SF suspends cannabis tax to help dispensaries compete with drug dealers | Hacker News Reader

SF suspends cannabis tax to help dispensaries compete with drug dealers

thenationaldesk.com

191 pointsNoRagrets234 comments

In most recreational states, cannabis is taxed heavily at every step in the supply chain, so the highest quality still ends up being very expensive -- upward of $400/oz. The black market has the exact same quality at the wholesale price, typically 40-60% less than retail, with the added bonus of not having the government involved. For a daily or heavy smoker, a ~50% discount is a massive amount of money.

Additionally the taxes create operational overhead to stay compliant. Every product follows a chain of custody similar to pharmaceuticals. Even the scales used must be of the same spec used for gold weighing and cost roughly $1,500 each. It's not just the dispensaries but the wholesalers, processors, and cultivators need to buy these scales and register them once a year with the state for $100. Furthermore the batches sizes are too small for the cultivators and processors. In Oregon, it was 15lbs each. An outdoor harvest may bring 1,500lbs an acre. Each test costs roughly $50 plus the labor for a human measuring it. Even if it was all going to biomass processing (think isolates and distillates used for edibles and vapes), the same process applies.

Part of the reason to justify all of this regulation was to ensure that the blackmarket would update accordingly. Instead, rich investors took control of the cannabis market and the underground market thrived without enforcement pressures. Poor people who actually suffered the consequences of prohibition received none of the benefits of legalization. This issue is certainly economic and racial.

Now the legal cannabis market wants to expand but can't. Now it has to compete with a market thriving due to enforcement evaporating. One way is to reduce taxes. This would make it more profitable for the already rich existing investors in cannabis to make more money. Taxes are extreme and certainly need to be reduced but the real issue is supply chain and access to market.

It's really difficult to sell weed legally if you want to. More importantly, it's expensive. We should make it cheap to sell weed. You should be able to sell weed like alcohol. Alcohol licenses are much cheaper and with much larger quotas. Additionally alcohol is more standardized than cannabis while facing less supply chain inspections & requirements. There should be strong exceptions to small producers. Also, interstate sales should be allowed. Illicit markets serving out of state customers won't go legit if they can't ship across state lines. Especially to adjacent states with legalized cannabis. Isn't it crazy you can't ship weed from Oregon to Washington?

Lowering the barrier to market would have the additional benefit of enabling smaller market participants like the people who did it before it was legal. I actually have no problem with very high taxes on the larger companies. Maybe it'll fund building schools and hospitals in the places ravaged by the drug war. It's a great disgrace that our laws have prevented any reasonable path for going legit while demonizing them in the process.

If people can sell pies, vegetables, dairy and sometimes cider at informal farmers markets, cannabis should be the same.

Moldy cannabis is self-apparent in most cases.

Toxic distilled alcohol isn't. Some claim you can use a flame test to detect poisonous liquor.

Well, a flame test is suitable (at least against liquor that isn't deliberately trying to kill you), but the naked eye isn't sophisticated enough to analyze the spectrum.

sodium dichromate ?

Some states did initially allow co-op markets where farmers got to sell directly to consumers, and only needed to test large batches to meet requirements. The prices were very low because there were no extra middlemen to get taxed, and because each farmer was its own vendor, you could buy very large quantities in one location -- and I think the concept eventually got shut down for that reason.

The middle-man feared to be cut out and replaced by new humbler middle-man and lobbied for safety regulations to kill the emerging competition?

Ding ding ding.

And the regulators obliged because they got to take a cut and control how it gets spent and they get to pick winners by exerting influence over the myriad of licensing and compliance stuff that legitimate business in this day and age. Win-win, so long as you don't care about the outcome for the peasants.

> Toxic distilled alcohol isn't.

Do you realize this ideia of poison alcohol was propaganda done by the government during prohibition, right?

We know how to distill from millenniums, and selling poisonous alcohol isn't a very sustainable business model...

I remember reading an article about the success of this campaign (was one of the first of this kinda). I'm mobile, but I'm sure someone can find a post a link.

> Do you realize this ideia of poison alcohol was propaganda from the government, right?

Eh, I'm not sure about that. There are stories in the newspaper every few years about a corner stop selling cheap bootleg alcohol that has caused someone to go blind (or die) because it contained too much methanol. I for one am quite glad that alcohol production is well regulated.

But you could also simply not partake right?

If I’m very sensitive to food borne illness concerns, maybe I make the choice to go to a grocery store with vacuum sealed product, versus buying at a farmers market?

Similarly, folks who want “safe” booze can buy the bottled stuff from the big boys, not the corner store swill.

Of course, the weakness in this position is that the corner store swill is often substantially cheaper, and thus disproportionately affects low income communities.

No good answers. I’m not a smoker. So I have no dog in this fight. But I can’t help but read this article with a degree of schaddenfreude and frustration. The gov’t is so poor at executing sometimes, it’s astounding.

Purely anecdotal, but my brother has a small (illicit) still and has walked me through the process - it's fairly simple, and neither of us can figure out how these methanol poisoning cases could happen by accident.

Simply, the "heads" (which are high in methanol) come out of the still first, so it's easy to remove them.

In addition, methanol test strips are cheap and easy to use.

I think it's probably as simple as people not caring and being careless.

Discarding the heads is obviously best practices, but from discussions with serious scientifically minded distillers (ie chemists that enjoy brewing gin and artisanal vodka at home) the amount of methanol contained in the heads of your home distillation is hardly enough to harm you. In the worst cases if you consumed a significant volume it might give you a harsh headache (and this would be a truly large amount). If you were to collect the heads from several batches and drank that all in one go, you could probably make yourself sick.

Now say you're a shady corner store owner and you take some denatured alcohol or other spirits and dump it into some cheap vodka and sell it under the table as 'moonshine' or something else to make a quick buck...yeah you're going to hurt people. And not just a little. You could easily kill someone that way, or permanently damage them. But at home with your own still? You're way more likely to start a fire than you are to kill someone with your distillate. Unless you start cutting your output with other not-for-consumption spirits.

Aside from removing the heads to avoid death and blindness, it's also done for flavour and aroma - they have a nasty, "chemical/solvent" smell (and I'd assume taste).

Right, it's not only the methanol that you want to discard, there's acetone, and other nasties too.

> Do you realize this idea of poison alcohol was propaganda from the government, right?

Do you realize that:

> During prohibition, the US Govt added poison to industrial alcohol to discourage consumption. People continued to drink it, so the government added more and they killed 10,000 people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_Stat...

> There are stories in the newspaper every few years about a corner stop selling cheap bootleg alcohol that has caused someone to go blind (or die) because it contained too much methanol. I for one am quite glad that alcohol production is well regulated.

Can you find a case of methanol poisoning for beer or wine brewing where the maker hasn't deliberately added in something extra that contains methanol (e.g. from fluids sold for industrial use)?

I find when the news reports stories like this, they bury in the story where the methanol poisoning came from so the general public are led to believe that all alcohol brewing is incredibly dangerous, including making non-distilled drinks yourself.

For example, the first link from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_methanol_poisoning_inc... is https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-06/grappa-poison-william...:

"Man pleads not guilty to manslaughter and grievous bodily harm following home brew tragedy...Mr Meredith said Lynam bought methanol to use as industrial weed killer and confused it with ethanol when the home brew was made."

I haven't researched this, but all the cases I remember were vodka or a similar spirit. It may well have been because someone was adding something containing methanol.

