Why Does Buying Weed—and Other Drugs—Feel So Weird These Days? (2025)

This isChecking Out, a column about how we shop, what we buy, and how it all makes us feel. Email tips and ideas tochecking.out@slate.com.

Before recreational marijuana went legal in California, you could find black-market dispensaries selling the stuff anyway. Even though the weed was fine, the experience was lacking. “The black market truly felt that way. It felt like what it was,” interior designer Kim Myles remembers. “You walked in—you were in a man cave, with a two-door buzz system. You felt like a criminal.”

Myles loves weed, and she wanted better for herself and her fellow enthusiasts. When she was living in Los Angeles during that pre-legalization period in the early 2010s, she was always on the lookout for dispensaries that provided a more intentional atmosphere. “The ones that I loved were the ones that understood that I was about to drop serious coin, that I was interested and curious about the product,” she said. “An environment that spoke to a retail experience, not a criminal enterprise.”

Myles was an HGTV personality with years of interior design experience. And in 2022, she launched a dispensary makeover series, High Design, on Discovery+, just as legal weed was going mainstream. She traveled the country, helping mom-and-pop shops redesign their spaces to compete in a booming cannabis marketplace newly flush with corporate money. In the years leading up to her show launch, nearly half the states in the country legalized recreational use, but at independent stores and big chains alike, Myles found that the vibes hadn’t much improved beyond the black-market man caves of yore.

There were the occasional high-end spots. But at the average dispensary, “it’s cold and a little sketchy. The design does not feel considered,” Myles said. “If this is retail, which is what we’re saying, and it’s competitive, which is what we know—then what the hell?”

As weed legalization swept the country over the past decade, with psychedelic mushrooms slowly following behind, it seemed for a moment that purchasing drugs would be seamlessly integrated into the rest of our consumer lives. Instead—and despite Myles’ efforts—no matter where you live and how legal it is, the practice of buying drugs still feels trapped in a liminal zone between normal shopping and under-the-table commerce.

Buying legal weed can still make you feel like a criminal: Depending on the dispensary, you may have to talk to a bouncer, get buzzed in, traverse a metal detector, or pay through a weird “cashless ATM” system or bank transfer. The branding and names (Mr. Green, ReLeaf, Star Buds) seem generated by a stoner A.I. The store windows are blacked out, like you’re entering the adult section of a video store. Unless you spend a lot of time in vape shops and rest stops, it’s an order of magnitude seedier than any other establishment you regularly enter.

Meanwhile, in a strange paradox, the experience of buying illegal drugs has never been more user-friendly. Ketamine companies are advertising on Instagram, ready to send a trip directly to your door. (Technically, the pricey lozenges and injectables are for legal medical use in at-home therapy, but no one’s going to stop you from taking them to the club.) Dealers are sending out multipage menus on Signal, offering options that were unavailable to casual consumers a decade ago. No longer must you settle for whatever pouch of powder or crumbling fungi was left in your dealer’s stash. Now, you can choose from multiple varieties of cocaine—priced according to strength—alongside ayahuasca microdose capsules, GLP-1 weight loss drugs, and mushroom chocolates crafted by chefs formerly employed at Michelin-starred restaurants.

“Drug delivery services have definitely gotten more organized, thanks to different sorts of advancements in encryption and apps, and competition from different services,” said Michelle Lhooq, who reports on drug culture for her Substack, Rave New World. “If you buy drugs on a Telegram group in Berlin, the menus are, like, 50 items long. It’s insane.”

The difficulty of buying recreational drugs used to add to the fun of getting your hands on something you couldn’t purchase at a cash register. “The buying experience is an integral part of the drug experience. It’s part of the thrill and the pleasure,” Lhooq said. There were the safe and boring drugs you could get at the pharmacy, and then there were the illicit substances that carried a bit of risk and mystery along with their more potent effects. If some buyers experienced a bit of cultural dissonance in their purchase and consumption—how many clean-eating wellness freaks have snorted goddess-knows-what manufactured in Gaia-knows-where out of baggies that have passed through a stranger’s rectum?—that was just part of the bargain.

