I'm not really a drug user. I will have the occasional puff off a joint at a party but I have never actually purchased any for myself. I do know quite a few people that have weed as a regular part of their lives though and in Vietnam is has always been one of those things that is technically illegal, but the police don't seem to ever do anything about it in regards to foreigner use of it. They have a similar attitude towards the casinos that are strictly off-limits to anyone Vietnamese but if you are not Vietnamese they roll out the red carpet for you.
There was even a place right here in the neighborhood that I live in called "Smokey's" that had a neon sign of a marijuana leaf in the front window. While the place was called a "cafe" they didn't have any drinks for sale in there and it was pretty obvious what the place was for.
I have only been inside of Smokey's once and it was because a friend of mine was visiting and wanted to score some mary-jane. I went with him and it was a pretty straight-forward process. You didn't need to know a secret handshake or a password, you just said you wanted to get a bag and a bag you would get. They did have a rule though and that was that no Asians were allowed in the store that didn't work there. One of the people in my crew was from Singapore and they wouldn't let them inside even though they explained they were not Vietnamese. I guess that was one of the rules the police had in that they cannot even have the perception of selling to locals or the police would bust them. I was never told this, but that is what it seemed like.
Anyway, I was sitting with one of my friends after returning from Bangkok and he showed me a message about how all of the weed distributors were busted on the same night, the business owners were arrested (or so they say) and their operations were shut down.
I think this was always going to happen because there got to be too many dealers and some of the "companies" started to spray pain their contact advertisements on property that is not their own.
This one, like many of the others, got painted over and called a scam. I never used them but I had friends that did and they told me that it is not a scam. The process worked like this: You send them a TG message, they send you pics and prices and then they deliver it to you, often for cash in hand upon delivery.
Sounds to me like something that would be extremely easy for the police to bust if they actually wanted to and while it took years for it to happen, that is precisely what went down in the past week or so.
I am only familiar with weedCatShop and Rec420weed.com not because I use/ used them, but because their adverts are sprayed all over town.
They are not at all discreet about what they do here but there is no online store, just a Telegram contact and from what I have been told, they respond to just anyone that send them a message that states they are interested in a purchase. This is not a good business model for someone that is doing something that is illegal but I guess they were able to get away with it for a long time.
According to a friend of mine that regularly partakes in marijuana, all of the telegram channels went dark on the same day and Smokey's and the place across the street from it that always smelled like weed from afar, have been shut down.
While I do think that marijuana should be legal, I can't really say that I am disappointed that these places all got shut down. you can't really win the war on drugs and while this might be a temporary setback for the businesses that were involved, they were seriously pressing their luck by having these services in the first place. When I was in college and high school, the dealers I knew were shady, word-of-mouth, type of individuals that would only deal with you if they knew you personally.
Going commercial in a country that is very clear about how it is illegal is pretty stupid if you ask me.
Vietnam's tourism is exploding at the moment and I think they would rather preserve their family-friendly image and not make this turn into Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand, which are places that everyone knows you just go there and can get weed and in the case of Laos and Cambodia, you can get anything else as well. I think this might be the driving factor behind why this coordinated strike against the distributors happened all at the same time.
I won't miss it and I find it rather stupid that a drug dealer would advertise by vandalizing a piece of property with their real contact information. The vandalizing is a crime in itself and now if they wanted to, the police can charge them with all of those as well.
Good riddance I say. The people who want weed are still going to be able to find it, they will just have to go the more conventional route of finding a shady dealer and getting it that way - the way it has always been done.