Today’s New York Times has a nice long story about Colorado’s legalized, regulated, and taxed for-profit marijuana trade. It’s getting a rocky start:
Since this place opened in January, it’s been one nerve-fraying problem after another. Pot growers, used to cash-only transactions, are shocked to be paid with checks and asked for receipts. And there are a lot of unhappy surprises, like one not long ago when the Farmacy learned that its line of pot-infused beverages could not be sold nearby in Denver. Officials there had decided that any marijuana-tinged consumables had to be produced in a kitchen in the city.
“You’d never see a law that says, ‘If you want to sell Nike shoes in San Francisco, the shoes have to be made in San Francisco,’ ” says Ms. Respeto, sitting in a tiny office on the second floor of the Farmacy. “But in this industry you get stuff like that all the time.”
Boulder now has more marijuana dispensaries than Starbucks and liquor stores combined and the state is trying to figure out how to properly tax and regulate them.
The new rules, many of which will take effect over coming months, treat dispensaries a bit like pharmacies and a bit like casinos. Felons will soon be prohibited from owning dispensaries. (Mr. Werner is selling the Dr. Reefer store.) Twenty-four-hour Webcams will be trained on every growing facility and dispensary in the state. There are restrictions on hours, new rules for licensing, labeling and on and on.
Dispensary owners, generally speaking, aren’t complaining. The more regulated the business becomes, the easier it will be to operate, says Ms. Respeto of the Farmacy. The company, which was co-founded by her father, has big ambitions: to become a medical marijuana dispensary franchise and do for Super Silver Haze what Rite Aid did for pills.
The mutual- and hedge-fund managers are starting to come around, looking for moneymaking opportunities—a growth-investment opportunity if there ever was one.
The Nike analogy is a bad one. Ms. Respeto should have said something like “You’d never see a law saying you can only sell cigarettes or booze in San Fran if they were made in San Fran.” Which is true and makes her point more effectively.
Oh, and pot dealers are “shocked” to be asked for receipts? Jesus christ… It’s called accountability stoners, get used to it.
One day we will look back with nostalgia on the pre-corporate days of the Pot Trade.
While the lurking presence of mutual and hedge-fund managers usually seems sinister, it might be a good thing, or at least not a terrible one, in this instance.
If those types of people can do anything well
(aside from personal enrichment), it’s put pressure on people in government to ease strict regulations on things. A more open and easy system of commerce for marijuana? Please.
The stoners are all going to be pushed out as selling pot becomes a small-margin competitive business, where sloppy business practices=failure and corporations will soon provide the PBR of THC delivery.
Good idea and a good first step but legalization wouldn’t work for all drugs.
@4:
I don’t think they’ll be pushed out as easily as all that; some, certainly, but pot growers have traditionally been very good at the adaptation thing, so I expect a fair number will figure out the new system – once there’s some consistency on the regulation-side.
And while this will no doubt attract the interest of large-scale producers (I can just imagine R.J. Reynolds and their peers jumping on this, if for no other reason than to counter the eventual phasing out of their tobacco operations), I also expect things will run more like alcohol production has in the U.S. in the past couple of decades, with a few large conglomerates mass-producing a product of moderate potency (ala your PBR comparison), but at the same time leaving lots of room for the craft-producers who would be more akin to small-batch distilleries and microbreweries.
There’s always going to be demand at both ends of the spectrum: people who want a milder high will be attracted to the mass-produced products, while those looking for truly ass-kicking bakage will gravitate toward the smaller producers of higher THC content product.
@7 “I can just imagine R.J. Reynolds and their peers jumping on this, if for no other reason than to counter the eventual phasing out of their tobacco operations”
It worked for clove cigarettes, which are TOTALLY different from menthol “flavors”