BY: DANIEL KORN
When I was in high school, there was a popular service called Dial-A-Bottle. You’d call up the company, tell them what booze you wanted, and they’d have a guy drive over to your location and drop it off for a small service fee. More importantly, they never carded, so it was an easy way for the underage crowd to get their drink on. My friends, all of them potheads, remarked how they wished there was a similar service for weed.
Well, if they lived in California, their wishes would have been granted. Meadow – a start-up based in San Francisco – is a service that delivers marijuana to people in the Bay Area, provided they hold a license for the medicinal variety. For eligible customers, ordering is as simple as visiting the website or opening up the app, entering a ZIP code, choosing a depository and strain of weed, and checking out.
Your pot will show up within an hour. And if you don’t currently have a medical marijuana license but feel like you should, you can use Meadow to schedule an in-home doctor’s evaluation for $100
As an article on Slate Moneybox notes, Meadow isn’t the first app of its type, and faces competitors both in the Bay Area and other American cities such as Los Angeles and Seattle. But having just received $120,000 in seed money from start-up accelerator Y Combinator, they’re primed to become the most ubiquitous. Their next goal is to expand to the entire state of California, which, with its estimated 682,814 medical marijuana patients, is thought to grow and consume the most marijuana in America. Meadow also assists dispensaries by selling them software that helps them manage patients and ensure that they follow proper California state law.
As marijuana legislation gets more lax in North America, apps like Meadow are going to be increasingly important for bridging the gap between dispensaries and the average citizen. Most dispensaries are small businesses that lack reliable tools that would allow them to connect to the public more easily, which is where Meadow comes in.
Acting as a feedback loop, easy-to-use apps also gives the burgeoning marijuana industry a more legitimate face, which helps it gain public support and legislation to get to a place where dispensaries can become actual businesses.
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