To ‘gift’ marijuana, firm ‘sells’ motivational speeches
Blond hair bobbing as she barrels through Washington, D.C., rush-hour traffic on her bicycle, 27-year-old Liz Sluchak is on a singular mission: to bring a 19th-century French novelist’s motivational words to a paying customer.
On a street corner not far from Nationals Park, she finds Malcolm Bell, an account manager who has paid $60 to hear her read a quote attributed to the author of “Les Misérables”: “Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.”
Sluchak reads the words from her phone. Bell contemplates them. He says the speech, delivered by contractors for the company Dreamy DC, “always connects with something that I’m going through.”
“We haven’t been able to connect with anyone for two years,” he says. “It feels really good.”
The Dreamy transaction is over. However, Sluchak, now in her personal capacity, hands Bell the equivalent of an eighth of an ounce of marijuana. The weed is not Dreamy’s product, according to the company, but an unrelated gift.
Although an 11-word speech might not seem like much, compared with a substantial amount of marijuana, Bell said the speech is essential.
“If you don’t give me the speech, that’s defeating the purpose of the entire thing,” Bell says. “I think that’s the best part.”
In D.C., where possession of small amounts of cannabis has been legal since 2014, gray-market companies have offered marijuana “gifts” for artwork, T-shirts and pizza, among other products. Because marijuana can’t legally be sold in the District, Dreamy pushes this legal workaround to the limit, offering positive words.
Ryan Ha, a 33-year-old D.C. native, said he got the idea for Dreamy after returning to the District in 2014 from managing a comedy club in China. Inspired by the motivational spiel of Trader Joe’s greeters, he created Dreamy after grappling with the question: What is an intangible good that will sell? He first contemplated offering “artisanal hugs” through a company called “Hugs by Ha” but changed direction.
“No one wants to hug their drug dealer,” Ha said. “I just had to create a platform.”
The platform launched in 2016, Ha said, offering a product that generates no waste sold by a “double digit” number of contractors, known as “speakers.” Dreamy offers a variety of speech lengths, including Zen ($60), Inspire ($200) and Power ($360).
“If there is any relationship between cannabis and the speech, I don’t know of it,” he said. “Especially if there’s a relationship between the price and the amount of gift that you might have gotten.”
Ha said the Dreamy app is loaded with “things that got me through college and early adulthood.” Skimmed from the Internet, the quotes are often apocryphal – received wisdom that, depending on the listener, could be perceived as profound or straight from the greeting-card aisle.
Dreamy has proved a long-lived player in D.C.’s cannabis market as the market inches closer to legitimacy. Though it has not yet acted, the D.C. Council is considering legislation that would legalize the sale of recreational marijuana.
Any marijuana sales that the council approves, however, would run afoul of a congressional appropriations rider that blocks D.C. from commercializing the drug. Though Senate Democrats removed this rider from their appropriations proposal last year, it was reincorporated on March 9.
Not all council members who support legalization support gifting. D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, a Democrat who has introduced legalization legislation, said in a statement that gifting is “subterfuge.”
“The fact is that they are selling cannabis in this city and that is illegal and it is illegal because of the congressional rider,” Mendelson said in the statement. “Congress needs to step out of this so we can get a handle on the public safety problem here and we can regulate this business.”
Darel Dawson, president of the I-71 Committee — an advocate for legalization — and who owns Peace in the Air, a boutique that sells digital music and gifts marijuana, said gifting has birthed a robust economy that employs D.C. residents and provides citizens, including veterans and the elderly, a product they need. He would prefer a licensing system, but the current system works for now.