Today, we’re in an era of unprecedented drug availability, which has given rise to a brand-new gray area of aesthetic contradictions. Legal drug businesses still convey a whiff of criminality. Illegal enterprises increasingly display a veneer of legitimacy. And corporate money has given a professional sheen to potentially harmful substances that are barely regulated at all.

Take nitrous oxide, for example. Once offered only in medical containers meant for the dentist’s office and small canisters meant for making whipped cream, the gas became available in giant tanks sold at smoke shops just a few years ago, providing a cheap, quick, inhalable rush. Now produced in a range of candy-esque flavors by shrewd companies that go viral on TikTok, it’s a favorite drug among teens. Though many states limit its purchase to adults, there is only one major constraint on the sale of nitrous: Manufacturers and vendors must market the gas for culinary purposes only and pretend they don’t know consumers are huffing the gas to get high. (Obviously, stoners are using that tank of blue-raspberry Galaxy Gas to make paprika espuma.)

Other possibly unsafe drugs share nitrous oxide’s winning recipe: a combination of flashy, recognizable branding and minimal restrictions. Drinks spiked with kratom and tianeptine—an opioid that can lead to serious health problems and fatal overdoses—are displayed like packs of gum at gas stations and head shops, engendering trust in consumers who may not know they’re ingesting potentially addictive substances.

These drugs feel appropriately monitored by health authorities, because they have recognizable logos and are sold alongside items like cigarettes, whose addictive and toxic properties are met with commensurate regulations. But even though the Food and Drug Administration says tianeptine cannot be sold as a dietary supplement or medical product, its enforcement mechanisms are limited. No one’s dispatching investigators to every bodega in New Jersey, which means the drug that began as a French antidepressant is a snap to find in any old convenience store, often mixed with synthetic cannabinoids.

And yet, compare the ease of buying a tianeptine shot with the hoops one must jump through to snag a legal pre-roll of marijuana—or even a box of Sudafed. On access alone, one would reasonably assume the shot is safer to use, which is not the case at all.

If the buying experience sends the consumer a message about the product, what are legal weed dispensaries saying? Myles sees too many slapped-together businesses using the same cookie-cutter template: a fake foliage wall, green paint, a green LED faux-neon sign that says something like “Stay High.” The bouncer is intimidating, the attendants shunt customers to digital kiosks, and there are no attractive, informative displays for browsing. Unlike almost any other store where buyers come in to spend hundreds of dollars, the user experience—and, by extension, the user—feels like an afterthought.

Myles doesn’t fully fault dispensary owners for these shortcomings. “I always say dispensaries are the turducken of retail,” she said. “It’s high regulations stuffed into high security, jammed into heavily systems-based operations. And then you have to put a necklace on it to dress that bird up for retail.” There may not be a single other product on the market that has to be sold under such stringent conditions: the covered windows, the heavy security measures, the lack of actual products to see or smell, the rigid rules for who can touch it and how it can leave the store. With so many elements dispensary proprietors must budget and plan for, Myles said, “the first thing that’s gonna go is the design.”

Of course, some dispensaries have sunk good money into glamorizing the act of buying weed, hoping to attract higher-end clients. Architectural Digest’s list of “The Country’s Most Stylish Cannabis Dispensaries” lauds one shop in the Berkshires, clad in oak and marble, that “pays homage to Rome’s iconic Colosseo Quadrato” with 78 arched vitrines for product display. (Among the items available for purchase: a $1,500 Hermès ashtray and a tabletop lighter once owned by Jack Kerouac.) At the Woods in West Hollywood, which is part-owned by Woody Harrelson, smokers can lounge in mood-lit nooks around a lush garden with a koi pond. “It looks like a resort straight out of Bali,” Lhooq said.

But these playgrounds for the one percent and the dispensaries that feel like glorified bodegas are still largely selling the same products. To the extent that there is any disparity in weed quality—and, often, there’s not—it’s Whole Foods vs. Safeway, not Prada vs. Kohl’s. Items that are sold under completely different brand names may be identical white-label products manufactured by one of the many cannabis companies that now operate across state lines.

