The proud owner, 21-year-old Kenny Kemp, is sole heir to hundreds of millions of dollars and a passionate stoner whose support of the functional glass art industry provides a needed infusion of legally acquired money. On a warm evening in the middle of January, Kemp handed out bottles of water and offered his guests the opportunity of a lifetime: to take hit after hit of hash oil off of one-of-a-kind glass pipes worth tens of thousands of dollars each.
The skyrocketing value of glass pipes isn’t simply a result of smokers and dealers’ red-eyed awe at their growing complexity and beauty. Selling marijuana is easier than it used to be, but it’s still pretty hard. Even if you manage to coax the dankest resin out of your female plants, grease the palms of whoever is controlling your state’s cannabis licenses, and build up a loyal customer base, you can’t legally do much with your rapidly accumulating stacks of cash. Not in Colorado, not in Washington, not anywhere. As long as the federal government considers the drug illegal, most banks don’t want to go anywhere near legal pot profits, because even state and community banks in places where the drug is recreationally or medically legal are licensed and overseen by federal institutions.
More than simply works of art, status-affirming trophies, or ways to get high, custom glass pipes have become ways for marijuana entrepreneurs shut out of legitimate financial institutions to invest their otherwise untouchable cash.
Most transactions involving bongs and rigs, which look like bongs but are used for vaporizing concentrates, happen off the books, among friends, at trade shows, or between connoisseurs who meet online. Then, anyone who paid five figures for a pipe using drug money, including dealers in states where weed is very illegal and businessmen in states with medical or recreational cannabis laws, can resell the same pipe with all of the appropriate receipts, paperwork, and taxes. Presto, change-o: Now the money is clean.
“You can use [glass] to launder money,” said one California businessman who deals in marijuana concentrates, showing BuzzFeed News his collection. “You go to a gallery, see something for thirty thousand bucks, make a deal, and then sell it off and just make a stipulation that whoever pays you pays with a check. I could trade half of these pipes within a day or two, if I wanted to.”
(Due to the quasi-legal nature of their businesses and financial practices, almost all of the marijuana merchants interviewed for this story asked to be anonymous.)
The skyrocketing value of glass pipes isn’t simply a result of smokers and dealers’ red-eyed awe at their growing complexity and beauty. Selling marijuana is easier than it used to be, but it’s still pretty hard. Even if you manage to coax the dankest resin out of your female plants, grease the palms of whoever is controlling your state’s cannabis licenses, and build up a loyal customer base, you can’t legally do much with your rapidly accumulating stacks of cash. Not in Colorado, not in Washington, not anywhere. As long as the federal government considers the drug illegal, most banks don’t want to go anywhere near legal pot profits, because even state and community banks in places where the drug is recreationally or medically legal are licensed and overseen by federal institutions.
More than simply works of art, status-affirming trophies, or ways to get high, custom glass pipes have become ways for marijuana entrepreneurs shut out of legitimate financial institutions to invest their otherwise untouchable cash.
Most transactions involving bongs and rigs, which look like bongs but are used for vaporizing concentrates, happen off the books, among friends, at trade shows, or between connoisseurs who meet online. Then, anyone who paid five figures for a pipe using drug money, including dealers in states where weed is very illegal and businessmen in states with medical or recreational cannabis laws, can resell the same pipe with all of the appropriate receipts, paperwork, and taxes. Presto, change-o: Now the money is clean.
“You can use [glass] to launder money,” said one California businessman who deals in marijuana concentrates, showing BuzzFeed News his collection. “You go to a gallery, see something for thirty thousand bucks, make a deal, and then sell it off and just make a stipulation that whoever pays you pays with a check. I could trade half of these pipes within a day or two, if I wanted to.”
(Due to the quasi-legal nature of their businesses and financial practices, almost all of the marijuana merchants interviewed for this story asked to be anonymous.)
Unlike flashy cars or mansions, pipes are subtle, keeping nosy neighbors unaware of your growing wealth. Plus, the value of glass can fluctuate dramatically, making it easier to conceal what’s really happening. Some pieces worth $2,000 just a few years ago are now worth $10,000.
“A lot of people like to buy up glass companies because it’s really hard for the government to see, to understand it,” said Phil Martin, one of the partners who runs Moxie 710, an L.A.-based seeds and extracts company. “They don’t understand that you can buy glass really cheap and then sell it for a high price — they just don’t understand it — so it’s a lot easier for people to put their money in there, launder it, and get it legally back out of the glass company. And that happens a lot.”
Kemp has an extensive, legally paid for collection of pipes, pendants, marbles, and tubes featuring psychedelic swirls, fantastical creatures, skulls, and nostalgic references to Nintendo characters. When you’re hanging out in his mother’s basement, you can smoke out of a black Glock, a bear shaped like a honey container, or a monkey in a suit smoking a cigarette and holding a banana like a gun.
But Kemp acknowledges that he’s not the typical customer when it comes to five-figure pipes, in that he doesn’t work in the weed industry.
“The demographic that does buy [glass] usually has money that’s not the cleanest,” he said. “How are you not gonna spend a lot of money on [glass], when you have so much [cash]? Like how are you going to wash it out?”
Just as in cannabis itself, the market for pipes has changed considerably in the past few years alone. Back in 2011, a top glassblower named Scott Deppe told the makers of the pipe-art documentary Degenerate Art that the most expensive piece he’d ever sold had been $18,000. A few months ago, Deppe posted on his Instagram feed a green skull pipe covered in gold-encrusted pot leaves priced at $100,000.
Source: http://www.buzzfeed.com
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