> We know how to distill from millenniums

I'm reminded of that XKCD where every day, 10000 people are learning for the first time something that everybody knows...

No person alive today has known how to distill alcohol safe for human consumption for longer than about 100 years. The median experience among current distillers will be substantially lower than that age.

Jamaica Ginger and the Jake Walk. A lot of people were crippled by bad booze adulterated with other bad things

> Do you realize this ideia of poison alcohol was propaganda done by the government

Methanol poisoning is a VERY real thing. Methanol is easily accidentally produced when using a poorly calibrated still and not throwing out enough of the early product, particularly while processing alcohol made from corn where pectin helps create methanol. It’s very real and very dangerous.

The problem is ethanol (the good alcohol) laced with a small amount of methanol won’t immediately cause obvious health issues, they tend to creep up over time especially given continued consumption.

The government did however also purposely release horribly adulterated alcohol into the black market during prohibition and literally kill people, which is probably where your belief of it all being propaganda comes from.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_toxicity

- https://sciencing.com/test-alcohol-methanol-8714279.html

- https://slate.com/technology/2010/02/the-little-told-story-o...

>Methanol is easily accidentally produced when using a poorly calibrated still and not throwing out enough of the early product,

Easily? Yes.

Easily done unintentionally? No way in hell.

You don't even need to calibrate anything, just throw out the first bunch of stuff that comes out of the still. There's a ~10deg hop after the methanol is done boiling during which the still almost stops producing. You just throw out everything that comes before (and during) that reduced flow.

> We know how to distill from millenniums,

Only in the sense that we've had computers for millennia (i.e. the one before 2000 and the one after).

I think you might be referring to this legislative attempt to workaround tax avoidance with sometimes fatal consequences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denatured_alcohol

> Denatured alcohol (also called methylated spirits, in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom; wood spirit; and denatured rectified spirit)[1] is ethanol that has additives to make it poisonous, bad-tasting, foul-smelling, or nauseating to discourage its recreational consumption. It is sometimes dyed so that it can be identified visually. Pyridine and methanol,[2] each and together, make denatured alcohol poisonous; and denatonium makes it bitter.

> In many countries, sales of alcoholic beverages are heavily taxed for revenue and public health policy purposes (see Pigovian tax). In order to avoid paying beverage taxes on alcohol that is not meant to be consumed, the alcohol must be "denatured", or treated with added chemicals to make it unpalatable. Its composition is tightly defined by government regulations in countries that tax alcoholic beverages.

> this ideia of poison alcohol was propaganda done by the government during prohibition

imagine believing propaganda about propaganda.

congrats, man, you've come full-circle. methanol poisoning is very real, and methanol is definitely present in the "heads" of distillations (speaking as someone who's done this), and since there isn't a clear delineation between what is the "head" and what is the "body", it's entirely too easy (especially if you don't want to waste any of the good stuff) to accidentally include too much methanol in your distillation... which is exactly why alcohol is regulated

> and since there isn't a clear delineation between what is the "head" and what is the "body"

At any appreciable scale you get a reduced flow/pause in output as the mixture finishes boiling off the methanol and has to increase in temp before boiling the ethanol. It's a 10+ degree temp change so it's not instant. You need to be creating a small batch on a heat source that's way overkill to not have a defined difference.

Not just the idea/ propaganda, but the govt mandate that methanol be added to ethanol to make denatured spirits, aka the "poison alcohol".

It was literally a government created problem, with the same government claiming to be the only layer of security protecting John Q Public from this super dangerous product.

Prohibition is a case study in so many different ways of how to badly govern with the best intentions.

As enforcement is winding down, weed dispensaries are competing against near slave wage labor.

That's the problem. Illegal weed is basically being created outside the US with labor who barely gets paid, of course the cost will be higher.

Because it's being imported via illegal channels this is now a customs problem.

My bet is that the way to solve this would be to create a legal weed import policy, letting it sit there for a decade, then when illegal weed channels don't exist, add on a tariff. Then things will balance out.

Um, its being grown in Humboldt county in the middle of the forest. It is essentially incredibly cheap forced labor - but input costs are pretty low.

There is also pot being imported but a lot of it is grown in the state/national forests.

Judging from news reports, a good chunk is grown in the desert region as well:

https://z1077fm.com/tag/marijuana/

Seems like both mexican and asian gangs based on those arrested. Desert seems like a bold place to grow even in the shade structures... All you need to do is run an algorithm over the satellite data for any new structures on a weekly basis then have PD check it out for illegal grow op...

The consequences for the perps are basically nil, it's apparently a land use violation as far as CA is concerned. Literally a county code enforcement/permitting office problem of agriculture in a non-agriculture zone. At least until they find illegal weapons or evidence of other crimes.

There's been rumblings of changing the laws to increase the penalties, but I haven't followed the issue closely. The large grows are problematic for the region's water security/quality, since the region is dependent on finite groundwater aquifers full of ancient water that isn't being recharged anywhere near the rate of consumption AIUI. There are reasons it's not zoned for agriculture.

Lol! Weed is barely imported anymore. Seizures at the border have been on a continuous downward trend since 2000. Imports are now close to miniscule. It’s illegally grown domestically, whether that be guerrilla grows in the national forest, or massive warehouses in plain sight.

https://www.princetonpolicy.com/ppa-blog/2018/5/15/we-are-wi...

https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R45812.pdf

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/oregon-state-police-seiz...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/marijuana-seized-california-bil...

A lot wrong with your statement. Weed isn't imported. It's grown domestically. Here was a billion dollar field in California that got caught (1). There are many more.

The next part of slave labor is just false. Trimmers I met were earning $500 to $1,000 a day. $100 per lb trimmed was pretty common. If anything, creating an import model will guarantee we use slaves. Columbia exports cannabis legally to Europe already with a lot less worker protections than in the US.

(1) https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/la-county-sheriff-m...

> Trimmers I met were earning $500 to $1,000 a day. $100 per lb trimmed was pretty common.

I don't believe this, the numbers don't line up. If it's wet, doing 5 pounds in a day is reasonable, but nobody's going to pay you $100/pound for it. 5 pounds of wet is a little over a pound dried, so $500 is around a quarter of the total sale price. I just don't believe anyone is paying that much for something a child with safety scissors could do (albeit much worse). I also don't believe that growers wouldn't simply buy automatic bud trimmers. They're not as good, but I would be willing to bet that consumers would be happy to not pay the apparent 25% trimmer markup in exchange for slightly less pretty buds.

If that's dry bud, the price is reasonable, but there's no way in hell anyone is trimming 5-10 pounds of dry bud a day. That's like a rolling curbside garbage bin full of weed.

I don't think they're using slave labor, but given the number of people I've heard wanting to do it so they can work with weed, I'd be surprised if they're paying significantly more than minimum wage. I'd wager it's very close to $15/hour + perks, where "perks" mostly means "all the free weed you can smoke".

>similar to pharmaceuticals.

It is a pharmaceutical. Using any given drug without doctor or pharmacist oversight isn't a great argument for less regulation. Even if you're overall against most regulation and govt overreach.

>Even the scales used must be of the same spec used for gold weighing and cost roughly $1,500 each. It's not just the dispensaries but the wholesalers, processors, and cultivators need to buy these scales and register them once a year with the state for $100.

