The Cannabis System Is A Mess
The illegal markets and, lack of public education, and closing of the operators by the government have made it hard for legal dispensaries to compete. I want to scream “DO SOMETHING”. Every dispensary and farmer is paying absurd taxes while attempting to build businesses from scratch, most of which are under-financed. The same disaster exists in California as it does in NY. I can’t speak for the other states, but the question is, why are they not doing anything to protect legal licenses to only compete against each other?
If an illegal liquor shop opened or someone started making bootleg vodka or wine in any state without a license, they would be shut down in a nanosecond. It makes zero sense that cannabis is treated differently; it should be treated the exact same way.
Being in the weeds of this debacle has only highlighted how broken our system is. That nobody in politics has the wherewithal to say the buck stops here. Fear of not being re-elected, fear of not getting the funding from the lobbyists, fear of pissing off a group of people who won’t vote for you next time, has made it hard for anything to get done.
Why can’t the governor or the mayor say that you will be closed if you do not have a license, period? You must follow the guidelines set forth by the Government to build a legal cannabis business in this state that will create new taxes for our state. There will be fines and eventually jail times if you continue, not because you are selling weed but because you are not abiding by the laws put forth to distribute weed, like alcohol. How hard is this? It appears to be very hard.
What will happen in 2025? From everything we read, and of course, each media platform skews the information differently, it is clear that the DEA is moving towards rescheduling the plant. This is all new territory. Once it happens, how quickly does that change banking? They won’t need a fair banking act passed for cannabis (although they still need one) because the banks all want in on this.
The lawsuits to move products across state lines will begin, but that takes time; I assume banking will not. There have been countless legal roadblocks in the process of building Gotham. We have started to think of them as weather, if you wait long enough the climate changes, and sometimes you have to shovel the sidewalk.
I hope that 2025 is game-changing for the cannabis industry if (fingers-crossed) the DEA reschedules, the banks jump in, and the plant becomes federally legal. It is time. It is also the only way we will fix the illegal market, and the way cannabis operates.