One year into legal pot sales California doesn’t have expected bustling industry
latimes.com
latimes.com
I live in SF, where there are a variety of shops. The ones I walk by all seem clean, orderly, and well run. Certainly more so than some liquor stores I can think of. So I'm happy to have them as neighbors. That said, I understand why other cities would have been more reluctant to license. Not everybody needs or wants to be a pioneer.
If we're still having the same problems 5 years out, I'll be more concerned. But personally, I'm a big fan of subsidiarity, the principle that decisions should be made as low down in the power structure as possible. [1] That different people are deciding differently right now is how we'll learn the best ways to do it. There's no urgent problem here that requires a centralized solution.
Recreational pot sales is probably a pretty small issue in the scheme of things and will likely sort itself out eventually since there's money to be made. But the idea that local control is fundamentally a good thing seems pretty suspect to me based on how many examples there are of it going so badly.
The examples you raise seem to be ones where you're saying that local control is not consistent with resolution of the issue. So it seems like you're agreeing with the principle, not contradicting it.
Climate change and transit offer pretty clear examples where people have decided local control isn't sufficient, so they're resolving it at higher levels. See, e.g., the Paris accords, BART, and the various state and federal highway systems.
Housing is clearly more complicated, but it seems like the principle is often being applied there too. Most control is local, but where that doesn't work, we see attempts to resolve it at higher levels. E.g., California's recent battle over the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act and Prop 10.
Do you have an alternative principle in mind? If we don't start with the assumption that local control should be preferred, then what do you suggest instead? Historically it was the divine right of kings, which I'm not a fan of. And giving all power to the UN or the national government unless they decide otherwise also doesn't seem great.
On the other hand, some systems do just fine navigating a complex problem space by just solving large number of local optimization problems. See for example slime molds, which are colonies without centralized nervous system, yet manage to move and forage for sustenance successfully as long as the environment is solvable.
It's more efficient if everyone get's their own breakfast but the central bank should take care of the interest rate affecting the money that's used to buy the breakfast. Etc
The same principle as with for example right to vote with no voting place in N (for sufficiently large N) miles radius.
I think the total across all races in the entire county (school boards, ballot measures, multiple city councils, water districts, everything) was about $33 million for all candidates. SD County is so big that if it were a state it would be about 20th.
See for example — https://www.kpbs.org/news/2018/aug/10/latest-fundraising-num...
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/politics/sd-me-san...
That seems like a strong way to put it... How about "stripped of opportunities not taken away by the state"?
California didn't give anyone a "right" to buy/use weed, they just said they wouldn't stop you. Notably, it's still illegal at the federal level...
IDK if this mindset is widespread enough in California. But coincidentally such an approach does improve the bottom line of large / established sellers.
You can choose to heed their views or not, but they still get to vote the same as you.
Why would it take the ability to have a "100% mobile business" to make it a booming market?
I live in Vancouver and weed's been officially legal throughout the Canada for several weeks now. It's still relatively new but nothing noticeable has changed aside from fewer people discussing such a frivilous and previously mishandled issue. It's not perfect but far, far, far better than strict prohibition with draconian sentencing laws.
What bothers me the most about this story is how marijuana is supposedly 'legal' yet some locals seem Hell-bent on treating it like an illegal and necessarily dangerous. Instead of vocferiously refusing shops to open in a municipality you'd think the free market would be enough to determine where there's not enough demand for a product.
I guess if some people prefer being judgemental and pious to actually getting a handle on social issues that's their prerogative. It's a frustrating position to reason against, in fact that almost never enters the equation, but it sure seems to resonate with a lot of people.
It is still illegal at the federal level. There is nothing that stops the federal US government from throwing someone in jail for growing / transporting / using / processing payment for marijuana.
I cannot think of anything else that is illegal at the federal but legal at the state level, and has weird hand wavy aspects in front of it.
I always wondered about that. Has there been any chatter about someone trying to get a federal court to nullify the law? I have no idea how that can work.
The US has signed up to a treaty that requires us to treat marijuana as an illegal controlled substance. That requires an explicit act of Congress to abrogate, and no court is going to find otherwise.
It probably should, but you may be wrong about the weight of legal opinion: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/donald-trump-can-unila...
In any case, the relevant treaty is not self-executing, and there is no mechanism to force Congress to criminalize drugs if it chooses not to even without explicitly abrogating (or even the President unilaterally disavowing) the treaty. Foreign countries could try to bring a case against the US before the ICJ, but even if successful, that wouldn't actually force changes to domestic law.