Every scale or other measuring device involved in commerce has to be inspected and stamped yearly, in most states. That's why the scale at your grocery checkout and gas pumps have the same stickers on them.

Other than the banking issue, none of the common complaints are really specific to the cannibas market.

More likely this market has just attracted a disproportionate number of people with little or no business experience, who are oblivious to the risks, regulatory hurdles, and associated costs that all types of businesses deal with.

>Lowering the barrier to market would have the additional benefit of enabling smaller market participants...

>It's a great disgrace that our laws have prevented any reasonable path for going legit while demonizing them in the process.

Spoken like someone starting to understand some of those crazy right-winger, free-market, pro-business, small-government arguments.

50% is worth the diminshed crime, and nobody should consume cannabis daily.

That's, like, just your opinion, man.

> nobody should consume cannabis daily.

Only a sith etc..

You do know there are low THC strains available? And that there are people who self medicate with cannabis for scores of reasons?

What exactly are you scared is going to happen to these people? An increased risk of bronchitis? Some people would consider that a great trade for reduction of chronic pain, nausea, or seizures.

Medical use notwithstanding, people who use cannabis on a daily basis will probably tend to produce and pursue bad ideas. I've been there when I was younger.

That state of mind is like turning the temperature up on the generative function in the mind. Lots of exciting, weird shit reveals itself to your conscious perception. On the other hand, our brains probably evolved to favor adaptive ideation. If that system's filters are always tweaked or turned off, then eventually the ideation will be misaligned with the "sober" environment.

> people who use cannabis on a daily basis will probably tend to produce and pursue bad ideas

I'm convinced people just produce and pursue bad ideas in general. That's why our society functions best by rewarding people with good ideas, and making damn sure everybody knows the core ones, from language to mathematics.

Every idea starts out bad, anyway. That's what design, engineering, and craft are for: Making ideas better until they're useful, beautiful, or good enough to experiment further with.

That's a fair and interesting point, worth looking at. I personally think that you're more right than wrong, and that while cannabis is great for idea generation, idea execution is somewhat hampered.

But as has been pointed out, people are dumb. 90% of everything is bad.

Remember when some guy came up with a "juice machine" that just squeezes capri-sun style juice pouches, that you got as a subscription service? And people gave him millions of dollars to build and market the thing? And were surprised when it failed spectacularly?

> What exactly are you scared is going to happen to these people? From observing people who are smoking multiple times per day (even 4+): An extremely happy-go-lucky attitude, often problems with memory and periodical total idiocy (while being baked of their goddam mind).

They also tend to have little enjoyment due to increased tolerance and are mostly addicted (being sober is not comfortable for them).

Sounds like they're smoking high THC strains, and not for medical reasons. Did you miss that part of the comment?

Ss for the dependency, I am aware of no study that shows lingering effects on anything after two weeks off. And it's much easier to break a cannabis dependency than, say, an alcohol dependency or most others.

I smoke every day, but I've also come close to dying from it[0] on a number of occasions. There are definitely potential risks, but with that said, I completely agree with your points.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabinoid_hyperemesis_syndro...

"This article needs more medical references for verification [...]"

There are dozens of studies and hundreds of articles from every reputable source imaginable. Feel free to Google something sometime instead of trollishly dismissing a legitimate medical condition that people have died from.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29768651/

if this is the medical problem that the dude himself almost died from, I'm pretty sure there's some validity to it

Thanks, I actually hadn't heard of that.

Did you try drinking more water?

Someone close to me suffered from this as well. It was pretty hellish. Even when it's not life-threatening, it made it pretty much impossible to go anywhere without weed accessible to keep it from triggering on withdrawal. He finally quit altogether which cured it, but lost 50 pounds in a few months because the CHS symptoms kept persisting for that long after quitting.

We're pretty sure high-potency (legal) dabs were tied to his case, but regardless, it's very troubling to see people in the comments so dismissive on the science of CHS (and how much more common it has become in the past few years in particular).

I'm worried that people who use it daily will compound the negative effects (memory effects being the most signifi ant, especially for us knowledge workers) and develop dependence.

I actually approve of cannabis for recreational use, but in moderation.

Even if i agree to part 2 of your messagr, part 1 shows gow disconnected from people who dont have that much money

People who cannot afford recreational drugs should not be using recreational drugs. Medical use is a different thing of course.

We could probably change the world a whole lot of people who "should" or "shouldn't" do stuff were applying this principle

> nobody should consume cannabis daily

Based on... what? Your opinion? Your parents? Your god? Because it's certainly not based on fact.

Not based on fact? Which facts are those? Certainly not these ones I'm guessing?

https://www.uq.edu.au/news/article/2021/01/long-term-study-r...

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

Worth noting that cannabis is illegal in Australia, so if anything it could point towards people willing to ignore the law are more likely to X and Y rather than the cannabis being the cause.

But I'm just playing devils advocate here, I doubt daily consumption of any stimulant is great in the long term, but cannabis is probably not worse than anything else really.

> I doubt daily consumption of any stimulant is great in the long term, but cannabis is probably not worse than anything else really.

I'd be willing to go out on a limb and say that cannabis is a lot worse than caffeine in this respect. I have known quite a few people who smoked cannabis daily, and while they didn't seem to notice they were mentally slow (compared to their normal selves) and almost entirely unmotivated.

Still better than alcoholism of course. But we shouldn't pretend that their aren't issues with every day cannabis use.

I mean it all depends on dosage right? And if you're smoking more CBD or THC. I had a friend who overconsumed caffeine until his heart rhythm started going bananas and he was hospitalized. But I've known many people who got stuck in the druggo trench, be it because of cannabis or not, a common denominator was they were all smoking weed.

Well sure, but that's true of literally everything. Drink too much water and you'll be in hospital. A small enough amount of cyanide will be fine. I think it's fair to assume a "normal dose".

I mean if we are going with “knowing people” as an anecdote, I know a LOT of extremely rich, successful, and motivated people (especially in SF and NYC) who smoke cannabis basically nonstop.

Daily smoking of tobacco has a distinct effect on peoples lungs, while daily drinking of alcohol as a distinct effect on peoples liver. Smoking of cannabis has both effects, through how much on each is still being debated.

I think we can however be fairly confident that daily consumption of tea and coffee is safer in term of stimulants. Not many develop chronic bronchitis from tea.

Just as an FYI, medical cannabis is legal in Australia, though AFAIK it is only available privately, and the system is over-burdened with regulations and costs (similar to the situation in the UK).

Indeed surprisingly, cannabis can have bad effects on human. This has been taken I to account in a French case where murder of an old lady was declared not responsible due to its cannabis consumption.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-56929040

The handful of French nationals I know regard that case as a grotesque miscarriage of justice emblematic of the double standard by which French and EU laws essentially do not apply to third-world economic migrants.

Irrespective of the judgment made, the expert mandated for that case( they were two distincts group) concluded the same. The cannabis hashad an effect on the behaviour.

I use the case as an illustrative example of the effect of the cannabis. Not judging the case here

Your first link's sample pool was high schoolers and young 20 y/os - people who haven't had their brains fully form yet (which happens around 25). Further, it was funded by the Australian department of health, so ehhh who knows what sort of biases exist there.

I can't even open your second link.

Picking sources from a Google search generally doesn't help to back up whatever point you're trying to make fwiw.

This is the most biased answer I've ever read I believe.

How so? I pointed out a flaw in responding to my question with a study performed on adolescants.

