Desmond* has been a weed courier on and off for almost four years. He’s in his mid-twenties now, but he was still in college when he heard about the opportunity through a classmate. He works three days a week, and makes, on average, 15 deliveries a day. If he makes more than 20, he gets a free bag. Usually he’ll give it away or resell it — he used to be a big stoner, but he doesn’t smoke much any more; certain strains make him anxious.
The work helps him pay off his student loans and subsidizes his creative pursuits (he’s in two bands and does photography on his days off). When he’s working, he looks like any one of the hundreds of bike messengers who speed around New York City, clad in shorts, perched on a single-speed bike, with a bag and a couple of delivery tubes slung over one shoulder. And like any other messenger, he can be at your door in 20 minutes or less.
The Village Voice has more.

There’ll be a lot of pressure on Denver police officers working this weekend’s annual 4/20 event at Civic Center Park. Organizers have been asked to discourage public smoking even though lighting up at 4:20 p.m. on April 20 is arguably the gathering’s most sacred tradition — and security concerns are higher than ever given a still-unsolved shooting last year that resulted in one day’s worth of festivities being canceled.

A U.S. map that shows where pot is legal looks a lot like recent electoral college maps, except instead of blue, the liberal states are rendered in green: the entire West Coast (California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada), progressive mountain and Midwest states (Colorado, New Mexico; Michigan, Illinois), all of New England, plus New Jersey, Washington, D.C., and Hawaii. Twenty states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws legalizing medical marijuana; in two of them, recreational weed is all good, too.
Conspicuously absent from that map: New York. The Village Voice examines why.

If you’ve been craving a dose of “Reefer Madness,” there’s still time to RSVP to Thursday’s annual conference of the central Arizona anti-drug organization MATForce. The public portion of the conference runs from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors auditorium, 205 West Jefferson Street. The featured speaker is Kevin Sabet, the anti-cannabis activist that Rolling Stone magazine calls “Legalization Enemy No. 1.”
Sabet’s a drug-policy expert and marijuana prohibitionist who’s served as adviser to the Office of National Drug Control Policy under two presidents. He’s on a crusade to save marijuana users by forcing them either to undergo re-education and “treatment” — or to rot in jail.