This was the first result for both “drugs treaty” and “Narcotics treaty”.
Problem is, ever since Wickard v. Filburn decision, all that the federal government needs to do is to add "... in interstate commerce" in the text of the law, and it is magically constitutional. The words themselves have practically no meaning - in Wickard, the Supreme Court ruled that a person growing food for personal consumption is still "participating in interstate commerce", on the basis that they'd have to buy that food otherwise, and therefore affect market prices on it.
But the commenter is right about it being illegal at the federal level... and as a Schedule I drug on par with Heroine no less but more dangerous than Hydromorphone (HA!).
The Federal government can technically roll up and enforce the laws federally at any location they please but they don't have the budget or manpower for it. Unfunded mandates can't be enforced upon the lower levels of enforcement and they depend upon them for cooperation. They could technically have thrown the bulk of their enforcement budget into an early adopter but that would be playing whack-a-mole as others could crop up and openly defy them while they are busy there - all while 49 other states are complaining about there being way better uses of their resources than replacing every vice squad in California.
The federal government caused the problem in the first place in their adamant refusal to acknowledge reality with Schedule 1 classification - not just in assigning it to marijuana which trivially has medical uses but in that the very category is a tautology. We don't know if something has medicinal use until we try it in every application. For all we know even something horrific like krododil may be very good chemotherapy for treating specific kinds of tumors. Weaning off of heroin may well be the best approach to beating addiction - it is already accepted for nicotine in general practice! The specifics don't matter so much as the general point that Schedule 1's very existence is an outright tautology and illogical dogma.
They could have avoided the massive backlash and much of legalization movement's momentum being a serious thing by making Marijuana schedule 2. This isn't even something radical, not even decades ago - you have been able to find cocaine in ENT applications throughout the country perfectly legally given that there really is no better substance despite the known downsides.
The whole thing is fundamentally a failure state on the law. It is technically a solution in that it prevents enforcement of bad laws but it really highlights the systemic dysfunction and creates greater inconsistency. It is a matter of debate if being able to have this is a good thing or not.
I can think of one similar issue as well however that is even lower. The Sanctuary City "issue" (an emergent solution that some don't like) is a similar disconnect of high-level dogma colliding with and failing to respond to low-level reality - any significant urban police force knows they would have to be extremely stupid to have a zero-tolerance deportation policy when they depend upon the population for witnesses and crime reporting. It is beyond a matter of even demagogic politics locally while many above consider its state unacceptable.
TL;DR version - the law refused to bend so it broke instead.
Schedule 1 substance research has long had far more 'propaganda machine' orientation than science orientation however with the agenda transparently reflected in studies.
All of the giving spiders drugs studies to look at their webs while it may have some slight neurological value ignored the bleeding obvious with some examples like the 'caffeine' webs.
http://www.learning-mind.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/spid...
Of course those webs looked sparse, caffeine is a known neurotoxin to insects! That is why plants produce it in the first place and spiders wouldn't even have much reason to develop a resistance given most species have a carnivorous diet, their prey would have more of a reason to and prey that is dying of neurotoxin would be far less likely to survive to land in their web. Perhaps caffeine's inclusion among the study was a snide point on someone's part about the applicability of spider models to vertebrates.
Meanwhile they knew about MDMA use therapeutically yet it took to the 10's to start using it for PTSD again in clinical trials. Sorry lost generations of veterans - there was another war for you to be a casualty of.
It is still having politicians try to practice science - and I'm not sure how applicable those two are when they were dragged from them kicking and screaming essentially. It is still a political process instead of a scientific one.
Personally I think we as a society have demonstrated a considerable capacity for adaptation, so there's little to worry about, but my extended family certainly disagrees. There are a lot of other linked issues that operate similarly and it's a bit of a tragedy.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
It's ironic that for so many Americans the idea that people should be allowed to make their own choices would be such a tough sell...
Marijuana is illegal in the United States. There may not be state-level prohibition in some states, but that doesn't make it legal in those states, any more than the fact that individual states may not prohibit fraud against the US government makes such fraud legal in those states.