Did he say anything disprovably false?

I mean, I'm also arguing against him in this thread, but this comment in particular doesn't really stand out to me

doesn't help to back up whatever point you're trying to make fwiw

Neither does going "ehhh who knows what sort of biases exist there". What are you implying here, the people running the experiment are all inveterate stoners or something?

Do you want to address the main point of my comment or focus solely on the secondary point I made?

Here's what his second link landed on, for me:

https://accp1.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/...

Thanks. I don't think that person actually read the study, they just wanted to slap some things onto their bias to prove their point - as I said.

That study tested the effects of withdrawal within long-term users, and the cognitive impairment resulting from that, over 28 days of abstinence.

From the conclusion:

> It is unclear whether these deficits might be attributable to a residue of cannabinoids in the central nervous system or to withdrawal effects from abruptly stopping cannabis, although both factors likely contribute. In any event, our data suggest that these deficits are largely or completely reversible after 28 days of abstinence.

So, this study found no evidence long-term permanent cognitive impairment, which does nothing to prove the point the person who posted it was trying to make.

It's not good for you when used so frequently. Once or twice a week is fine, perhaps even good for you due to relaxing and mood-enhancing effects. Every day is stretching it and risking a dependence.

But hey, I don't have to power to forbid you anything. I'm just saying how it is. You can just choose to ignore this and keep using every day.

But you've not stated any studies backing this up. You're just passing by like a judgmental parent.

And why does that seem to worry you so much? Do you worry that I'm right, or am I offending you by saying this?

Because such assertions should be based on evidence.

No, I think you're wrong. When we're talking about recreational drugs, those who claim or imply that they're safe have the burden of proof.

Err, no, that's not how it works. You're the one who came to this conversation stating "nobody should use it daily", implying they are dangerous. The burden of proof falls on you.

Not every counterargument or counterevidence to your worldview is an appeal to taste, authority, tradition or religion.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2014/10/07/what-20...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_effects_of_cannabis

That said, outcomes may vary by individual, daily quantity, and whatever strain was most commonly smoked, and frankly, if it had been decriminalized and taxed instead of demonized from the get-go, research would have been much further along by now (can't exactly easily study an illegal substance).

Based on the fact that I've personally seen the detrimental effects it can have on some peoples mental health.

Nobody should really consume alcohol daily, yet a lot of people sure do.

And it's highly taxed and highly regulated, compared to most retail items.

I'm a medical user. What do you know that my doctor doesn't?

You don't seriously think you represent the majority of cannabis users, right?

While medical marijuana is weaker than most strains you'd expect to buy, medical users are more likely to be daily users with a regularity most recreational smokers will never hit. In that sense, this is a good example case.

What? Of course not! You made a blanket statement, and I simply refuted that by pointing to a large group that doesn't fit with it.

But you are not claiming that there's no adverse effects with your medication? I'm not sure what we're arguing about here.

I'm simply claiming that your blanket statement is false - there are good reasons why some people would use it every day, and for whom the good effects outweigh any bad effects.

In terms of bad effects, it's not as simple as "yes" or "no"; it's more about how much you use, as well as how often. For example, I use 10mg/THC oil at night, and vape up to 0.2g in the evening - the only adverse effect I have is some acid reflux from the oil, which is easily dealt with.

When I was younger I consumed cannabis daily for years and I totally agree.

Everyone is free to do whatever they want with their body, of course, but it had a negative impact on me.

Health wise, what is the impact of the smoking aspect of marijuana (vs other delivery methods), really just idly curious about this

Smoking cannabis and tobacco have many of the same problems, I believe. It's probably a good idea to consume cannabis some other way.

I'd expect Eaze to have a bigger impact than anything else. It's hard to beat a curated experience plus delivery.

They demonize it for a decade, create a sophisticated black market, and now via pen on paper they want a pound of flesh? Pfff.. let them compete in the open market. What value do they provide? None. They are owed nothing, if anything they need to pay restitution to the thousands who rotted in jail for non violent pocession of a flower.

> For a daily or heavy smoker, a ~50% discount is a massive amount of money.

Its more than that. I have a few dispensarys in CA and the experience is shit. The places are loaded with cash because they cant legally accept credit or debit cards. So you have to bring cash or use their ATM and get charged a withdrawal fee. This also means they are targets for robbery so security at these places is crazy with guards, waiting rooms and check points. This meeans you have to wait upwards of 20 minutes just to get inside to wait on a counter line for another 10 minutes. The experience is miserable.

My NYC dealer has been in the game for ages and moves volume. You can buy plates (pounds) from him if you wanted (usually $1800-2400 depending on the strain). I send a text and get an automated menu reply, text back my order plus address and within an hour or less someone is outside in an "uber" or "lyft" with my weed. I pay $80-100 for 0.5 oz.

BTW, if you live in NYC and pay over ~$30-35 for an eighth ounce you're getting ripped off BIG time (unless its in a branded bag like Jungle Boys etc.) I have a friend who moved to Williamsburg tell me how they buy from same the guy I do, more than double the price and sell it to "stupid rich white kids from Iowa".

> Its more than that. I have a few dispensarys in CA and the experience is shit. The places are loaded with cash because they cant legally accept credit or debit cards. So you have to bring cash or use their ATM and get charged a withdrawal fee. This also means they are targets for robbery so security at these places is crazy with guards, waiting rooms and check points. This meeans you have to wait upwards of 20 minutes just to get inside to wait on a counter line for another 10 minutes. The experience is miserable.

That sounds awful to me. Here in Canada, legal dispensaries accept debit, cash, and various credit cards; you can order online for in-person, same-day delivery (within a couple hours); you can order online and pickup in person, too. If you go in-person, you might have to wait if their employees are all helping other customers, but otherwise I can be in and out within 5 minutes.

> I pay $80-100 for 0.5 oz.

That seems obscene, coming from Canada. A decent-quality 28g bag of weed here tops out at 160 CAD, from what I've seen (edit: and I just bought an ounce I am perfectly happy with for 90 CAD). I'm not sure I've seen an ounce for more than that. Half-oz usually range from 60-80 CAD, depending on quality/sales.

At this point I greatly prefer the legal dispensaries to any black market weed for quality, convenience, price -- whether MOM or dealers. I think the only place dealers would have an advantage is more freedom to offer a better price to certain clients.

It's wild hearing that in other countries drug dealers still accept cash and meet people in person. Although prices for practically everything are way higher here (10g would cost you about 200$ or more), the convenience of using bitcoin and not having to meet a single soul to make a purchase at any hour of the day still outweighs it for me.

> not having to meet a single soul

Then how do you get your weed? Teleporter?

Deaddrop. You get an address, sometimes a GPS spot, a couple of photos, and retrieve whatever substance you ordered yourself.

yeesh. That sounds awful. The reason why I get curb side are:

1. If he doesn't have your number in his phone ahead of time, he wont respond. I had to be recommended by a close friend of his who is in turn good friends with me. He has to trust you and any deviations from basic rules will get you banned (he ghosts you).

2. He doesn't deliver himself, he has 2-4 drivers he pays well ($400/day + all the weed you can smoke)

3. Most people in my neighborhood know how to mind their damn business or smoke too so no one gives a shit.

Well, when a couple of grams of weed can easily get you a 7-10 year prison sentence, you define convenience a bit differently.

