Big Marijuana May Not Be Inevitable But Is Highly Desirable

[CloudMaster]

"http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall ... desirable/

http://www.forbes.com - Tim Worstall - 11/18/2014 @ 11:14AM

Big Marijuana Might Not Be Inevitable But It Is Highly Desirable

The New York Times has another of its “Room for Debate” features (disclosure, I’ve taken part in a couple but not this one) over whether it’s inevitable that the increasing legalisation of cannabis is going to lead to the rise of “Big Marijuana”, along the lines of Big Sugar or Big Tobacco. The correspondents, as ever, seem to be largely talking past each other (you don’t get to see what others are saying as you compose your own piece) but the general outcome seems to be that while legalisation is highly desirable the rise of large corporations supplying it would be some form of disaster. A result which is to me most odd.

It starts here and then there’s Mark Kleiman:

"The District’s elected officials are now considering whether to move beyond “grow and give” by creating another for-profit market. I’m against it.

Granted, buying at the store would be more convenient than home growing for Washingtonians who want to consume cannabis, and would therefore compete more effectively against illegal growing and selling. But turning cannabis over to for-profit vendors carries two great risks: increased drug abuse, and illegal exports from the district to the rest of the country. The key factor is price: Legal cannabis will cost (before tax) a small fraction of what dealers now charge for illegal cannabis."

Well, yes, legal pot should be a great deal cheaper than illegal pot. And a reasonable response would be to have high taxes, as with tobacco. But the really important point, to me, about legal supply, for profit, is that then gives people a reason to be concerned about quality, marking and labeling. Even in the absence of the usual duty of care this would still happen (indeed, it happens an amount in the illegal trade). Having a brand that is known to provide what is actually being sought is of value to the producer. Thus legally being allowed to supply will result in the creation of those brands that can be trusted. Legal supply, as opposed to just legal use, will contribute to quality of supply.

Then there’s this from Kevin Sabet:

"And that, of course, is the real danger of American-style legalization. It would be one thing if recent legalization laws simply removed criminal penalties for adult possession – a revision of that nature is overdue – but the current legalization wave is driven by far more than social justice: it is about making a profit."

And what’s wrong with profit? Sabet seems to have inhaled the hippie disdain of money and capitalism without quite grasping the joys of the drug itself. For in order to make a profit providing something you have to be providing that something more efficiently than other people. Further, you’ve got to be creating value while you do so: that profit you record is the value that you’ve created. So, imagine as I have done on these pages recently, Zambia starts to grow legal pot at $10 a kg and the price of a pack of 20 joints in the US is thus around 50 cents (before tax). The supplier of these makes a profit, the consumers get their joints cheaper and everyone’s happy (the consumers presumably ecstatically and stonedly so) and all are better off. Why wouldn’t we desire this more than some system of home based grow it and give it away?

That’s not the way we deal with wheat, pizzas, apples or coriander, so why on earth would we think it a suitable one for cannabis?

Another way to put this is that we know that capitalism, big bad corporations, provides whatever it is hugely cheaper and usually of better quality than peasant farming or craft production methods. So, if we’ve decided that cannabis should be legal (which I agree it should be) why on earth would we want to insist that it can only be produced by those methods that we know are inefficient, expensive, and lead to a low quality product?

It’s not inevitable that we will have Big Marijuana but it seems entirely obvious to me that if we’re going to have legal pot then Big Marijuana is the next desirable addition to the system. And that means legalisation of for profit supply and trade, not just legalisation of possession or consumption."

[spidergawd]

For the smaller local grower the local Farmers Markets which seem to thrive along side "Big Groceries and Stuff" would seem an ideal outlet. We have plenty of them everywhere now. They would pay their taxes just like the Butcher the Baker and the Candlemaker. A nice specialist pop-up-pot-shop is just what we need along Chiswick riverside on a Sunday morning.

Purely an outlet for small or medium growers , no import.

[CloudMaster]

"http://www.west-info.eu/legal-cannabis- ... rofiteers/

West - Welfare Society Territory - by Anna Madia - 2014.12.01

Legal cannabis: the activists and the profiteers



As with all movements, the pro-cannabis successes have also come with their own problems. The anti-prohibitionist breakthrough that has now been embraced by many American states is likely to divide the advocates of legalised marijuana into two camps. On one side there are the pure anti-prohibitionist activists, who have fought for years for the right to legalisation. On the other there is the world of business, which aims to profit from an industry that, according to the latest estimates, will have a turnover of $35 billion by 2020.

And it’s the dizzying profits that are pushing the activists to call for businesses, which are already making huge gains, to put their hands in their pockets to keep the campaign for legal cannabis politically alive and also to push the campaign further. Their goal is not just legalisation but also to start up a debate on issues such as drug addiction or the high rate of imprisonment in the US. This is what historic champions of the ‘Yes we cannabis’ campaign, such as Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance Group and Graham Boyd, founder of New Approach, are calling for. Both consider the big marijuana businesses to be short-sighted, with an interest only in making a profit today, without thinking about the new battles of tomorrow.

But can the grass-roots supporters also convince American capitalism that profit is not everything? For now, they try to get their message across by travelling from state to state holding talks and conferences, trying to persuade the audience to donate. Aaron Houston, strategist at Ghost Group and executive director of ‘Students for sensible drug policy’ describes it as “a Herculean effort”. But raising awareness is the first step. And Houston believes that US business should learn from the mistakes of Silicon Valley.

They need to understand that business and politics must work together to fully defeat prohibition, as well as realising that business itself is entirely political. The real gain is not cash, but being able to apply an appropriate set of standards in each state, thus rewriting the federal laws on cannabis."