By the 1930's, the subculture had rooted itself in Harlem, where three reefers could be had for fifty cents and white kids flocked from around the city to partake. In 1939, with the assistance of the police department, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia commissioned a famous study of marijuana use in Harlem that, when finally released in 1944, estimated there to be 500 "tea-pads" in the neighborhood. The tea-pads were direct descendants of the 1883 hashish parlor, outfitted with comfortable furniture, low lighting and victrolas playing jazz. The mysterious reefer was also hawked by street peddlers in the Broadway vicinity between 42nd and 59th Streets, the La Guardia report divulged. One could buy it in certain bars and restaurants given a proper introduction, and terminal porters ("mainly Negroes") would often provide the link between seeker and peddler. Some theater employees were suspected of hustling, and although its distribution in dance halls was not confirmed, the smoke billowing above musicians and dancers suggested as much. The report concluded that marijuana was a safe, non-addictive, inexpensive substance which "creates a definite feeling of adequacy" in its users. It was an anathema of a diagnosis for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, whose Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger steamrolled over the information in his nearly single-handed crusade to criminalize pot.

Delivery services appeared years later as an inadvertent byproduct of a different drug epidemic. In 1984, New York police commissioner Ben Ward and then-U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani flooded the crack and heroin-infested Lower East Side with cops in Operation Pressure Point. Caught in the net which makes no distinction between so-called hard and soft drugs, were hundreds of weed spots -- the sparsely stocked bodegas, headshops, street corners and park benches that headquartered small-time pot dealers. Operation Pressure Point was deemed initially successful, producing 14,360 arrests in its first eighteen months and netting $3 million in seized assets, and similar police saturation was soon applied to pockets of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, upper Manhattan and Washington Square Park. As pot sources were bulldozed along with their hard drug counterparts, a window of opportunity was opened for delivery services.

Every thread of inquiry eventually leads to Michael Cesa, an eccentric East Village type who became notorious in the 1980's as the "Pope of Pot." Though not the first to operate a delivery service, he was certainly the most visible. Cesar employed over a dozen bike messengers and telephone salespeople. He grossed around $10 million a year by police estimates. His toll-free number "1-800-WANT-POT" was a downtown legend if for no other reason than because he did little to keep it secret -- he announced it on the Howard Stern show and handed out business cards at the Village Halloween Parade. As the self-appointed high priest of the 'Church of the Realized Fantasy,' he dispensed joints as ceremonial sacrament in Central Park's sheep meadow. Aron Kay, the former Yippieprankster who made his name throwing pies in the faces of public officials, met Cesar for the first time at a party in the Village. "He had just opened a shop at 17 First Avenue and they delivered all over the city on bicycles from there. They were delivering to UN Diplomats who would ship to their home countries in protected UN bags," Kay told me. "People say that there are two kinds of pot dealers -- those who need a forklift, and those who don't. This was a forklift situation."

Cesar flirted openly with the law and therefore established a revolving door for himself in jail. He was convicted of drug-related charges three times in the 80's, serving two short sentences in state prison. When his New Jersey mansion was raided in 1990, he received a ten-count felony indictment that alleged the sale, distribution, and intent to sell marijuana. Shortly after his 1991 release, he died of liver cancer at the age of 52. By then, however, an entire method of marijuana distribution had taken hold in New York, thanks largely to Cesar's entrepreneurial precedent. "These people got marijuana delivered like most people send out for coffee," said one prosecutor of Cesar's clientele, and indeed, delivery services soon sprouted up to supply the high demand. Their stylish business cards circulate widely, edgy downtown magazines have extolled their favorite services, and the 1998 Tamra Davis' pot comedy Half Baked had Jeaneane Garofalo, Snoop Doggy Dogg and Willie Nelson doing cameos as delivery customers. I've heard the current number of services pegged between a few dozen and a few hundred, each one employing a small coterie of runners like myself who are out there every day, carrying what appear to be ordinary computer bags, backpacks and purses along the great anonymous artery that is the New York City sidewalk.

Next: continue with Jessica's Story of her Job.