Hacker News Reader

Comment by theboogieman | Hacker News Reader

Add the fact that, if legal marijuana is priced low enough to make black market dealers less common, the people selling the marijuana will now be forced to only sell to people 21+.

I’m not saying that this is the case as legal recreational marijuana sale prices in many legal states are high enough (due to taxes or artificial supply dampening due to restricting who can grow it and how much) to justify the existence of a black market, but if that was the case, I’d expect a drop off in youth usage.

View on HN

I think this overstates the interest in drugs among Zillenials and Gen Z.

Most people in our cohort tend to follow a "you do you" philosophy that cuts both ways - if you choose to or choose not to partake in marijuana or alcohol, that's your choice.

Stuff like "marijuana" or "alcohol" isn't viewed as cool or uncool, it's just viewed as a yet another consumable like coffee or sugar.

Same way some people choose to cut down on coffee and others are coffee fiends, it's similar with booze and weed.

Personally, I find that older generations have an unhealthily polarized view on weed and alcohol consumption - they are split between the "weed cures everything" and "weed is the devil's lettuce" camps.

Heck, even this thread has tinges of judgement about how younger generations just don't care one way or the other about weed as if weed consumption is a core part of being young.

I guess I'm a zillenial, born 1998. I distinctly remember a time in highschool where I saw vaping (the flavoured cartridge kind) shift from cool, to just some meaningless detail about someone. I totally think this shift has stuck. You're 100% right in comparing weed in this context to coffee, that exact same pattern happened to vaping too.

It's not like there WASN'T drinking, vaping, and weed. Just no one is pushing it on you. The pushing is a lot more focused on social (and online) things now. But that's a different topic.

I'm on board for it being a good thing. The kids are alright eh?

> It's not like there WASN'T drinking, vaping, and weed. Just no one is pushing it on you. The pushing is a lot more focused on social (and online) things now. But that's a different topic.

Exactly!

> I'm on board for it being a good thing. The kids are alright eh?

That's my opinion as well, but I'm part of the Zillenial cohort as well so I'm biased.

>if legal marijuana is priced low enough to make black market dealers less common,

It never is. The overhead from running a lawful business is way higher even before you start accounting for all the weed specific cost of compliance stuff.

It varies from state to state, but legal prices are comparable to black market prices in a lot of places. And the selection available in legal markets is beyond compare.

Oh, it can be.

I live in MI and weed is really, really cheap here. I don't smoke, but I partake in edibles (I have MS and nerve pain that meds can't do much about). I can get 2000mg of edibles for 40 bucks. And that's without price comparing: That's just going to the closest dispensary near my house. And lots of places do penny/free joints with a very low/no minimum purchase.

That's not the case here in Washington state: legal weed is significantly cheaper than the black-market ever was, unless you want some high-end specialty bud you most likely couldn't have gotten at all back then.

We've had legal marijuana since 2018 up here in Canada, and from the statistics it looks like the market has almost caught up. The closest comparison I can think of is piracy and beginning of streaming wars (like Spotify and Netflix). Sure piracy is free, but a significant chunk of people started subbing for the services because of the convenience. If you'll only save about $5 per purchase, but have to get cash, arrange everything and etc., that might be just enough friction for you to just go to one of the billion stores nearby.

A conspicuous absence of black market for other herbal products such as tea and cilantro indicates that the edge of the black market over the lawful businesses isn't that great, if extant at all.

Or, to take an even nearer example: consider alcohol. It's heavily regulated and taxed in the US, but what little bootlegging exists does so mostly as a curiosity, not as a way of getting cheaper booze.

I think those are just not great examples. There are plenty of examples of black markets for legal things, including food stuff.

Example: instead of buying meat at a formal (as in, legal business that pays taxes, has the proper sanitary reviews, etc) butcher shop, its buying from a small producer who kills their own animals, or from some shady figure who kills other producer’s animals.

Another example is alcohol and cigarettes that are bought at duty free shops by mules and then sold tax free in street markets.

The edge of the black market over lawful business ranges from small to huge depending mostly on how regulated the lawful business is and the costs of a physical location (think street sales of snacks right across from a shop that also sells snacks but also has to pay rent, utilities, taxes, etc).

"its buying from a small producer who kills their own animals, or from some shady figure who kills other producer’s animals"

That is a very marginal case. The vast majority of revenue in the meat business goes through the big corporations.

"Another example is alcohol and cigarettes that are bought at duty free shops by mules and then sold tax free in street markets."

Oh yeah, if you burden the legal producers with extraordinary, punitive taxes, the black market unburdened with them can flourish.

>Oh yeah, if you burden the legal producers with extraordinary, punitive taxes, the black market unburdened with them can flourish.

That's exactly what most states, though apparently not Washington, do with weed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com