THEREFORE they will be able to move CASH money out of their stores TO BANKS, resulting in fewer "smash and grab" incidents ... aka, "Hyundai meet storefront of weed shop."
Looking forward to this, silly to see so many Kia "boys" being used for gross violence crimes when regulation changes could lessen it.
Thanks for the link. I'm not a marijuana advocate, but from that article it sounds pretty plainly like so many other stories of law enforcement effectively stealing cash because they can, and are often instructed or incentivized to do so.
Well-known to expert GeoGuessr players as a convenient way to quickly tell what country you're in on a random rural road, as different countries use mysteriously consistent different bollard styles even when their road surfaces are otherwise almost identical.
Edit: reminds me of my neighbour who dropped his motorbike because a car pulled out on him from a fuel station. I asked how fast he was going, he said with absolute conviction he was doing no more than 5mph.
When I told him that was too fast he couldn’t wrap his head around it.
Oh my god. As someone who can't see well enough to get a license, but somehow can see bollards just fine as a passenger: If you can't see them, you shouldn't be fucking driving.
I’m a bit late responding, but thanks for accepting that you are unable to drive.
As someone who hits the road most days, whether in a car or on a motorbike it’s absolutely crazy to witness the state of affairs going on on the roads.
My uncle, who isn’t far off 80, but very fit and healthy has given his licence up this year after some pressure from family - I’ve been in the car with him driving and he isn’t safe, he can drive for sure, but he isn’t fast enough to respond to a bad move by others, nor if there is an accident ahead.
I’ll be personally removing my mother’s car when she is unfit to use it too. I don’t care what it costs in taxis or public transport, I don’t want her risking someone else’s life, nor her own, over the ability to get up and go immediately, rather than wait 10 minutes for a driver.
I’m grateful that they are willing to accept this and agree, I’d like to think my mother has another 10 years or so in her at this stage, but the moment it’s clear she’s not fit, that vehicle is gone.
It's not really a matter of accepting it or not - my eyesight is poor enough that I couldn't get a license if I tried.
I was also lucky enough to grow up in a place that provided generous benefits to people who couldn't see well enough to get a license - free public transport and 50% subsidised taxis. Having access to this mitigated the loss of economic opportunity significantly. Where I'm living now I don't get those benefits, but I'm in a position where I no longer need them.
The ones I've seen in the Detroit area seem to mostly be in areas zoned industrial, which typically means single story, stand alone buildings with few "eyes on the street". Going to guess Michigan has restrictive zoning requirements for marijuana businesses that keep it out of the public eye.
> Going to guess Michigan has restrictive zoning requirements for marijuana businesses that keep it out of the public eye.
It's up to each city/county if they allow any stores at all and their own regulations / licensing.
A recent change a lot of shops seem to be going through is removing the "lobby waiting area" (so 2-3 shop "in private") and just adding more shelves and display cases while building up a huge line. Never liked the farce before (and probably a holdover from when they were medical only) so its a nice change.
>"The owner says around $15,000 of products and items were stolen from the store."
It doesn't mention anything about cash.
"Smash and grab" in weed shops doesn't usually have much to do with having piles of cash sitting around (though I'm sure that might happen too) - it's the product that thieves want to steal because it's got no serial numbers, it's pretty light-weight and easy to run out with thousands of dollars worth of product, and it's easy to resell.
If there's any cash in the register that's often secondary to grabbing a few pounds of high-quality product. 3 pounds of high quality weed can be valued at $20k. I doubt there's that much in the cash register at the end of the day, and good luck getting into the safe. It's much easier to run out with 3 pounds of weed.
There's typically far more monetary value in product in any weed shop than there is cash, likely by an order of magnitude. Many of the purchases are done electronically, so there's not as much cash as you might think in most dispensaries.
How are these purchases done electronically if the stores cannot process credit cards? After there dispensaries more commonly using crypto that I don't know about?
Up to the 1990s (and probably still to this day, IDK how electronic payments have impacted this) there was a whole industry dedicated to getting cash off business premises and into banks.
For example, banks often had special "night safes" allowing small business owners to drop off bags of cash outside of branch opening hours. Some businesses would get daily armoured car visits to collect the day's takings. There were even supermarkets with a system of pneumatic tubes allowing cashiers to transfer money to the back room without leaving their stations, so their tills never had enough cash to be worth robbing. You could also get safes with a deposit slot, so employees could drop the takings into the safe, but didn't have the combination needed to get anything out again.
Assuming these all still exist, there are options for keeping cash secure, and getting it off the premises fast.
Of course, by similar logic they could store all the product in a safe out of hours. Jewellery stores manage to store loads of diamonds without getting robbed, after all...
