By now, New Jersey has been running its mouth about legalizing marijuana for so long without actually delivering results that the state qualifies as the American equivalent of the under-qualified male wasting everyone\u2019s time at your company meeting with pablum he half-remembers from a TED talk.<\/p>\n
Bad news: You can\u2019t fire a state, and since it is highly likely whatever New Jersey does with legalization New York may attempt to copy \u2014 meaning cannabis policy in the country\u2019s largest city does at least somewhat hinge on what happens in Trenton \u2014 what happens there is actually fairly significant. This is failing up.<\/p>\n
Good news: In the meantime, there is plenty of cannabis available and there is a good chance that, unlike in other states where the industry is regulated and taxed, the people selling it are ethnically diverse. This is the \u201cunderground market\u201d that is alive and well in\u00a0New Jersey<\/a>, which of course means that it is a \u201cproblem\u201d that lawmakers want to get rid of.<\/p>\n The Asbury Park Press<\/a>\u00a0recently spent a night at a cannabis pop-up, one of many New Jersey marijuana sales events. The event was what the kids may even dare to call a \u201csesh,\u201d or a \u201csecret sesh,\u201d of the kind that they advertise on Facebook-owned Instagram to anyone who bothers to click \u201cfollow.\u201d<\/p>\n At places like this, according to the newspaper, \u201cpot dealers\u2026 are going to stay in business, regardless of what the law says.\u201d After all, \u201c[t]he dealers have a vast supply of weed, imported illegally from California and Washington, D.C. They\u2019ve got a loyal customer base and years of experience. And, unlike legal weed dispensaries, they can sell tax-free.\u201d<\/p>\n The reason why all this works, one cannabis merchant told the newspaper, is simple market dynamics. People want cannabis. There is no legal cannabis available. Lo, a market inefficiency that someone will fill.<\/p>\n At some point, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy will sign a bill that the New Jersey state Legislature will send his way. The current plan is to tax cannabis at $42 per ounce, which could be an effective rate of 10 percent on the low end to closer to 30 percent at current street prices. How tight-fisted the state will be with awarding licenses \u2014 and thus, how absolutely cutthroat the competition for a license will be, and how much greater a mountain of capital a would-be entrepreneur would need to enter the industry \u2014 is not entirely clear,\u00a0but if the state\u2019s approach to medical cannabis is any indication<\/a>, it will be neither generous nor easy.<\/p>\n According to the photos of the cannabis purchased at the pop-up seshes posted to the Asbury Park Press website, what\u2019s available would be comfortingly familiar to anyone who has ever purchased marijuana elsewhere in the country \u2014 because it appears that\u2019s exactly where it came from, down to the branding and packaging.<\/p>\n ThePress quoted an official from the state police lobby, which predictably is one of the main components of the anti-legalization effort, as saying that the regulated market will find it difficult to compete with the unregulated market. Flaws in his analysis aside \u2014 if the cannabis is coming from California in a form other than massive turkey bags, it is subject to some regulation \u2014 he is onto something.<\/p>\n If there is an underground market, that means the regulations are bad, or inadequate, or the taxes or too high, or too few licenses are issued, or some combination of these or other problems that arise when lawmakers view an industry as an ATM or treat cannabis like a dangerous commodity that should be regulated more strictly than\u00a0alcohol<\/a>. In other words, a thriving underground market is a diagnosis and a critique. Demand for cannabis will never go away. If almost 50 years of federal prohibition has proven anything, it is that people like to smoke weed and are willing to run sizable risks to do it. Thus, if an underground market is still kicking, it means the regulations are somehow not competitive.<\/p>\n And also, so what? Here is the libertarian argument, when the Venn diagram of Ron Paul supporters and weedheads approaches a very odd circle. Can there truly be something wrong with procuring some home-grown outside of the legal market in a way similar to trying your buddy\u2019s home brew? There\u00a0could<\/em>\u00a0be, sure \u2014 it is a simple thing to come up with a problematic scenario in the hypothetical. But really what the underground market shows is what the rest of us are doing wrong.\u00a0Like the mutating dinosaurs in Jurassic Park<\/a>, the underground will find a way if the regulated market gives it a path.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>, have you ever been to a sesh?<\/p>\n The post In Defense of the Underground Marijuana Market<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
By now, New Jersey has been running its mouth about legalizing marijuana for so long without actually delivering results that the state qualifies as the American equivalent of the under-qualified male wasting everyone\u2019s time at your company meeting with pablum he half-remembers from a TED talk. Bad news: You can\u2019tContinue 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":[4588,50,119,687,215,3123,8965],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33528"}],"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=33528"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33529,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33528\/revisions\/33529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nRead More: In Defense of the Underground Marijuana Market<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"