We live in a world in which the vice president of the United States can and does say, as she did last week at a “marijuana reform roundtable” in Washington, D.C., that “Nobody should have to go to jail for smoking weed.”
She didn’t use any formal term for cannabis, but rather the street slang of her East Bay youth.
For anyone who was around in this country in the Prohibitionist past, when hundreds of thousands of Americans very much did get arrested for smoking weed, and many of them went to both jail and to prison, it can still be shocking to see how far we have come on the legalization front. From a civil-liberties point of view, count this as a major victory in our society.
But the realities of how legalization has played out in states around the country can also remind us of the adage, Be careful what you wish for.
The massive crash of upscale pot retailer MedMen in recent months is an object lesson for what ails the business. Once thought of as the Apple Store for fancy, fancifully named strains of marijuana has now shuttered many of its retail locations. Once valued at over a billion dollars, its stock price has plunged to zero.
And, in many ways, it’s not the company’s fault. A major problem in trying to make money selling legal marijuana in this country is that marijuana is still illegal in this country — federally. State by state, it’s becoming locally legal in different ways.
But so long as the government in D.C. insists on keeping marijuana a Schedule I drug, just like heroin, national banking institutions find it impossible to work with companies selling weed, and the tax code limits ordinary business deductions in ways that make it much harder to make money. The Biden administration needs to make good on its promises for change.
And, in California, state, county and city governments need to recognize the role they play in keeping old-fashioned illicit pot dealers in business because of their lower prices. In addition to the normal sales tax of up to 10.75%, cannabis shops are subject to a 15% excise tax on their sales that makes it very hard to compete. Plus cities continue to throw up bureaucratic roadblocks to pot stores. It all adds up to a world in which government still makes it a difficult place to sell weed.