Can't buy shit with weed. Gotta sell it. And that has time requirements and risks to you (including getting robbed yourself).
Meanwhile these are cash-only businesses, so if you're gonna steal then go for the money. Esp. since most dispensaries I've seen do a reasonably brisk business.
The poverty and gangster culture is going to stay the same so this seems like a weird kind of social take, I mean wont grifters just find another way to hurt common folk?
I mean... I can leave a 2000 USD Macbook for a toilet break in Starbucks over here without any issues and have done so regularly.
People are talking about schedule 3 needing a prescription, etc. From the financial point of view that's irrelevant; the point is that you CANNOT legally sell schedule 1 drugs commercially (with some exceptions that I can't remember).
Schedule 1 -> banned from the financial system.
Schedule 3 -> OK to use the financial system.
How the DEA schedule and the financial system interact is still unclear. The important part is that once regulations are updated weed businesses won't be restricted from access to the financial system. There may be some more regs around that access, but I'm sure they'll be worked around.
Right. At the end of the day we need to just de-list it and strike all federal laws on it. The ship has sailed and the states won, let’s just do the inevitable thing and get on with it.
If it has been illegal to sell cannabis commercially, how have cannabis companies been allowed to form and be publicly traded? I would think that federal regulation to be publicly traded would cause issues.
> How the DEA schedule and the financial system interact is still unclear.
You already answered this already :)
> the point is that you CANNOT legally sell schedule 1 drugs commercially
Schedule 1 means illegal under (nearly) any circumstance, commercial dispensaries fall under “any circumstance.” Drug scheduling is just a tiered system for classification in order to determine which rules to apply to its sale, distribution, and possession of the substance.
A lot of them have wiggled around this problem by offering “atms” at the cash register. You pay with a debit card, but it’s not a normal transaction, it’s an ATM withdrawal! I don’t understand how the money is vended to the business, but it keeps it out of the store
That's a fairly a common practice for cash only businesses, normally a different company is supplying the ATM and its cash. For example I've seen cash only ice cream shops with the same setup.
That's not what he's describing. In this case there actually is no cash or traditional ATM involved on-site. It's connected to the dispensary POS, not a physical ATM. (They often have a regular ATM like you describe also, though.)
So you do an ATM transaction, but the money goes to the dispensary somehow. I do not know how it works on the back end, but I've used it as a customer. It's lovely and can even be done over your phone.
Isn't that how a traditional ATM transaction works? You use the ATM and the money goes to the ATM owner (plus a fee). The only difference here is you get weed instead of cash.
Yes, but any ATM tells the bank that you took out $10. The bank never sees the cash and the cash doesn’t belong to the bank. Substituting goods may or may not be allowed but the bank doesn’t know about it and customers are unlikely to complain to the bank.
Signs that times are a' changing -- you can buy illegal drugs with a card now.
(Call me crazy and old-fashioned, but I don't think I'd want 50+ illegally-correlated transactions on my financial record that the government could lump into other charges...)
The Silver Platter doctrine prevents your financial institutions from handing over that data unbidden, but they can do so by request from law enforcement.
which law enforcement can get, trivially, if they're prosecuting a felony.
it's just a function of time and process, and while you can dispose of plants and bury money in your back yard, you can't undo old bank transactions. 20 years later those records may not be a thing, but last year sure will be...
sure they do. for example it's illegal to be in possession of marijuana and a firearm. the purchase of said MJ would be pretty good evidence that could lead to other warrants. That's the Hunter Biden gun charge.
It's oddly not. Only to be a user or addict with a firearm. IIRC if you just like the way weed looks in your hand that doesn't make you a user, and there's plenty of reasonable doubt you're guarding it for grandma or whoever.
Of course people are still being convicted of weed and firearm, but it gets recorded as gun law violation and nobody cares, cuz left hates guns and right hates weed, so they'll never repeal it.
The worst part is that the states are quite happy to help the feds enforce this. E.g. Hawaii has both mandatory gun registration and requires a state-issued license for medical marijuana. And if you happen to have both, well:
It should also be noted that while DEA is instructed by the executive to not go after cannabis users in states where it's legal for recreational use, there's no equivalent directive issued to ATF.
It would be great if the DEA and ATF were a bit more consistent in their enforcement. Joe Rogan smokes pot and has guns, federal agents busting down his studio door and dragging him away in handcuffs (while state ones look on and clap) would do more to move the needle on drug legalization than most anything else.
What you're saying is how people generally think the law works, but it's not how it works in practice. This is easily illustrated with possession of drug paraphernalia charges. There's two types of possession, actual and constructive - but both face the exact same charge. Constructive just means something like 'could be reasonably accessed.'