For additional context to my Canadian friends, it's not actually legal in the US. Various states have banned state and local law enforcement from enforcing the federal law.

Since it's still illegal federally, dispensaries can't use banks as their funds could be seized without a trial, and merchant services (credit/debit network access) can't offer services to those businesses as it would be aiding in a felony.

Kind of an aside, but there are banks that reimburse withdrawal fees. Schwab is one.

Many credit unions will do this too. (They don’t charge foreign atm fee, and reimburse for the atm’s fee)

You'd pay cash to a local dealer too so I don't really see the difference there.

Don't they take payment apps? Also if the illegal competition is that much cheaper, not being more convenient is one more point against them.

I doubt most take payment apps. I'm sure most are savvy enough to know their transactions are being monitored.

In Colorado small time dealers will take payment apps, but anything wholesale is cash or crypto.

Dealers take payment apps. Nobody cares. Dealers and consumers don't care. DA isn't looking for consumers (for now, ideally the clock runs out before a future DA cares). Everyone knows there is a record. The apps don't care, as long as you don't literally say "FOR DRUGS LOLLZ" in the notes section, but apps and actual banks really don't care (about anything) they just want to maintain relationships with other banks and the national government, who care less and less. Try not to be in a circumstance where that kind of data matters to anyone who would respond to someone else's attempts to blackmail or extort you, the less people care the less effective the data is. Almost half of Congress is willing to liberate banks from pretending to care about this and they represent a vast majority of the population, so the flippening is coming.

Let's hope!

I don't have to wait 30min in what ironically feels like a police station to buy weed.

As a Texan who has perused dispensaries in CO, OR and CA, I have never had such an unpleasant experience. In fact, the largest and most professional feeling dispensary was in SoCal. It felt like an apple store. There was no anteroom, and products were displayed in arrayed glass cases and hanging in walls.

Several places I have been to have a small waiting area that you must be let to pass, but that is more common in my experience in smaller towns.

I can't comment on the prices, since I have never bought bud illegally. But the in-store experiences have been just fine, and I don't have to hang out at a bar and try not to look like a cop to find a stranger selling.

Edit, the CA experience was 2-3 years ago, so maybe things have gotten worse or maybe in places where rule of law is less enforced, things have changed.

I have noticed that the dispensary experience is very different in CA vs OR. Oregon dispensaries are often small headshop type places whereas every dispensary I've been to in California seems to be a more expensive operation with a bank-like queuing style. The Oregon dispensaries are also just more thick on the ground; can't throw a rock without hitting one. Not so common in CA and they're tucked into shitty office parks much of the time.

Not sure why they're so different but I don't think it's the cash-only property that is doing it, since it's the same deal in OR.

> I have a few dispensarys in CA and the experience is shit.

And CA is way ahead of MA in this regard. Dispensaries here are plagued by supply issues and frequently sell poor quality product at a premium price.

Which states? Oregon, and Colorado are no where near that, and quality $125/oz can be found.

Hate to say it but your dispensary might just be ripping you off.

I’ve searched high and low for good prices and found that even in states like CA (on average much more expensive than e.g. OR) you can find good priced bulk deals on good - not amazing but at least 6-7/10 - product. Definitely on par with the wider market’s prices. Talking about ~$150/oz.

The problem is just most dispensaries don’t want to sell this presumably because

1 it’s low margin

2 Demand for large quantities actually isn’t that high, go into a brick and mortar dispensary and usually you will wait behind someone asking really basic/newbie questions to the budtender. Which is to say, most customers are not hardcore and aren’t buying large quantities. Most customers probably don’t even know how much things “should” cost either, so no need to go super cheap.

3 It basically cannibalizes business from their much higher margin SKUs, like 1/8 oz of 9/10 quality weed.

4 It starts a race to the bottom which isn’t really where you want to be.

Yes and (Adjacently): Dispensaries also need access to basic financial services. Like merchant bank accounts.

In my jurisdiction, dispensaries are still cash only. Because of federal law, banks won't touch weed money. (Ironic, given how many have laundered cartel monies.)

IIRC, there's been security problems. Like stick-up robberies. Which increases risks and costs (more security).

I know people working on weed policy. Harmonizing all the laws up and down the legal stack. Totally not my issue, so please correct me.

My throwaway crazy uninformed idea: Merge the marijuana and state-run bank policy advocacy. So that dispensaries (et al) have a safe, convenient alternative to handling cash.

Aha. WA State Rep Hasegawa proposed this policy in 2014.

https://cannabisnow.com/washington-state-could-manage-mariju...

Hasegawa is a great guy. So I'm probably repeating an idea I heard during some presentation (and not being original).

Any way. SanFran should create their own bank for their own small businesses, including dispensaries.

Edit: Maybe even just start their own credit union. Like a union of local small businesses. Sponsored by the local chamber of commerce and partially underwritten by the city. Totally spitballing here; I have zero knowledge about this stuff.

Sorry. I no idea about the current status of state-run banking, in WA, CA, or else where. In general terms and in principle, I support anything that takes power away from commercial, publicly traded banks.

Yeah it's weird, at my dispensary in WA they do have some setup where you can pay with a (debit) card but in addition to a $3 service fee they also for some reason have to round up to the nearest multiple of $5 and give you cash back.

The fees and rounding are because in a roundabout way, they're still just using cash. They just have a portable ATM terminal -- if you check your transactions it will probably show up as an ATM withdrawal. That's also why they also only accept debit cards.

I had a business plan to fix this but it was hard to get it funded, even by the heavy investors in the legal pot business, because of fear of the feds. It’s a shame because it broke no banking laws according to my lawyers, but of course the feds can lean on the big funds.

The short answer was to do all the banking in Canadian dollars where it’s entirely legal. Independent of pot, Canadian banking laws are set up for these sorts of arrangements while the US banking system is far more conservative.

Drop me a note if you are interested in giving it a try and I can tell you more.

I'd be fascinated to hear more about how your CAD idea wasn't going to contravene any US laws while giving the cannabis industry access to the banking industry.

If you're exclusively in Canada then the US Feds are nowhere near as much of a concern, but then that also doesn't get you any access to the US market, which seems to be the point. Let's say the legal pot industry on near the northern US border switched over to Canadian dollars to get this system to work, it still seems you'd need to get Canadian dollars to Canadian banks (because they can't be deposited at US bank accounts because the issue is that pot businesses can't make deposits to US bank accounts, not the nature of the cash being used.)

Buuuut... aren't there rules about moving more than $10k (USD) cash, or equivalent financial instruments (aka CAD) across the border?

Of the lesser known things that San Francisco has done in this sphere, is that the SF Office Of Cannabis gave those that were materially oppressed by the War on Drugs [1], a leg up on starting cannabis-related businesses. They gave them a year's head start a few years ago before licensing was available to all, and now there's a government-run incubator.

[1] https://officeofcannabis.sfgov.org/equity/applicant#equity-c...

Wait I was told that when it was legalized there would be no more underground drug market. Seems things aren't as simple as they seem on the surface.

Depends on how much regulation you place around the market. According to wikipedia, most cities and counties in California have banned cannabis retail, which is just one thing likely to contribute to an ongoing black market. I imagine there are others.

This is something pot activists have complained about from the get-go. Legalization was sold to politicians with the promise of high taxes. We knew that poor users would be priced out of the market, that legal weed would be a privilege enjoyed by the rich, that dealers with criminal records would be shut out of the legal market.

