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Comment by chrisabrams | Hacker News Reader

As a NJ resident, I've been curious to see what the next Governor would do to fix the broke state's budget. Interesting this article doesn't discuss the economic benefit that would result from it. Right now state & local taxes are just being raised each year instead.

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There are probably diminishing returns to legalization + taxation as novelty wears off and neighboring states follow suit.

How would neighboring states' follow-on legalization diminish tax returns over time? Washington has posted $280 million in tax revenues so far, and Oregon $85 million. Neither seems to threaten the other -- demand is pretty much ubiquitous.

If NJ doesn't require a NJ ID in order to buy in-state, the differences are huge. NJ is in a much denser area than Washington, Oregon, or Colorado.

Boston, DC, Philadelphia, and Baltimore are all reasonable drives away and NYC is right next door.

It would be quite ironic for NJ to pass it, and watch my NYC friends who said they would "never visit Jersey" all the sudden find a reason to come...

I know the Netherlands has had issues with drug tourism after their legalization efforts. I wonder if Jersey won't have similar issues. Other states that have legalized have been protected from this by geography, but Jersey City is smack in the middle of a gigantic greater metropolitan area and mass transit system that spans multiple states.

But the plan is to delay actual legalization till 2019 (the Gov just wants the legislation passed in his first 100 days), so presumably they're conscious that legalization will bring about a bunch of logistic issues like this that need to be worked out.

Amsterdam and Jersey City aren't really similarly situated. Drug tourism comes with some problems, and if you can get beautiful canals, the Dutch Masters, and Anne Frank House tourists instead you'd much prefer those. But if that's not an option drug tourism is probably better than nothing. If not to JC, which is gentrifying rapidly, then certainly to Newark which is just a couple of stops further on the PATH.

Boston, DC, Philadelphia, and Baltimore are all reasonable drives away and NYC is right next door.

not to nitpick, but Philadelphia is just as close as NYC (maybe even closer) I routinely joke that Philadelphia and NYC are part of New Jersey, usually to upset citizens of said cities. Then I point out that the culture in those cities is much more like NJ than the rest of their own states.

I grew up in NJ - I'd do the same thing to rile people up, but deep down I knew: South Jersey is part of Philly, and anything north of Mercer Co is basically NY. Except for the shore counties - they hate all of us equally. So I consider them to be New Yorkers out of spite.

Most of the "hate" is just as superficial as programmers teasing people that use other languages, or sysadmins trash talking other operating systems. I can see the Walt Whitman bridge from the end of my road, and I have made friends with plenty of people from North, and Central Jersey.

...Another fun one is to pretend that Central Jersey doesn't exist, or to claim to be a proud Shoobie (or Benny) to the shore people :-)

Totally. Jersey Pride is actually a unifying force. Kind of like how we all pretend to not like Seaside and Wildwood.

Legality aside, it would seem pointless to drive to another state to purchase a similar product for marginally less money than available to you locally.

Many cannabis products aren't possible to produce without a legal framework.

Say you want a consistently dosed 5mg edible. Does your state have a robust cannabis oil extraction and distillation infrastructure? Does it have rapid, reliable testing to quantify dosage? Probably not.

Maybe you prefer a live resin extract produced from fresh cut flower. You need to have refrigerated trucks in the field when you harvest, a -20C refrigerated room for product storage, and a processing lab. This kind of product is highly sought after but rare in the black market.

There's as much depth to the cannabis industry as there is to alcohol, tobacco, or food. It just wasn't clear to people when all they could purchase was the equivalent of moonshine.

New Jersey does have the country's only coca leaf processor. They know how to handle shipments and regulation of controlled substances.

People do it all the time. The NH state liquor stores do an incredible amount of out-of-state business. And even more more mundane purchases, the arbitrage in sales tax is significant enough that many people plan around trips to NH to buy bigger-ticket items.

http://wealthalchemyblog.com/2012/10/taxes-matter-14-cross-b...

That was a great article, I knew states competed in attracting businesses, I didn’t realize retail competition would be so large as well.

It helps when a state border is a day trip drive away from a major metro area.

The largest grossing pot store in WA state, prior to legalization in OR, wasn't in the states largest city of Seattle. It was located in Vancouver, just a few miles from Portland.

There is definitely a benefit to being the first mover in a region. You are correct that states will still see significant tax revenues and jobs that persist.

Right, because Seattle probably had lots of smaller neighborhood shops, whereas the "destination" shops in Vancouver were likely bigger and closer to the freeway.

Not that Vancouver doesn't have a decently-sized population in its own right, but it only stands to reason that the smaller city would have fewer, busier shops serving tourists from across the river.

Seattle didn't though, largely because licensing was completely bottlenecked. The city itself took a while to permit more than a handful of shops. I don't know the numbers, but given that Seattle is a bigger city than Portland, I wonder what the data normalized to shops per capita - hypothetically considering Vancouver to be part of Portland, as it probably would be if there wasn't a state line in the way!

Ah, I didn't realize that. I've been away for a number of years, and on my last visit, there were already quite a few.

I'm not a Seattle resident, so I could be way off, but it was something I went out of my way to observe. We were spending a week every summer in Seattle, and Washington had legalized while my home state of Maine was debating it. I remember in 2015, licensing was still an issue in Seattle and there were like ~3 dispensaries in the city, none of them downtown. I think there was one down in the ID, one a bit north, but nothing centrally located. Then in 2016 there were at least a couple that popped up closer in.

I tend to think that cannabis is pretty harmless for adults and I voted for legalization in Maine, but I'm okay with a slow rollout. There's a whole generation of folks out there that think the stuff makes you crazy, so there's some benefit to slow uptake.

This is what a lot of people miss. There isn’t much of a “honeymoon” period to cannabis legalization. There’s already a LOT of people consuming illegally right now. They will buy it through legal means in due time. They will still continue consuming. And there’s a LOT of users. It’s a pretty well established, stable market once the customer starts buying.

This is not just the sale. There is a whole industry behind pot.

I know lawyers, architects, energy managers, etc working now in the weed industry. It is big business.

This transcendes simply sales. And NJ would be regional leader.

And perhaps reduce some prison costs if NJ has many pot offenders.

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