It had to happen, and now it has: a social networking website for medical marijuana smokers.
Do you use Facebook mainly for chatting online about cannabis? Do you love it when you get a barrage of moronic “420 alert” status updates each afternoon? Are you hoping to connect directly with “experienced growers” and a “panel of experts” about all things pot-related?
Then look no further than WeedPals.
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Neither the company's website nor the press release we received provides
any information about the company's ownership. In fact there's not even
an email address on the “Contact Us” page, just a form to submit online
queries, so for all we know this could be some kind of eloborate
government conspiracy to glean proprietary information from pot smokers
for use in some unspecified future crackdown.
According to a recent piece on WeedPals by William Breathes, the marijuana reporter for our sister paper Westword, most of the folks who are chatting online are from California. Breathes reports that the website's main attraction seems to be providing a new and 420-friendly forum for folks who aren't comfortable enthusing on Facebook about their favorite new ganja strain. The website he adds, “is so similar to Facebook that the layout and even color scheme mirror the social networking giant.”
The few unique features it does offer, says Breathes, include a “community shout box” which allows you to post a comment visible not just to your friends but everyone using the site, and a “dislike” button, something which Facebook has scrupulously avoided. It's too early to speculate whether WeedPals will grow large enough to become the next Weedmaps or Weedtracker, but Breathes reports a rather lonely vibe. So far, he says, he's the only person on his news feed and only has one friend.
Award-winning investigative journalist Nick Schou is Editor of OC Weekly. He is the author of Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb (Nation Books 2006), which provided the basis for the 2014 Focus Features release starring Jeremy Renner and the L.A. Times-bestseller Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s Quest to bring Peace, Love and Acid to the World, (Thomas Dunne 2009). He is also the author of The Weed Runners (2013) and Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood (2016).