> Legalization was sold to politicians with the promise of high taxes. We knew that poor users would be priced out of the market, that legal weed would be a privilege enjoyed by the rich

Poor users seem to enjoy a lot of legal alcohol. Taxes on that are high too, and it's even easier to make your own alcohol than to make your own weed.

Liquor licenses and marijuana licences are very different in availability and, due to how the products are consumed (alcohol being very central to social gatherings), the necessity of having a license is more important for alcohol.

> it's even easier to make your own alcohol than to make your own weed.

It sure as fuck isn't. There are parts of the world where putting some free seeds in the ground is sufficient.

People make alcohol in prison toilets. That’s not really far from “throw seeds in the ground”.

It's also not really safe to drink. Probably unlikely to kill you, but you're not going to get any assurances E. coli isn't in there.

It's pretty hard to mess up growing weed bad enough to hurt someone, unless you poison yourself with pesticides on accident (which aren't really necessary at least at the personal scale). If something bad happens, it's almost always to the plant.

Sure, you can make alcohol yourself. Then you discover some batteries increase the kick. Then you realize a drop of methanol just takes it to insane levels. Then 2 drops kill or blind you.

A high proportion of the booze consumed worldwide is what the bureaucrats call "unrecorded", and poisonings are exceptional.

"Two drops" of even pure methanol won't do anything to you. Not even close.

Of course I don’t know the LD50 of methanol, but I do know it’s quite close to whatever gives you the kick.

Alcohol has long shelf life, can be easily produced at large scale, etc.

Selling flower buds of a plant will hardly be accessible. But the industry will eventually find a way to make a viable cannabis product from waste.

And historically when even more alcohol was consumed there was a massive bootleg and moonshine industry. In the end, most likely the people running it have simply died of old age and the newer generations prefers other things.

The majority of poor people have neither the time, space, know-how, or desire to make their own alcohol or weed.

But it's an awful lot easier for a dealer to sell weed to a hundred people than for them to sell bottles of alcohol to a hundred people.

One will get you in severe trouble in a lot of states.

This isn't a terribly apt comparison. The competition for weed is not individuals growing their own weed (which, in fact, requires land which the urban poor do not have access to), but with (a) well-established growers who have been continually operating in the black market, and (b) new legal growers and their employees who can skim some of their product for "personal use".

Individuals can and do make their own alcohol -- and it's a really expensive hobby to get it right. In terms of price per unit volume, distribution of illicit alcohol is quite problematic. You can easily fit $500 of weed into 1 liter (local prices and densities vary). Retail booze is less than a tenth of that. Bad booze would be even lower. This is a substantial impediment to the risk/reward calculus for street-level sellers all the way up to producers.

From the original article: “Mandelman’s office pointed to a Dec. 19 report from the California Legislative Analyst’s Office that found that increased state cannabis tax rates were directly linked to illegal cannabis sales.

In addition to the illegal sales, increased theft is also creating problems for cannabis retailers.”

I’m sure other factors are that retailers have to pay rent and payroll taxes. I have no idea what the price differential is, but I could imagine it being quite significant.

Making things illegal doesn’t mean it goes away. Most often, it just makes it more expensive because people are exposed to more risk from selling it. But if you don’t enforce your laws and there is no risk, then of course the legal version of it can’t compete. If the city didn’t enforce any of its awful zoning laws, housing would be super cheap.

Threat of violence is the only true currency, the final turtle at the bottom of all other currency turtles.

Another problem with dispensaries is that banks will not allow them to use them. That means they end up being cash only, and a huge target for burglaries. There is a bill passed by a huge margin in the house in April, but the senate hasn’t taken it up yet, called the SAFE Banking Act.

I do believe it could eliminate most of the illegal marijuana market, but only under a government and voting population that considers reducing taxes and this kind of crime to be important priorities. It's never going to happen in a place like California, surely.

There's still an underground cigarettes market in my country. It helps that we (a EU country) have a land-border with some other non-EU countries, we have very high taxes on cigarettes (compared to our revenues, at least), they don't, it's only natural that money will find a way.

The authorities do announce "contraband cigarettes captures" every week or two but I'm pretty sure that's just scratching the surface. They've recently also managed to "capture" an An-2 (great plane) on its way back from a contraband run, pretty cool.

[1] https://www.digi24.ro/stiri/actualitate/evenimente/un-avion-...

It's not just the taxes. It's how hard it is to sell weed legally. All of the hoops and expenses add up. In Florida, it's like 20 licenses that cost $25M each. We should make it as easy as selling alcohol and then the prices will match.

Is your claim that it costs half a billion dollars to setup to sell weed legally in FL? That defies all order-of-magnitude estimation.

No, $25M is the open market price for a license charges a company to pick up a license. Looks like someone sold a license for much more (0). Only 22 licenses for companies in Florida have been granted (1). In Florida, companies have to vertically integrate their whole supplychain and not mix with any other cannabis company. It takes opening like 50 dispensaries under a license to break even. Florida sells $1.2B of cannabis a year & $500M in acquisitions were completed in Florida last year.

(0) https://www.tampabay.com/florida-politics/buzz/2019/10/15/fo...

(1) https://mjbizdaily.com/florida-medical-marijuana-operators-b...

(2) https://mjbizdaily.com/cannabis-msos-on-buying-spree-in-flor....

There's an underground market in cigarettes in high-tax states of the US also! https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129934...

It certainly reduces gang violence and fake or tainted drugs.

But I don’t think it really reduces the amount of fake or tainted drugs, at least not for those who really suffered from the prohibition.

The heavy taxation and the strict regulation of the market creates a massive cost overhead. Even the lowest quality of legally sellable weed is so expensive that it’s out of reach for poor consumers. The undergroud market may even be able to offer the same quality product for a fraction of the price, for obvious reasons of course.

So many people, especially those with less financial stability, will still choose the underground market over legal options. Also, I’d assume that since the legalization, the pressure by law enforcement has dropped quite a bit, at least for consumers. This would make the underground an even more compelling choice.

How common is fake pot, though? I mean, surely young folks try to do stupid things to other young and stupid people (fake and tainted drugs). Occasionally folks don't get the quality they expect. But all this stuff means you lose customers and you continually need new folks to dupe.

"fake or tainted drugs" has always seemed like a bigger problem with different categories of drugs.

Additionally, I'm not convinced it actually reduces gang violence since we still have a thriving black market.

I think k2 shows up occasionally.

Nope, fake and tainted weed is a very real problem when it's illegal.

I've seen cannabis with plaster mixed in; glass beads, added ketamine, synthetic fibres; anything cheap to increase the perceived effect and weight. And all of those are safer than legal synthetic 'weed'.

The THC to CBD ratio is completely impossible to control when in prohibition areas. Dealers select for maximum THC to minimize weight to effect ratio, which is the opposite of what you want if you're trying to protect people from any possible psychosis trigger.

People who are self medicating with cannabis in illegal countries have very little control over these factors. If they try to grow their own they can get prosecuted as suppliers and face higher sentences than rapists.

Ketamine is a bit harder to come by than cannabis, and at a dose that anyone would actually feel, it's going to make the weed more expensive. That just doesn't make any sense.

It makes perfect sense if you're an organized gang stealing horse tranquilizer, and adding it to awful quality hash that's been mixed so much with garden waste that it barely works.

It's not seen as much these days, but was literally a nationwide problem in Ireland for well over a decade.