The federal policy against enforcing the existing federal criminal prohibition of marijuana against medical use that complies with state law is an unusual complication, but the criminal prohibition still applies even in those cases (particularly, should that policy be lifted by Congress tomorrow, all the crimes that occurred while it was in place could be prosecuted—and criminal and/or civil forfeiture associated with them pursued—because neither the crime nor it's punishments were removed, so no ex post facto issues would exist.) And it's not clear what the boundaries of that policy are, and, more importantly, it's not clear that anyone but Congress itself would have standing or an available remedy should the executive branch act in a manner that is arguably outside of the bounds of the policy.
https://www.straight.com/cannabis/1180771/evergreen-obtains-...
I thought you couldn't even be fined if carrying only enough for personal use.
I openly smoke marijuana in public places. Why?
It's a LOT LESS HARMFUL THAN SECOND HAND TOBACCO.
I see uninformed parents scowling at me for blowing marijuana smoke away from them while they are smoking cigarettes infront of their kids.
Anyways, if you see a guy smoking weed around Robson square, that's me.
I know I'm well into the minority on this one, but I think it's antisocial behavior to smoke anything where the general public will catch so much as a whiff of it and the people who knowingly do it are jerks, but for some reason this is very normalized behavior. I'm not anti-drug though; smoke whatever you want cloistered away from the public.
Then you can stay at home.
let them. I really don't give a shit if people think smoking weed in public is antisocial behavior lol
you aint seen nothing yet
Do you have a source to confirm that? I'd think it would be roughly similar: smoke of burning leaves.
Firefighters have above-average rates of cancer, including lung cancer. This suggests that inhaling lots of smoke from ANYTHING on the regular isn't good for you. Example: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/cancer/cancer-biggest-killer-...
However, it is not debatable that they are the primary causative agents in tobacco-derived cancers. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco-specific_nitrosamines
Burning known and non debatable evidence of toxic chemicals in tobacco leaves harvest curing.
Marijuana comes out ahead.
So much misinformation about drugs. Heroin is safer than alcohol if moderately consumed. Addiction wise, not so great. but Tobacco is said to be harder to quit than heroin.
I can attest to that.
You can't even get high from second hand marijuana smoke outside.
Hotboxing your car however, will get you high. Certainly better than being in a car with a tobacco enthusiast.
Considering that the cities that do allow rec cannabis include Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco and San Diego, the number of retail establishments seems very low even if they were limited to only these cities. Whats interesting is that California's licensing is done through their Food and Agriculture Department while Colorado's is done through the Department of Revenue.
Here in Sunny CO, the prop was a Constitutional Amendment, guaranteeing the right of each state citizen to grow and possess their own Marijuana, which lead to sales. -Only two cities (Colorado Springs and a mountain town IDK)- created local exemptions against retail sales. They are now suffering with badly damaged roads and limited tax revenues to fix them, compared to cities right next door that capture all the sales.
Hampered decriminalization does not rid us of the black market. The [THC] black market is _gone_ in CO because who needs it? Questionable products, limited availability, difficult logistics...no, you go to the local store and five minutes later can be higher than 5280'.
EDIT: As CP says, there were more than two cities banning sales. Actually a lot more than I knew. I'll stand by my conclusion though. The full list is here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:11yRzRk...
Limit any/all state subsidies for cities/counties that ban pot.
If you want money for roads/schools/etc... you can get it out of the pot fund, but you have to allow retails sales in your county to benefit.
Wtf is going on in California.
Forreal. As someone in Canada watching the weed thing play out, my prediction is that Cali would legalize and then utterly dominate.
Like the medical and recreational stuff is there, the weather is great for growing stuff, including weed, and with 40 million people -- more than all of Canada -- there is a huge base of investment capital and consumers to pull from.
Why isn't California DOMINATING the global weed trade?
There's probably other reasons as well, but this might be part of it.
Overall I think it's a good thing though. Since real medical patients never get their pot on medical insurance, the reduction in cost really helps consumers.
Source: anecdotal data from friends that were in the industry, and prices at Harborside back in "the day."
For comparison, bulk price of tobacco is a few bucks a pound. Admittedly I am not an expert in marijuana vs tobacco cultivation, but I doubt it's 1,000 times more expensive. Ultimately, the problem with profiting in a legal marijuana industry is that people simply don't smoke that much pot.
Say that there's 260 million adults in the US and they all smoke 1 joint per day. Assuming:
1 joint = 1 g of marijuana 1 lb = 454g 1 acre can yield 600 lbs of marijuana 1 farm is 1000 acres
If you do the math, that means we need roughly 350 farms worth of marijuana. Or in terms of acreage, roughly 0.04% of all the acreage in the U.S. under cultivation. In other words, even if we assume a ridiculous level of smoking there's simply not a huge demand for pot. Using more realistic amounts, a handful of large farms could produce all the marijuana consumed in the country.
