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Olivia Falcigno was new to Washington and looking for pot. So on Memorial Day weekend 2019, Falcigno, a summer intern, visited a cannabis shop near Union Station. She asked an attendant whether the store sold marijuana; he insisted that it didn’t.

“But I can offer you some advice,” she recalls him saying. “And if you want to pay me for advice, I can offer you a ‘quarter’ of advice.”

About $50 later, she left the store with a quarter of an ounce of cannabis and some holiday-related wisdom: Be kind to veterans.

“It was my exposure to all the different, unconventional ways people acquire their drugs,” Falcigno said.

Welcome to the theater at the heart of Washington cannabis acquisition. Pot is legal, but not legal for anyone and everyone to sell. The technicality has spawned a shadow market whereby $50 worth of pat advice and a side of pot is not a bad deal.

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After D.C. voters legalized marijuana in 2014, Congress introduced a budget rider that restricted its commercialization — save for seven licensed dispensaries that are allowed to legally sell regulated marijuana. Others interested in profiting off the newly legal market were forced to find creative alternatives. A gray area in the regulations made one major alternative possible: An ounce or less of marijuana can change hands as long as no money, goods or services are exchanged. So some shops, often called “I-71 compliant” — after the ballot initiative that legalized the drug — interpreted that to mean they could sell other products and throw in cannabis as a “gift.”

Enter the currency of crap: Stickers, purchased for $30, crowd the homes of frequent buyers. T-shirts with shop logos sit musty in drawers. Keychains and rubber bracelets clutter trash cans. For most buyers, the tokens are a formality.

“It’s kind of like the toy in the Cracker Jacks, right?” says I-71-compliant shop owner Darel Dawson. “You buy the Cracker Jacks, you get the toy. And in this case, the toy is cannabis.”

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Some sellers, like Gifted Curators in Adams Morgan and Legacy DC on U and 14th streets, have found methods that all but bypass the gifting economy. As two of the biggest names in the I-71-compliant cannabis market, they each sell paintings in their shops, many sourced from local artists. Customers more interested in acquiring cannabis purchase “digital art” that is redeemable by messaging an order number to an email address on the receipt — but most don’t ever do so. A recent visitor said he’s bought from the shop for years but redeemed his art only once.

“I don’t even remember what it was,” said the patron, who declined to give his name. (Another D.C. disconnect: Though pot is legal and perfumes the air in every quadrant of the city, there is still a taboo around admitting cannabis use. The substance remains illegal at the federal level, and the federal workers who make up D.C.’s backbone remain subject to the government’s Drug-Free Workplace Program.)

D.C. shops have, in recent years, become increasingly abstract with their gifting programs. House of Herbs in Columbia Heights, for instance, promotes a “body healing experience” that is gifted with the sale of herbal tea. Hidden Gym in Logan Circle sells workout plans — perhaps to work off the extra calories from ensuing munchies. The mobile delivery service Dreamy DC sells motivational speeches, with quotes attributed (with varying levels of accuracy) to Henry Ford (“Those who think they can, and those who think they can’t … they are probably right”) and Albert Einstein (“Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid”). The speeches come in a variety of lengths, including “Zen” ($60) and, for people who need more, uh, speech, “Power” ($360).

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Experiences with a cannabis “gift” are also on the market. Elevated Lounge in Glover Park sells tickets to a guided tour around the monuments. Ticket holders to these “elevated tours” are offered pre-rolled cannabis joints to consume before the trip, though not at the monuments themselves. Talk about higher learning.

The gifting loophole isn’t limited to bricks-and-mortar or delivery shops. The I-71 Committee, a lobbying group of stakeholders and shop owners aiming to pass legislation to license the I-71 market for recreational use, is hosting a bar-crawl-inspired “canna-crawl” on April 20. Tickets, which sell for $4.20, will get patrons gifts at each of the 11 stores involved in the committee.

I-71 gifting is, for many, a tedious workaround. But where some sellers monetized a passion for cannabis, others used cannabis to monetize their passions.

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Quartz Bailey ran a thrift shop on Instagram when she was approached by her now-business partners with the idea to stand out among sellers by combining efforts with an I-71-compliant cannabis gifting outfit called Cheeba. Now a year into operations, the store, which is located in Navy Yard, sells secondhand clothing in its front section and gifts marijuana in its speakeasy-style backroom.

“Some people come in and think they’re in the wrong location or wonder why they’re ID’d,” Bailey says. “It’s nice to get your free gift and have an item that you actually use. You can wear the clothing that you receive, and then you have your cannabis as well.”

It’s a deviation from the token economy D.C. buyers are familiar with; part of Cheeba’s revenue is reinvested into the thrift store to expand the clothing selection. The backroom, which is retro-themed with a dart board and ’90s movie posters and accessed through a bookshelf that doubles as a door, sells Rubik’s Cubes, Slinkys and Uno cards for customers who don’t want to sift through clothes.

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But, Bailey says, “I love when customers come in and say, ‘I really came in here for the I-71 gifting, but I found a new thrift shop that I love.’”

I-71-compliant gifting provided Bailey’s thrifting business a storefront it had no plans to otherwise acquire. But Dawson, owner of Adams Morgan’s Peace in the Air and president of the I-71 Committee, opened his shop specifically to fund his creative ventures. He’s a visual artist, musician and founder of clothing brand Grindstone, which has been in operation for 25 years. But he struggled to reach a broader audience, especially for his musical pursuits.

“We wanted to find a bigger buzz,” he said. “No pun intended.”

At a funk parade several years ago, Dawson started offering pre-rolled joints free with the purchase of a CD. It helped him stand out from the crowd. And it spawned the idea to open an I-71-compliant shop that sold digital music; buyers purchase cards with QR codes that lead to streaming platforms or private listening links. Dawson, who also performs under the name Grindstone, gained so much traction that he started a record label that represents himself, plus rappers Sir E.U and Pinky KillaCorn.

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“It’s through this shop that a lot of our current fans even know about us,” Dawson said. “For one platform to build another, that was just a beautiful manifestation of what this type of gifting process can create in terms of your tribe.”

Peace in the Air also sells Grindstone clothing and art. It’s a hub for Dawson’s “Black Smoke Podcast.” The shop hosts events like silent discos and brings together a community of people interested in art, fashion and music.

“Cannabis did that,” Dawson says. “To have all that, and to not be a place where people are hiding, it’s almost like a dream come true.”

Much of D.C.’s cannabis culture, it turns out, is like a dream. One where you might fork over $100 for a keychain or a mysterious QR code and still walk away happy. Or maybe just confused.

Falcigno says she was mostly turned off by her cannabis gifting experience in 2019; for the rest of her summer in Washington, she purchased her cannabis the old-fashioned way.

“It was a really quirky way of going about it,” she says. “It was a wink-wink, nod-nod situation that took me two minutes to understand what was actually going on. … I was just like, I’ll get it through someone I know.”

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