks with several layers of middle-men between grower and buyer. Think 1-800-WANT-POT, but if there was an absolutely 0% chance of Mickey Cesar answering when a patron dialed the number.
And these ancestors of Mickey Cesar’s archetype quickly grew to heights that the pope couldn’t have imagined. In 2004, a police department in Long Island received an anonymous tip from what law enforcement assumes to be a disgruntled employee working for a weed delivery service called the Cartoon Network detailing its functions and providing the address to a call center. After a year of investigation, John Nebel, founder of the operation, was charged with conspiring to traffic over 2,200 pounds of weed between January 1, 1999 and December 1, 2005. Nebel pleaded guilty, admitting to running a mobile, tech-based network out of a call center that often changed locations and delivered weed through a system of messengers overseen by street level managers.
It’s difficult to know just how many of these services are actually operating in New York. They exist in all sizes, from large corporate like structures with organized lists of clients in the tens of thousands to small-businesses who deal with only a select few. They have no posted marketing like 1-800-WANT-POT. They operate through business cards and word of mouth. The internet is too easy to track. Nebel’s operation in its heyday had 30 known employees including business executives, and at least six street-managers who oversaw countless dispatchers and couriers. Only Nebel and his nearest associates knew everyone involved, making it difficult to be ratted out to police by a lone snitch.
The weed was being supplied by tens of private homes across the tri-state, growing 300-400 high-grade plants and harvesting three or four times a year. At the time the street price from one grower could reach as much as $720,000. But The Cartoon Network bought in small amounts so they could move it quickly. The weed was delivered by the pound to call centers that changed weekly, or sometimes daily, often hotel rooms or one of Nebel’s seven houses. The service kept a sophisticated database that could scan numbers based on buying history and previous messenger, making it easy to avoid police. If the number cleared the database, the dispatcher would return the call and ask for a code, if the buyer provided the code then a messenger would be sent to the address. Many of the messengers were young, normal looking couriers. They carried just under 8 ounces of weed at a time, since, in those days, possession of 8 ounces resulted in a felony charge.
In the 6 years that Cartoon Network was functioning, Nebel and his associates made their fair share. At the time of his arrest, feds seized $837,000 of weed, $685,000 in cash, Seven homes, 16 cars, and a boat. The feds at the time were seeking $22.5 million in forfeiture. With all this cash available, weed services had no problem attracting messengers. Couriers working for the service made $200 a day (about $320 in today’s money). While this might be just pennies compared to the earnings of Nebel, it beats the wages that the typical, “legal” messenger might make. And as weed services grew in the mid 90’s and early 00’s, the advent of email and fax left a lot of “legal” couriers unemployed, without transferable skills, or job training.
The bread and butter of the courier industry was for decades documents with information. But, with technology like email, text, and fax making it increasingly easier to send documents with the click of a button, the niche that messengers once critically filled no longer required their services. Rob Kotch, owner of Breakaway Courier Systems, put it like this, “the only thing left is food and clothes … and none of that is urgent… No one wants to pay $25 for a delivery. They want to pay $5. So the only way to do that is to have what’s called delivery density. That means deliveries per hour… You’re doing two deliveries an hour, you’ve got to charge the customer like $40 or something.” Nobody is willing to pay high prices for documents that can be sent instantly for free. And, while the food courier industry is booming in New York City, the treatment of “employees” as independent contractors by companies like UberEats and DoorDash means that wages are exceptionally low. With costs of living in the city going through the roof, it’s difficult to make a liveable wage at all as a food delivery person. In 2020, the court case “In re Vega, No. 13 (State of New York Court of Appeals)” ruled that corporate apps like UberEats, Doordash, and Postmates must consider their couriers proper employees and, in turn, provide proper wages, workers comp, and other benefits. But the NY labor department doesn’t stringently enforce these rules allowing big business to maintain an economic advantage. Traditional courier services can’t compete with low delivery prices while abiding by labor standards, i.e. paying minimum wage.
With these corporations dominating the food delivery market, traditional couriers rely more and more on delivering non-consumable physical items that could never (at least with current technology) be sent via the internet. To accommodate, “Messengers” are giving up the track bikes and shoulder bags for cargo bikes and front racks so they can transport larger packages that otherwise would need to travel in a car. And, they’re starting to compete in some ways with freight companies like UPS and DHL stepping into the space for what’s called “last mile delivery” (delivery in metropolitan areas where variable traffic and parking is an issue). These bike couriers feel less like messengers and more like corporatized delivery men; especially when you see them cruising slowly through midtown, stopping at every red, smiling at pedestrians on a bright yellow lay-down, DHL cube-cycle, complete with a matching DHL lycra suit, and clean piss-test to turn into the union. Nothing about this image harkens back to the high-flying outlaw days of decades past.
