1,000s of marijuana domain names registered in US


28 Oct 2010

More than 1,000 marijuana-related internet domain names have been snapped up as California, US, readies for the potential legalisation of the narcotic.

A former narcotics officer has been named as one of the busy ‘internet landgrabbers’ accumulating domain names for the drug in the hope that it becomes legalised, according to a New York Times article.

California could be the first US state to allow the legal possession and sale of marijuana (although 14 states have legalised medicinal use of the drug) and the names such as icecreammarijuana.com and marijuanapastry.com have been snapped up in expectation of a positive outcome.

High expectations

An alternative to selling the drug, the owners of the web domains, hope that there will one day be a demand for web sites that sell the drug so they can sell on the domain names or operate a business through them.

According to the New York Times, the ‘landgrabbers’ are utilising slang names such as ‘bud’, ‘weed’ and ‘reefer’ in their domain name titles to attract customers and expect that a more lenient approach to the narcotic might send people online for their purchases in future.