FTR, ketamine is much more than a "horse tranquilizer" - it is used extensively in emergency rooms, for depression and neuropathic pain, and in general vetinary medicine. And of course, it has wide-scale use recreationaly.

I presume the "horse tranquilizer" moniker came about as some kind of anti-ketamine propaganda.

You're not wrong; but I meant it quite literally, as in, it was being stolen from vets and thrown into incredibly shitty hash.

I find it hard to believe people would mix $100/g ketamine to make $10-$20/g weed have more mass. US prices

The ketamine was for effect on very weak hash, not mass.

And did I mention the theft, in the very short comment you're replying to.The US might have a thriving K market but 90's Ireland did not.

Here in Europe, there have been a lot of cases where sort-of-legal CBD weed was laced with sort-of-legal synthetic cannabinoids, which are essentially research chemicals (i.e. nobody really knows about their long-term effects and risks). If it's done right, the end result is not easily distinguishable from the real thing, but it's cheaper and safer to obtain for the dealers.

How easy/legal is it to grow your own in CA? If it's very easy, the underground market will probably be entirely homegrown, and still beneficial to the local economy even without tax income. If it's hard or illegal to grow, wholesale importation from cheaper areas will continue funding criminal logistics operations, and most of the revenue will leave the area.

It’s pretty clear that any argument of that form comes with the obvious caveat that excessive taxes or fees for the legal product wouldn’t cause the underground market to disappear. Obviously if it was “legalized” but there was a $1,000 per ounce tax, we would expect the illegal market to continue to thrive.

It's almost like demonizing a plant was never something that should have happened in the first place.

I love that these small businesses are keeping more of their hard-earned money, but I don’t really think this will have any noticeable effect on their sales. As someone who exclusively purchases cannabis flower, I will only use the dispensaries when my trusted guy is out, and for only the smallest possible quantity until my guy is back up. A majority of dispensary customers are looking for cannabis-infused beverages, concentrates, and a selection of professionally-packaged products that a street dealer is simply incapable of manufacturing.

Could you elaborate further on why you’d stick to your guy?

First and foremost, we have become good friends over the years, so I enjoy the ceremony of entering his home to sit down and hang out before making a purchase. The quality has been consistently excellent over the years, even before legalization. I also sometimes get headaches from dispensary flower that I never get from this flower, which my guy attributes to the "organic" (i.e. no pesticide) grow that his source uses.

I will say that I discovered cannabis-infused beverages only a few months ago, and they are the most compelling alternative to flower for both me and everyone I've talked to.

Could be the ingredients but headaches from weed are most often caused by chlorophyll which didn't break down yet. In case you get it, it might help to leave the weed in a jar for two weeks, it may still be too fresh. After that it should be broken down.

Not a smoker anymore, but I wish there would be "weed light". Weed today is so massively overbred that it contains massive amounts of THC or CBD or both. It would be nice to have some form of jazz cigarette that induces a subtle high instead of making you not want to move ever again and gets you close to a psychotic breakdown.

The stuff of today isn't comparable to what the hippies smoked in the 60s and I would say it can be quite dangerous. Also a lot of users get addicted to tobacco instead of the high of weed but will always smoke weed when they have the urge to smoke.

Hear Hear.

I didn't partake of anything cannabis related until it became legal in my state. I felt like I had too much to lose getting caught and losing my livelihood. Like you said, Beverages and edibles are what I consume as I've never been a fan of smoking due to health concerns. I didn't even know prices were high. lol

It took me awhile to realize that San Francisco is not suspending a video game called CannabisTax 2.

Have you recently, or are you currently, consuming cannabis?

Whats the price difference here? Doesn't seem worth the effort of hitting up a dealer unless you're picking up a couple other party platters.

It's in the article.

Right, 1%-5%. But I don't think I'd care to deal with illegal product and any possible (even if unlikely) headaches around it just to save $1-$5 for every $100 spent. Seems kinda foolish.

But yeah, I suppose if you're also picking up some illegal stuff, makes sense to make it a one-stop shopping trip.

People buying from dealers aren't considering the illegality in the choice at all, though. They're a choice between continuing to buy from someone they know vs entering a storefront that is going to make them provide a bunch of PII on the first visit, which also costs more.

For me the price was worth it to make "the person I know" become a "person I no longer knew".

Dealers are more likely to make house calls?

I don’t know, when I lived in Mountain View I could get (legal) cannabis delivered faster than pizza.

In pizza's defense it isn't often delivered in a "bake at home" state.

This is not as big of an endorsement as you might think. I live in the Peninsula and I once ordered pizza from one of the big chains and it came at perfect room temperature after like an hour. I called the place to complain and they said they would refund me if I was willing to give the pizza back (!). Sure enough, about 45 minutes later a pizza guy came around and I tendered the pizza (minus a single bite) back to him.

Not the most sterling benchmark.

Plenty of legitimate cannabis dispensaries have home delivery too.

Perhaps it's more about supporting your local small business?

I don't smoke weed, (not for moral reasons, I just hate it), but the incentive structures are really weird.

My read on the situation is... Government wants to tax the weed and ensure its safe. So there are a ton of regulations which require you to do a lot of extra work and are expensive.

That, along with the taxes creates a huge price differential between legal and illegal weed.

I thought it was all about taxes at first, but I've come to understand that illegal growers often use toxic pesticides that further increase yield-- and thus it is important to know where your weed comes from.

>I thought it was all about taxes at first, but I've come to understand that illegal growers often use toxic pesticides that further increase yield-- and thus it is important to know where your weed comes from.

I've always preferred to pay the higher prices for this reason, and the fact that I know exactly how potent something is.

To say nothing of fentanyl. I'd like to remind you also that paying higher prices for something is a privilege of our class.

So I'm going to work blue here for a bit...

Regarding contamination and unsafe drugs-- my best friend and I had a tradition. Once a year around the end of the year, we'd get a couple grams of cocaine and go to someplace fantastic like the Queen Mary, or Disneyland, or the Long Beach Aquarium, The San Diego Zoo, etc. We called this tradition "Merry Cokemass". We had an agreement to never do any drugs outside of these appointed 24 hours.

Anyways, we have both decided that this just isn't safe anymore.

Will the action the article describes, removing the 1%-5% tax, help much? It sounds like the other price advantages of illegal businesses will remain. Maybe removing this tax will reduce some paperwork?

The illegal businesses are probably still evading personal income tax, payroll tax, corporate income tax, sales tax. In addition to the pesticide stuff you mention.

I cannot speak from any position of authority-- but I don't think even 5% would be a major reduction in price-- but its likely the only thing the city of SF can alter. My feeling is illegal weed is at least half the price of the legal stuff.

The rest is state regulations. The laws are as onerous as having to tag and register each plant, what happened to it, their weight at harvest, and sometimes genetic testing of those plants.

The idea is to create a paper trail such that illegally grown weed can't be laundered into being legal-- but my god is it a MESS.

>but I've come to understand that illegal growers often use toxic pesticides that further increase yield-- and thus it is important to know where your weed comes from.

A lot of illegal weed is from the same supply chain as the legal stuff, but unreported, similar to bootleg products that are sourced from the same factories as the authentic stuff.

