By Peter Hecht, Sacramento Bee

The evening’s first customer emerged sleepy-eyed from the doorway of his apartment near Sacramento State for his marijuana concentrates: 3 grams each of strawberry, banana and pear flavors. He had few words for the delivery driver who handed him a white bag containing the order. Their transaction lasted mere seconds.

The pot-delivery business is booming in California. Using cars instead of dispensary counters, small marijuana startups have proliferated in recent years, serving a diverse customer base that includes homebound medical patients as well as people in communities where dispensaries are banned or few in number.

The estimated hundreds of mobile services for medical marijuana are operating in a largely unregulated sector of the cannabis economy, and state lawmakers and officials in cities such as Sacramento are scrambling to draft rules for the businesses or seeking ways to close them down.

Two leading online pot-consumer sites, Weed Maps and Wheres Weed?, each list 110 marijuana delivery services in Sacramento and nearby communities, including in Yolo, El Dorado and Placer counties.

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