Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/30/medical-cannabis-to-federal-approval-recreational-remains-criminal.html
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Tough luck for recreational users, though.
Geez, take the win and then work for the next thing instead of sounding like you’d rather not have anything. You have to fight a lot of battles to win sometimes.
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Maybe. The black market is thriving in Colorado because hedge funds/multistate corporations have bought up most of the legal market and lobbied the state to allow remediated products without warning consumers. Low quality is the standard in most stores. Corporations are ruining Colorado legal cannabis. Profits uber alles. While this may be fine for the mids crowd who wax poetic about fast food and Miller Lite, people who need quality are forced to the black market. Even with 26% tax, most people prefer the legal route, but are being encouraged to circumvent it.
One benefit of this law: CO passed a law to limit access to medical marijuana that required physicians to write a prescription, which would forfeit their DEA license to prescribe anything controlled. Many doctors quit providing evaluations, leaving people out in the cold. They can warm up again due to rescheduling. Yay.
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What happened in California was that doctors who had reached the normal end of their working life, or did not want to participate in modern corporate medicine, ended up working for dispensaries, or operating weed mills whose only purpose was to issue cannabis medical certificates. This practice was ignored by regulators. I haven’t lived there in more than a decade, but I doubt that the practice has ended; a medical certificate is an easy way around most of the prohibitive taxes that the legal cannabis markets suffer under.
I see that the medical weed mill I used to use there, CalMed420, is still in business and happily operating as CalMed421 now. It looks like Dr. Donald Clark, one of the early doctors to embrace medical cannabis there, is still doing his thing. That’s great-- he was getting elderly when I used to go there, a decade ago now.
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Good news for the UK, as apparently we’re the world’s biggest exporter of medicinal weed:
I only found out the other week that medicinal weed is now legal in the UK, with a prescription (and presumably it’s charged at the standard £9.65 prescription fee). Somehow that passed me by.
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Would you mind explaining how so? Low THC content, or ?
I remember the legal outlets being touted as a source that’s safer because their product isn’t tainted with who knows what.
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Sure. Cannabis is no different than any product or service where cutting corners for profit is concerned.
One challenge of growing is keeping a clean grow–no mold (esp aspergillus), bugs, etc. Def no harmful chemicals for a grower who cares about the plant and the people who consume it.
Doing this on a large scale while paying minimum wage to young stoners is really hard.
Lobbying the state to allow contaminated product without labeling it as such is easy. Ditto manipulating the testing standards for thc % with a wide window to make the reported number essentially meaningless. Just report the highest number from the one test of a tiny fraction of product you must submit. These are industry standards. So is a new nine month statuatory expiration date on flower. This is safety theater, as it sounds good, but forces grows to sell immature (less potent) flower and limits the selection/variety of strains that can turn a profit because many take too long to flower. Good weed takes time. However, the spice must flow and quarterly financials must show growth.
A good friend is the CO distriburion manager for a major nationwide brand and another is general manager for a large dispensary/grow with a couple locations here. Both can regale with stories of what I describe above. Neither likes it and both consume black market products for personal use. The quality gap is wide and there is no 26% tax.
In short, it’s business as usual for big money.
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Thanks, it does sound Awful As Usual.
I gather they know the growers personally, and their careful growing practices?
Most of the people I know who work in the CO industry seek out black market products or simply grow their own.
Younger people tend to buy the cheapest stuff out there due to lack of funds. Many have never tried something of quality. It’s like growing up and thinking McDonald’s has great burgers because you’ve never tried any others. That’s the reality of so many Americans who cannot afford choices, whether it’s an apartment priced by algorithm, organic food vs processed crap, or cannabis.
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Makes sense.
I wonder how much those who can afford to be discriminating on the black market can also avoid supporting the Chinese mafia. And whether that mafia is really any worse business wise than the Big Bizness controlling legal weed. And how clean mafia weed is.
The Chinese Mafia took down a lot of well-meaning folks well before any legalization. No doubt. They have only grown (lol) stronger across the country with legalization. Stories out of Oklahoma are telling, but not limited to it.
They used to offer homegrowers cash to distribute their product, then sell them out to authorities if they got caught. Their marks were like low level employees to be discarded when they became a liability. Very capitalist. Treasure troves of genetics were lost in seizures. Lives were ruined. This is their contribution to ruining something great.
This is not what I am talking about at all. My view includes the instagram-based trade of small growers who don’t have capital to set up a legal op or passionate homegrowers who love cannabis and share with friends. Younger people use instagram. Smart people network–making friends is safer and more fun–and stay offline.
that’s why i self medicate – i have no friends ;_;
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