Then there’s the issue of figuring out if your local weed shop is even legal. During the first two years of New York’s legal weed era, thousands of fake dispensaries operated in New York City, brazenly flouting the law. There are thousands more operating across the country, often ignored by law enforcement and stocked with counterfeit off-brand weed labeled with recognizable, legal brand names.

There is also no guarantee that the stuff you’re getting from licensed, registered dispensaries is of any higher quality than illegal weed from black-market vendors. Even at legal establishments, the products may contain an alarming amount of pesticides, including prohibited chemicals and substances that aren’t explicitly banned but are known to be toxic. A Los Angeles Times analysis found that legal and illegal cannabis smoking products sold in California exhibited the same incidence of pesticide use, with the heaviest pesticide loads discovered in the legal products. California’s illicit marijuana deals still outpace legal sales, and a cannabis control agenttold NPR that even seasoned officers find it difficult to distinguish legal weed from the black-market stuff.

As of now, Oregon is the only state that has legalized psychedelic mushrooms for recreational use. But the contemporary shrooms landscape has a vibe similar to weed’s—the feeling of a legal gray zone, with an uneven buying experience that scrambles consumers’ calibration of trust and perception of risk. California vendors are all over the place—some only sell to people who attest that doing shrooms is part of their “religion,” while others vend at semi-secretive mushroom farmers markets. In Washington, D.C., psilocybin mushrooms are decriminalized, but they aren’t legal, either. That hasn’t stopped Cap & Stem, a brick-and-mortar shop offering psychedelic goodies, from openly advertising around the city with posters that beseech residents to “Eat the mushrooms. Go to the concert.”

Just as with weed, though, it can be impossible for the average mushroom consumer to ascertain exactly what’s in the product she bought, even if she got it at a storefront with a cash register and business license. Lhooq says smoke shops and black-market dispensaries, including those that seem legitimate, often sell a suite of products made to mimic natural drugs, containing the likes of delta-8—a psychoactive cannabinoid that can be chemically created from CBD—and the synthetic psychedelic 4-AcO-DMT. “They come under the guise of mushrooms and weed, but they’re different chemical compounds than what people would think they are,” Lhooq said. “There’s a little bit of subterfuge or trickery going on.”

If you’re lucky, that just means a drug that doesn’t deliver quite the same high as the real thing. But last year, dozens of people across the country who ate slickly branded Diamond Shruumz products—whose tongue-in-cheek labels promise “great vibes” with a “powerful effect”—were hospitalized with seizures, respiratory failure, and other health problems. Three of them died. The products were recalled and tested; some contained toxic levels of muscimol, a component found in the poisonous Amanita muscaria mushroom, which is legal—and unregulated. Others contained compounds (such as 4-AcO-DMT and a prescription drug for nerve pain) that are not necessarily harmful on their own, but little research has been done on what happens when they are eaten together. The FDA issued what amounted to a shrug.

This incident underlines the potential hazards of the strange, liminal state of drug buying today. Companies that produce legal weed, mushrooms, kratom, or any of the plethora of bodega drugs could easily disband and rebrand—or just stop responding to complaints—if they’re found to be delivering an inferior or dangerous product. Little recourse is available to unhappy customers.

Back in the days when all your drugs were equally illegal, when they came from the stoner in your college dorm or a career dealer, they contained an implied mandate of caveat emptor. Because dealers rise and fall by their reputations, there was a loose trust that they wouldn’t try to get one over on you—but there was also no expectation that the products would be unadulterated, precisely dosed, or labeled with health warnings. Today, as buyers increasingly get their drugs in professional packaging from seemingly aboveboard businesses, that healthy skepticism is fading, just as the need for it is increasing. Thanks to heavy regulations, a punishing business model, and market consolidation among giant cannabis corporations, many dispensaries for legal marijuana will continue to lack the warmth and ease of other buying experiences in standard retail, while unregulated, familiar-feeling shops sell the actually dangerous stuff. Consumers have been conditioned to judge the quality and reliability of a product by the way it’s bought and sold. In today’s drug landscape, those instincts no longer apply.