In board games and in life, a monopoly is a great thing \u2014 for the tiny percentage of people who have control of the bank. For the rest of us, it\u2019s a tedious bore, where the best you can hope for is an abusive relationship in which mediocre product is offered for a premium price.<\/p>\n
From a purely capitalist perspective, it might be possible to justify or at least defend the power moves currently being made by Illinois medical marijuana growers.<\/p>\n
As the Chicago Tribune reported,<\/a> the state\u2019s cannabis cultivators are celebrating their newfound freedom to spend money politically by lobbying Illinois lawmakers and the governor to secure a near-monopoly on supplying cannabis for a future recreational market.<\/p>\n Existing growers have hired a former state Senator, Pam Althoff, as the executive director of a new Medical Cannabis Alliance of Illinois, which put out a statement declaring that they \u201csupport no new cultivation licenses.\u201d<\/p>\n New Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker campaigned hard last year on the promise to legalize recreational marijuana in the state<\/a>, which has a sizable and growing medical marijuana industry \u2014 bolstered in no small part by a recent allowance for anyone with a prescription for opiate-based painkillers to also access medical cannabis.<\/p>\n Pritzker, at least, is literally banking on the legislature getting legalization done: the governor\u2019s proposed budget plans on the state reaping $170 million from licensing fees, as the Belleville News-Democrat<\/a> recently reported.<\/p>\n At the moment, it costs about $200,000 for a medical-marijuana cultivation permit, with a $25,000 non-refundable application fee. Once that $225,000 is plunked down, there\u2019s a $100,000 annual renewal fee \u2014 plus, you know, the build-out and the labor costs required to actually grow cannabis. There are currently 22 cultivation centers across the state, one in each state police district, according to the newspaper.<\/p>\n A pair of Chicago-based state lawmakers who have been working on marijuana legislation for the past two years recently said that they plan to introduce a bill to legalize recreational marijuana within the next month or two.<\/p>\n Language has yet to be finalized and whatever is in the introductory bill may not be what makes it through the lawmaking process which, like most everything else, is often susceptible to the influence of enormous amounts of money.<\/p>\n And money is exactly what\u2019s already at play in Illinois\u2019s medical-marijuana industry, with even more cash at stake should recreational marijuana become legally available in Chicago, America\u2019s Second City and the Midwest\u2019s major population center.<\/p>\n The prospect of the state\u2019s limited medical growers receiving state approval to grow all of Illinois\u2019s cannabis prompted Mark De Souza, CEO of Revolution Enterprises<\/a>, a state-licensed cultivation operation that bills itself as the largest cultivator in the state, to pen an op-ed in Crain\u2019s Chicago<\/a>, the esteemed business journal, arguing against such a scenario.<\/p>\n \u201cI oppose a limit on new licenses for commercial production,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI cannot and do not speak for other cannabis firms, but I crave competition, because competition will ultimately lead to a healthier, more robust industry \u2014 one that generates more tax revenue and jobs for Illinois.\u201d<\/p>\n Deploying an argument that seems to hold more water given the results in other states (the main reasoning why California, for example, has only reaped about half what it expected to from marijuana taxes is a thriving underground market sustained by high prices on the regulated market), De Souza argued that a monopoly situation would lead to a \u201cnew and unregulated market.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe whole point of ending pot prohibition is to bring this market out of the shadows,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIf the new market immediately becomes the Wild West, it will not succeed.\u201d<\/p>\n Other states with limited cultivation capacities have seen demand far outstrip supply. This script has played out in Washington a few years ago, in Nevada in the summer of 2017 and again in Pennsylvania. Canada, too, saw some empty shelves after limiting or at least strictly regulating the supply-side of the marijuana industry.<\/p>\n Will Illinois learn from those lessons, or will it decide that money talks most convincingly? De Souza, at least, is offering an argument that is compelling because of both its reasoning and its source. Revolution would stand to benefit with a monopoly, but at a greater cost that could severely hurt marijuana legalization\u2019s purpose.<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/strong>\u00a0do you have access to cannabis where you live?<\/p>\n The post Will Illinois\u2019s Marijuana Legalization Plan Include a Monopoly?<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
In board games and in life, a monopoly is a great thing \u2014 for the tiny percentage of people who have control of the bank. For the rest of us, it\u2019s a tedious bore, where the best you can hope for is an abusive relationship in which mediocre product isContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[363,50,2121,216,2544,5,4672,170,1051,362],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33171"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33171"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33172,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33171\/revisions\/33172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Game Over?<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: Will Illinois\u2019s Marijuana Legalization Plan Include a Monopoly?<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"