Drug-dealing executives: How potheads fell in love with LinkedIn | Hacker News Reader

Drug-dealing executives: How potheads fell in love with LinkedIn

sfgate.com

>help him negotiate a wholesale cannabis transaction in Illinois, where pot is legal. He had a buyer — a cannabis manufacturer in need of pot — so he went on LinkedIn to find a cannabis seller. Hoxworth was openly conducting an interstate drug deal on LinkedIn.

I'm not sure what the author thinks "interstate" means but this is not it. The person they are writing about wants to find cannabis for sale in Illinois for a buyer in Illinois, that is intrastate not interstate.

I thought the "interstate" bit comes from LinkedIn not being an Illinois company.

If that is the case, then any business deal conducted over essentially any communication network would be interstate, which makes no sense at all

I believe this is actually the case

In e-commerce, doing “tax tables” is insanely complicated.

Most small companies don’t need to worry about it but large firms have to worry about “domicile”

I could be wrong here though, but a few years ago I did do a big project dealing with that

So then say John owns a business in Illinois and Joe who lives down the street from John's shop uses his cell phone serviced by a provider based in California to place an order with John, the order is later picked up in person by Joe who pays with cash.

Is that interstate?

I mean, per [1] Wickard v. Filburn (1934), growing wheat on your own farm to feed to your own animals is interstate commerce. And by that logic, any intrastate stuff done would be considered interstate commerce if it could affect the market outside the state - for example in Gonzales v. Raich (2005) the supreme court ruled that growing your own marijuana for your own personal medical use could be criminalized on the federal level using similar logic

> The parallel concern making it appropriate to include marijuana grown for home consumption in the CSA is the likelihood that the high demand in the interstate market will draw such marijuana into that market.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich

Reading that first case, just wow. Talk about mental gymnastics

It is horribly complicated, and I don’t know. I just helped code what general counsel told the product managers to build

It’s super weird. Some states, if you ship through them, will charge a small tax, but only if you’re a big company

So other states that don’t, shipping tables will sometimes adjust to ship over those states instead, if the system decides it’s cheaper. The system is populated by essentially accountants and lawyers

For small businesses it doesn’t usually matter, so since John is just picking it up himself, probably doesn’t apply

But if Dave is selling hundreds of toilets, from California to Illinois, if Daves truck goes through Idaho (just making that up) Dave may have to pay a small tax to Idaho

My point was that only a single state is involved which is "inter" not "intra"

The scenarios where multiple states are involved don't matter because that was not the situation being discussed. Nobody was shipping "through" a state in the story

I meant "intra" not "inter" for a single state in the first sentence

Struggle is the enemy, but weed is the remedy.

That explains so much.

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