Washington’s Liquor Control Board, the entity in charge of implementing I-502, is funding a survey to gather opinions about how best to implement the historic law. If you are 18 or older, please take a few minutes to complete the survey. Let’s make sure we Weedists have a say in the matter!
Categories: Best of the Web, Cannabusiness, Law & Politics, Marijuana News
Tags: I-502, legalization, Washington.
By:
Zeke Becker. Permalink: 
Shortlink: http://weedi.st/3H7Ra
Tags: I-502, legalization, Washington.
By:
Zeke Becker. Permalink: Shortlink: http://weedi.st/3H7Ra
This is a pretty unusual survey, especially the parts about how much premium I'm willing to spend on legal recreational cannabis versus black market or medical. I'm beginning to think that the regulators are worried that their legal product is going to cost more than black market. If so, legal cannabis in Washington is in real trouble. The whole idea at the beginning of this legalization effort was to have legal cannabis at lower prices than black market. Much lower. That made sense. Turn the black market profits into tax revenue. Methinks that concept might be going down the drain based on these questions. If so, the black market is going to continue to thrive beside the legal market.
That's actually the way it's all been designed. They get to control the "legal" market, while making it excessively costly through oppressive taxation, which maintains the "black market", so that they can double-dip by arresting and imprisoning those who can't afford to pay "legal prices" for corporate-produced cannabis.
They get you coming, they get you going, and they get you in the middle.
Or we could have sense enough to REPEAL CANNABIS PROHIBITION once and for all…but I doubt that people have enough common sense to actually END THE PROBLEM with so many "NOT REPEAL" options to pick through, and nobody even making the attempt to REPEAL the prohibitionary statutes.
People think it's crazy to "end the problem by ENDING THE PROBLEM"…and yet, they continue to be "shocked and amazed" when the problem doesn't end, and things always get worse?!?
Thanks for your passion, as always, ElectroPig. I don't really understand why it has been so difficult to just remove cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act, but these other methods do give us other options. It is just unfortunate that the Washington marijuana industry stands so little a chance of survival with such high tax rates. We here at Weedist of course encourage everyone to do everything they can, in all the ways available to us, to push for the eventual end to marijuana prohibition. We'll get there.
The answer is amazingly simple…It's difficult to remove something from anything when you never actually try to do it.
In Canada, "the Harper government" is REPEALING the MMAR, so that they can charge people between $1500 to $5000 PER MONTH (or more!!!) for a medicinal plant that they currently grow at home for pennies. And that's only "on average." The people who actually need more than three or four GRAMS per day are going to be instantly bankrupted.
Basically, it is expected that 10,000+ people will be forced to suffer needlessly in order to "remain a non-criminal", many who have come to rely on cannabis to keep them alive "will just stop that" and die, and 10,000+ people will decide that they are human beings who deserve not to suffer for some douchebag's political propaganda points…and they'll instantly be arrested, tried and imprisoned.
I kept telling people NO CANNABIS-SPECIFIC TAXES…Jack kept saying NO CANNABIS-SPECIFIC TAXES….nobody listened…so there they are.
This way, they get to keep AMAZINGLY HIGH profit margins in the "pharmaceutical cannabis market" while they also get to raise "enforcement" and "imprisonment" budgets, while making the black market MUCH more profitable, thereby GUARANTEEING that the problem gets worse–and more expensive for us–on all possible fronts.
We REFUSED to do what we knew was needed, and now, it's worse.
Surprise, surprise…
Maybe another thirty or forty generations, we'll wake up…but when the answer has been sitting in plain sight all along, and it is the ONLY THING that absolutely nobody will even speak of, let alone attempt, the end result is permanent failure, for no other reason that the fact that we REFUSED to end the problem for so long that the problem took over.
Enjoy your taxes and fees and license costs, everybody! It's only gonna get more expensive once they take more of your money to attack you with!
Indeed, I couldn't believe my ears when I heard that tax could be $12 per gram. Per Gram?!? I thought I'd heard wrong or that someone had made a mistake. At those prices, not only will the black market continue, but the legal recreational industry could fail entirely in Washington.
$12 per gram in taxes, wow. On the very high end I pay $16 per gram at my dispensary in CA. That would basically be 75% tax to the consumer, which is what Time reported back in February: /quicklink/time-will-high-m…
I guess the good news is that the WA regulators are asking the questions. Hopefully they get realistic and helpful answers and adjust accordingly. No home grows either, that part bothers me to the core. Free the weed, right?
Can you imagine what that means for us guys who kick it at $60ish per "grimmace"
Woe is me…we.
Put it this way, if you currently grow your own, and use an average of 15 grams per day, in Canada, that 15 grqansd per day will cost you $10.00 per gram, or $150.00 per day.
$150.00 per day translates into $4500.00 per month, or $54,750.00.
Now, if you're paying $16.00 per gram, with the addition of $12.00 per gram in "cannabis-specific taxes", now we're looking at $28.00 per gram, or for the same average amount as above, $420.00 a day, $12,600.00 per month, or $153,300.00 per year.
That's gonna be great for retirees and the sick and injured who aren't working, and are living off whatever they get back from their lifetime of pension contributions…but we can be damned sure that it won't be nearly enough to cover their medicine ALONE, let alone "ridiculously wasteful and selfish luxuries" like food, rent, heat, power, water.
It's really the best way to guarantee more people go to prison, more foreign cartels move in, more violence…basically, everything that prohibition created, but exponentially increased.
And YOU get to pay for it all…one way, or another!
Or we could have sense enough to REPEAL CANNABIS PROHIBITION.
My bet is that we're going to keep refusing to even say that word, and we'll never be able to understand why everything keeps getting worse…
I took a slightly different approach during the survey. When asked how much extra per gram I was willing to pay, I answered 0. Legal weed should not be more expensive than black market, or they're doomed. If it were 12% (not $12) per gram higher, hell maybe even 20% per gram higher, maybe I'd suck it up knowing that a small portion would go back into schools and education. Here's WA's current markup and taxes on alcohol for reference: http://liq.wa.gov/stores/liquor-pricing
As a Canadian, my opinion doesn't make any difference and would likely just be discarded…but I went through it anyway and I chose the same options.
You should NOT be able to get better quality cannabis, with wider strain availability, at a MUCH cheaper price, from the kid standing outside the local high school, than you could from a mass-produced, low-choice, questionable quality corporate-grown cannabis producer.
No cannabis-specific taxes. Keep the price as low as it can be. Let people grow their own and starve the international cartels, gangs, etc. of funds. Once they're out of fraudulently obtained money, then you repeal the prohibitionary statutes once and for all. THEN it's over.
I typed "$5 LESS" on that question.