Barely. I do lots of work with growers.. the sweet spot for a pound these days is $600 to $850, depending on quality. On top of that, transaction volumes are increasing too.. before you could make a deal on a handfull of pounds, now purchasers are interested in buying a "box" or a hundred pounds at a time.
I can't say I'm surprised. As someone who grew up on the Oregon border of California on i5, locals here complain about California's influence on the local economy and politics. (E.g. buying expensive land, driving taxes up)
However in Oregon, I believe our problem is with oversaturation of the market. From what I understand (not rehearsed in the subject), we literally have to give the stuff away because there's so much. For anyone who knows/cares, it's not unheard of for places to sell quality marijuana for as low as $48/ounce, which is very cheap.
The fear was was that nobody would pay for a more expensive product if you could get it cheaper, but customers like the idea of buying a product with a consistent price and quality.
When I look at other dried herbs on amazon, they're much cheaper. E.g. thyme is about $10 for 12 ounces, oregano is $13 for 5 ounces.
Weed obviously has higher taxes, more regulation and I presume a smaller market (most people consume culinary herbs as part of their diet, not everybody consumes weed). But I'd expect the price to come down once the regulations disappear.
On the contrary, I know plenty of people who consume large amounts of concentrates and don't use much herbs and seasonings with their food. I suppose unless we're counting third party foods, in which case you might be right.
Prohibition might disappear, but I doubt when marijuana is treated as a legal psychoactive drug it will be unregulated, or even merely regulated the way culinary herbs are.
Second off, much work goes into developing and stabilising a strain.
Thirdly, high quality MJ is grown indoors, with artificial lighting.
Fourthly, it requires a curing process.
Generally, all herbs require curing [e.g., fan-driven air drying at a specific temperature] if not sold fresh; in addition, the work of developing a cultivar or strain is similar for a great many trade herbs that are farmed as opposed to gathered in the wild [e.g., the numerous types of basil, F1 hybrids of parsley, valerian cultivars of varying potency, etc etc]
FWIW saffron is the dried stigma of the saffron crocus crocus sativa so only a small part of the flower
Fact is most people don't do drugs, even if you can buy it in the supermarket.
But it's hard to see "tried once in their life" or even "a few times a year" as really falling in an equivalent "junkie" category, so I looked for "heavy drinking" which they defined as "4-5 or more drinks in 2 hours" a few days in a month, where a "drink" is a standardized measurement of ~14 grams of pure alcohol, equivalent to a single 12 oz 5% beer = 5 oz of 12% wine = 1.5 oz of 40% spirits (etc, whatever the percentage is). Just 7% of Americans reported heavy drinking in the previous month.
Alcohol is regulated and taxed, but even so beer & wine at least is pretty trivial for adults to legally acquire in most of the country and relatively cheap spirits (like very low quality vodka) as well. I don't at all want to understate the harm of alcohol abuse, it's very real (and of course can extend beyond drinkers themselves due to their actions). Even so it seems like "make everyone into a junkie" would not be borne out by legalized alcohol. Based on popular culture it's easy to assume drinking is more prevalent to a higher degree then it is, at least personally I would not have guessed that heavy drinking was only single digit percentages here.
It looks like, as in other areas, there is a strongly non-linear curve function in the population where relatively small percentages form an inordinate part of consumption. If that's the case for marijuana as well then it'd suggest we could get far more efficient harm reduction by general legalization focusing limited resources on that smaller slice?
There's a 15% excise tax statewide in CA. It used to be a straight 15% on top of the sale price, but now it's calculated based on the average market price for an arm's length transaction.[1][2] This is usually calculated based on the wholesale price plus a markup of 60%.[3]
On top of that, there's (normal) sales tax applied to the whole purchase, including the excise tax amount.[2] In California, that means a statewide sales tax of 7.25%, plus county and sometimes city sales taxes that can add on an extra 0-3.25%.[4]
In places with very little additional county and city sales taxes, e.g. Newport Beach[5], that means paying 15% excise plus 7.75% sales tax, for an effective total retail tax rate of 23.9125%.
In places with higher county and city sales taxes, e.g. Santa Monica [6] that means paying 15% excise plus 10.25% sales tax, for an effective total retail tax rate of 26.7875%.