While traditional “legal” couriers may be dwindling in number, the illicit couriers delivering undigitize-able kush seem to be holding strong. Weed delivery, in some circles, has become something of a common job. As a young 20-something living in New York, I can tell you that it isn’t rare to meet a college student or aspiring artist who’s kept up with the city's inflated cost of living by delivering weed. When the money is decent, you get paid in cash, and your hours are compatible with late-night drug and alcohol benders, it’s difficult for many to move on. Especially if you don’t mind biking up to 50 miles a day in the hot or cold and potentially being the victim of an unreportable robbery. It’s impossible to say how many wheeled weed salesmen bike around the city on a day to day basis, but it’s certainly more than a few. And many of the messengers you might meet carry that same freewheeling attitude toward authority that the bike messengers of 25 years ago pioneered, maybe even to a greater extent. Hanging out anywhere, smoking they’re supply, staying out late, and not worrying too much about when they clock in or out. After all, as one messenger put it, “There’s not too many other reasons to put up with this shitty job.”
But what happens to underground weed networks and the cultures that they nurture when weed sales become legal in New York City? When weed was first legalized in NYC, thousands of dispensary-style shops, or “weed-delis” as I like to call them, opened without an actual license. As Bridget Read described them, “part smoke shop, part convenience store, part dispensary, all packaged in the aesthetic of a monster energy drink.” An estimated 2,900 of these unlicensed vendors popped up throughout NYC compared to just 60 licensed dispensaries. But after over a year of limited enforcement, the state is catching up and locking down their doors. As of July 2024, the NYC Sheriff office stated it had closed over 700 illegal stores since the updated regulations passed in April. State officials were initially reluctant to “recriminalize” weed, trying to make up for decades and decades of excessive prosecution. All the while, receiving a dispensary license was a bureaucratic nightmare, almost creating an incentive for stores to open illegally. Since the change in legislation, licensed cannabis sales are way up with some shops estimating a 35% increase since April. However, that isn’t necessarily true with licensed weed delivery.
When weed-delis first began to boom, there is no doubt that unlicensed “serves” took a hit. The only thing easier than shooting a text or telegram to a delivery service is walking to the deli, especially since there's one on every block. And since you could smoke on the street, there was really no reason to buy discreetly at all. On top of that, weed prices have been going down in every state, legal or not, as a result of overproduction. Veterans in the weed delivery game have made public comments about “Traditional NYC delivery” departing the golden era, and the weed courier becoming a “modest gig.” It’s more difficult to recruit your average everyday smoker to buy from an underground delivery system when there are street-level markets with large signs that say “Loud Za sold here.” Some services have chosen to isolate themselves from the market as luxury. Afterall, the days of weed delivery catering to the upper echelons of NYC’s smokers date back to Mickey Cesar and 1-800-WANT-POT, but buying from a bodega has always meant bodega quality. It’s difficult to find a deli that sells classic, bell-ringing strains like Green Crack, Sour Diesel, Northern Lights, etc. Let alone all of them conveniently packaged into a backpack and laid out in front of you on your own coffee table. Still, the illicit services market is being cut into by legal licensed dispensaries that are growing in number. Someday soon, licensed dispensaries may be close to as ubiquitous as weed-delis in 2022, often offering their own weed delivery service from a licensed bud-tender.
So, are we in the twilight of “Traditional NYC weed delivery” and all that comes along with it? Well, we won’t know until it happens, but examples from other cities suggest so. In 2019, UberEats and Leafly partnered up to offer dispensaries in Toronto a weed delivery service no different than food delivery. In a statement to the press, UberEats and Leafly suggested that their service was directly targeting a space that the illegal market was filling, taking up about 50% of unlicensed weed sales. Since then, the model has expanded into 3 other Canadian provinces. It’s not difficult to imagine UberEats stepping into American markets like New York when weed dispensaries increase in number. And, in turn, the traditional renegade weed courier will likely become a dramatically corporatized, underpaid, underprotected, and under-”employed” UberEats rider with an insulated cube backpack and reckless e-bike riding habits. Not to mention that before long, the case for interstate weed commerce may grow so strong that large out-of-state cannabis corporations begin to impede on the NYC weed market, unphased by relatively tiny delivery networks and small sacks sold out of delis. Soon the little fish may be dropped into the big pond and forced to swim with giants. Isn’t that what’s happened to all New York small businesses since the times of 1-800-WANT-POT? So, I think it’s likely that just like any renegade-tradition, there will always be a few weed courier networks that hold on as a sort of relic to the past. But they too will be pushed further into the pigeon hole of a subculture, a necessary protest to the corporate machines ability to swallow whole even those businesses deemed illegal.
*Bibliography available upon request