I do agree that it's a problem not knowing where it came from, but it seems that legal weed has really raised the bar, and the street has to compete at some level. I've heard street weed is a lot higher quality now than pre-legal weed.

govt should think different.. ask for smart people to fight to make the bestest safest process and product, then distribute over the nation and forget it (it's safe, it's cheap, it's smart. end of story)

You, along with probably most of hacker news, probably just won't understand - unless you connect with the culture.

To help explain it...

I find what I need from friends and neighbors. I have built a system of trust that operates outside of the typical capitalistic reality that the rest of society runs on. Sometimes it means knowing where stuff was grown and who grew it. Sometimes the trust is more blind - it depends on the situation. Since cannabis is an organic compound (I only consume flower, not oil or edibles) I find it easy to "verify" that I am getting a legitimate product.

I don't mean to brag, but I have a situation where I mostly get it for free. It is all love, and to have people share the love makes it all the more special.

Another way to think of it like a CSA - would you want organic produce directly from the farm, or from Whole Foods?

I hope this helps, at the very least, humanizes the other side a little bit.

This comment feels like art. Either it’s a troll that’s not that good, or it’s a genuine comment so far off in lala land that it’s a privilege to read.

Nothing about that comment seems THAT unusual. Honestly, I'm spending more time sitting here trying to understand where you're coming from than I am with them. What elements of their comment struck you as trolling?

It is a very foreign concept to many people, I understand where they are coming from.

For example, my mom loves Whole Foods and would not prefer a CSA. There is comfort in the standard quality that McDonalds has to offer. Marketing labels and branding have become commonplace and widely celebrated amongst consumers.

To ask for these luxuries to be stripped away is preposterous to most people. “Your weed isn’t lab tested - but you could be killed!”

I guess some new Californians don't know much about what happened there about 45 years ago.

The bits about "you dont understand unless you connect with the culture" and "its all love" read to me like stereotypes straight from the 60's.

That kind of thing is an extreme minority in most places- weed culture is no less mercantile than any other. The la la stuff exists, to be sure, but so does my neighbor offering to share veggies from their garden. Either way, I don't think it's got much bearing on the illegal drug trade, or the crippled legal trade as the volume is just two completely different scales.

> The la la stuff exists, to be sure, but so does my neighbour offering to share veggies from their garden.

In my experience there's quite a bit of overlap between the kind of people who like to smoke weed and the kind of people who like to grow their own vegetables and sell them from their garden. Perhaps less so in cities. I think this is one of those stereotypes that has quite a bit of truth to it.

There certainly is, but they aren't doing volume. Farmers and grocery stores (to stick with the analogy) are doing the volume work here, so as matters of policy, it just doesn't add much.

Rules, regulations and arduous compliance measures are an indirect tax on businesses. It would be good if policymakers saw it as such.

As someone who doesn't use cannabis, can someone explain to me why there continues to be an underground? Saw an article in news a couple weeks ago explaining that there are problems in Oregon again with unlicensed producers in wilderness areas again. One of the primary reasons I was in favor of legalization was that I didn't like the prospects of running into an illegal grow operation when I'm out enjoying Mother Nature. Is it just a matter of economics, IE: the underground, untaxed producers are so much cheaper that there's still an active market?

not every county in Oregon has legal ways to purchase, some counties want the tax revenue but don't want people to be able to get it.

taxation across every aspect of growing, processing, and sale adds a lot.

not all dispensaries are the same, some are swank, but more expensive, some are captive markets.

some people don't want to be tracked in any way.

so there are reasons some people stick with black market, but like piracy, making legal purchases and consumption easier helps to ease it.

This is good feedback... I knew there were places like Pendleton and the southeastern corner of the state that were still be sticks in the mud, but didn't really think in terms of that being a reason for a black market to continue to thrive (given access in so many places in WA, OR, CA in general)

Instead, they should prosecute drug dealers for tax evasion.

People hate to pay taxes. We see it here and everywhere.

I had a vacation house up in Calaveras county (in the sierras). After pot was legalized in California, a country referendum question banned growing pot in that largely agricultural county (“You wouldn’t want that stuff growing next to your vineyard!”).

The question, and almost all of its advertising, was funded by illegal growers who didn’t want the competition.

Here in Illinois. Weed became legal at suspiciously the same time that opiates became...

1) more difficult to get due to changes in various regulations.

2) heavily propagandized against.

This is obviously an attempt to shift a big revenue stream from the pharmacorps to a new pie.

That new pie is divided between the state (licensing fees, taxes) and whoever can get permission to grow and sell (Governor Pritzker and his cronies).

It's all about money.

Good because Opiates are a bit out of control and can be deadly.

Should be noted that this is just the city tax, which MMJ patients already were exempt from. You still have to pay the 25% state tax.

Drug dealers huh...interesting terminology there

Surprised to see no mention of this being a clear case of the Laffer Curve taxing past the Laffer (revenue maximizing) point.

Well I guess the "but the tax revenue could go to health care" thing didn't work out so well did it?

Well, I'm sure that even without that tax, the government will still receive more money than before plus all the money not spent in prisons, law enforcement and all that jazz.

I think this also should be something that other governments should take into account when taxing the newly legalized cannabis business, if you tax it too heavily from day one you may be pushing clients both clients and producers to the black market.

Both are drug dealers... Technically.

Given that it's 9:1 illegal to legal in the SF Bay Area, even this tax break might now be enough to matter. It's already lower risk and high profit to sell illegally rather than legally.

I'm kinda serious, why not use a crypto invoicing service? Seems like an actual use case to not have to rely on traditional banking.

One of the arguments why cannabis is illegal is that is hard to tax compared to alcohol. Well, turns out to be true.

Has the city considered…uh, arresting drug dealers?

Has the city considered finding a way to cut them into the big business that was created out of their traditional trade? Why help people go legal and regulated when you can throw them in prison?

I'd like to congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs. The surrendering party should have unconditionally surrendered, but have chosen to fight it to the grave.

Release all prisoners of war and pay reparations? Or just move onto the next authoritarian power grab like it never happened?

As more Americans of all stripes are buying firearms, it looks like a war on guns is next. I wish the bigwigs would learn....

Drug dealers should probably be more afraid of the Franchise Tax Board coming after them for non payment of state taxes

>Has the city considered…uh, arresting drug dealers?

We've been doing this for 50 years. Hasn't really worked out so far.

Not San Francisco. If you walk around the city for a few minutes, you’ll find drug deals happen in plain sight and at all hours of the day.

You know, sometimes I wonder if some of the Romans, looking around at their society crumbling in the early ADs, asked themselves "you know, I remember we used to have these things called laws?"

Seems we're tripping over ourselves these days to find every way to defeat the original purpose of the laws that we set up to make society civilized and fair.

And I'm not just talking about weed.

A huge problem today is that law isn't accessible anymore. While it is good to have extensive laws to create legal security, the fundamental laws need to understood by everybody. A high court is always needed to make final decisions on basic judgments, but they must be open to interpretation by common people that aren't lawyers and there cannot be many exceptions here.

If we have laws that forbid racial discrimination or surveillance and we get countless exceptions to these, the law basically becomes worthless and hollow.

Laws that protect against surveillance are worthless today. The intelligence community, tasked with protecting the constitutions, is guilty of undermining these by breaking them. Legislators are guilty of undermining them by having transgressions not have consequences. Even if you have an understanding on operational compromises, we went far beyond those. So the law vanishes, it has no value anymore. It is a broken law that also underlines how there are different set of rules for different people. So people start asking why they should honor other laws when it becomes inconvenient to them.

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