San Francisco is on the lower end of the middle of the pack with a sales tax of 8.5% [7], so that means the effective total retail tax rate is 24.775%.
Of course, there are other cultivation taxes, use taxes, special local marijuana excise taxes and other permitting costs that apply to cultivators and distributors and retailers that may get passed along to customers[8][9][10], so you could say that "total taxes" are closer to 40%. But most retail buyers are paying about 24-28% on top of retail list price in sales + excise taxes.
Note: Prop 64 made it so most medical cannabis sales aren't subject to sales tax, so medical users only have to pay the 15% excise tax. [8]
[1] https://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/formspubs/l537.pdf
[2] http://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/industry/cannabis.htm#Retailers
[3] http://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/industry/cannabis.htm#Facts
[4] https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-sales-tax
[5] https://www.avalara.com/taxrates/en/state-rates/california/c...
[6] https://www.avalara.com/taxrates/en/state-rates/california/c...
[7] https://www.avalara.com/taxrates/en/state-rates/california/c...
[8] http://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/industry/cannabis.htm#Started
[9] https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-weed-101-tax-location...
[10] http://blog.margolinlawrence.com/all-about-california-cannab...
IMO that’s what this is about; a delaying game until federal laws change and the multi nations can take over.
So he called some of the armored car firms to inquire about hiring them, and they all turned him down flat because they didn't want the chance of his cash getting intermingled with that of Wells Fargo, etc. What he did was set up a wholly-owned subsidiary to do the transport, buying a couple of armored cars to move both the money and the product.
There may be real competition between the black market and over the counter market that will play out, particularly if the former networks are already well established.
The regulations and controls on advertising are fairly strong here, for 'vaping' in Quebec for example, windows have to be covered, and there can hardly be any wording on the signage. No advertising, no way to get the word out.
Now - for a very heavily established industry, with a very addictive product like smoking ... they can still thrive.
But for a relatively new and established industry, we'll be able to see just how powerful advertising, branding, sponsorships really are in terms of influencing behaviour.
I also don't want my ID to be scanned for buying something still federally illegal.
If I could occasionally buy marijuana products at the grocery store as part of my normal shopping, no different than my occasional purchase of whiskey or wine, then I would have at least bought legal weed a few times since it was legalized here in CA. Even if it were relatively expensive.
Instead, today I'm far more likely to either not acquire any marijuana products at all (it's been years already) or buy some from the guy on the street who might also have shrooms.
I'm in Colorado now (I'm from NY originally)
CO did it right, but like someone said above - CO Springs was against it (pretty conservative, military area)and are now suffering the consequences of not doing so, worse roads, worse everything...
And hey, I'm pretty conservative myself and I live in Boulder. Boulder is wrong about other things though, like thinking they can ban AR-15's
CS is weird and beautiful in its own ways, and I would only live there now for the mountain access (far better than 95% of Denver metro).
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/30/colorado-...
Can't take credit cards.
Can't take debit cards.
Can get loans from financial institutions to expand your business.
Have trouble finding landlords willing to lease to you because they don't want their doors breached by federal agents.
Like 7-11, you’re paying for convenience and being able to get the exact same potent batch for the same price every time.
There are numerous other behaviors that IIUC are illegal under U.S. federal law but are not proscribed by California law, including: aircraft hijacking, carjacking, credit card fraud, and possession of destructive devices such as missiles and poison-gas weapons.
And yet I don't hear those same news sources referring to carjacking, etc. as being legal in California.
The cynic in my suspects that those news organizations are intentionally choosing language to push their own agendas, but maybe I'm totally missing something here.
It's not illegal to possess destructive devices on the federal level. There's a $200 NFA transfer tax to pay, but that aside, you can own a perfectly legal grenade launcher, or even a tank with an operational main gun. Some people do.
In CA, on the other hand, these things are explicitly prohibited (18710 PC).
In America, this is federalism at work. States can choose to do things that the federal government explicitly does not allow, and states can choose to not do things that the federal government explicitly tells it to do. When there is enough of a conflict, it gets resolved by the courts. In this case, the federal government has just chosen not to dedicate resources to cracking down on California's pot industry. California still welcomes the DEA's efforts in CA to crack down on other things, such as pot coming in from Mexico and harder drugs being trafficked.
States can choose to do things that the federal government explicitly does not allow
It's why actions at the Federal level normatively should be thought through and constructed extremely well. It obliges everyone to play by those rules once passed. In reality however, realpolitik tends to limit Federal reach.