So imagine you're in a car, get pulled over, it smells of weed so the cop executes a search, and he finds a pipe in the glove compartment. You're getting arrested for PDP there 100%. Even if it genuinely wasn't yours, you stand very little chance of acquittal. Beyond a reasonable doubt doesn't mean 'is there some other viable explanation' because there literally always is. It means is it reasonably likely that one of these other explanations is what really happened.
What you're saying is how people generally think the prohibited possessor law works, but it's not how it works in practice.
It says nothing of drug possession, only gun/ammo possession by someone who uses or addicted to illegal drugs. There is plenty of reasonable doubt that constructive or actual possession of drugs is not accompanied by use, in fact this is the case for many dispensary workers.
>922 g (3) ... who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C. 802));
oh fair enough about the "user" vs possession. but my point was they could possible use this info to get a warrant to surveil you to catch you using it.
They don't need that. I was served a federal search warrant after a detective wrote an anonymous officer claimed an anonymous DOG accused me of wrongdoing.
When 3rd order anonymous interspecies hearsay is sufficient for a warrant it means a warrant is just a rubber stamp.
Even a rubber-stamp warrant process serves a point, by making the police identify who they are targeting, as opposed to targeting everyone, and deciding who to charge after the fact.
Warrants aren't supposed to be hard to get. They are only supposed to stop the most blatant fishing expeditions.
Yes this seems to be increasingly common, at least on the west coast. The suboptimal part is that the buyer typically gets hit with an out-of-network ATM fee for doing this, so the consumer is paying $2-5 for processing per transaction.
That’s pretty small potatoes though compared to going to a bank yourself and making a transaction for cash you don’t normally have around. Maybe there’s an ATM down the block but that’s not the case for many people.
And those ATMs around the block from a dispensary (or even in the same buildimg) would still charge a fee for withdrawal anyway (as they are always a third-party ATM and not a bank one, so you get that big message on the screen about an extra fee for withdrawal).
Use a credit union or bank that doesn’t charge ATM fees; that’s what I do. Any CU-related ATM withdrawal is always free and I get 10 ATM withdrawals a month with fees reversed.
Yes, even exorbitant ones like on a cruise ship or casino. Free checks, too. And mutual funds with lower fees than Vanguard. But virtually no physical branches (most locations are brokerage offices only) so not ideal for depositing cash or getting a cashier's check... use something else for that.
The Neo-Bank I use in Germany (N26) works similarly. 3 or 5 fee-eaten withdrawals per month, but the always free option is supermarket registers. There’s a large network of supermarkets that are connected to the network, and I can generate a code on my phone, scan it, and it registers the negative value (e.g. -50 €), which I then get handed. Deposits work the same way (scan code, generate positive amount that you then pay), but at least for free accounts deposits incur a fee.
there is still a lot of cash on site due to the presence of an ATM though, and in the cash registers. the primary problem is that weed shops are incredibly attractive robbery targets due to being one of the few businesses in 2024 that handle large amounts of cash.
Often enough, it isn’t an actual ATM. You pay at the counter like you usually would using a card or an NFC payment method (e.g., Apple Pay), but the payment reader processes it as an ATM withdrawal transaction (hence an extra transaction fee of a few dollars). There is no physical cash involved at any point in this (at least not on the dispensary premises).
It feels like it is a state-by-state thing, yeah. I moved from WA to NYC just half a year ago, and I noticed it as well.
In WA, it felt like it was a pretty even 50/50 split (maybe with a heavier lean towards cash) between places accepting cash-only and those that accept debit as well (in addition to cash obviously). I dont remember any that accepted credit cards. All of this is a more recent situation though, as I still remember that just 6-8 years ago, pretty much every single place used to be cash-only. I also noticed some dispensaries experimenting with rather unconvential methods at different points in time too (e.g., Uncle Ike’s using a payment terminal for like a year that worked similarly to a regular debit card one, but it was using crypto as an intermediate medium on the backend to process the payment).
In NYC, it feels like everyone just accepts cards like usual, from grey-market ones to the legal ones.
However, I infinitely prefer the WA situation with cannabis over the NYC one for bajillion other reasons that are entirely unrelated to payment methods.
> the primary problem is that weed shops are incredibly attractive robbery targets due to being one of the few businesses in 2024 that handle large amounts of cash.
It's also the product that's the target much of the time - it's got no serial numbers and it's light-weight, and easy to resell.
My brother supervises at a dispensary. They are not attractive robbery targets at all. They have a lot of security. Like a bank, they expect the amount of cash would bring trouble if they were not prepared. Unlike a bank, they don't dispense much cash (just petty change) so they don't even have to leave much in the drawers, which are emptied frequently and dropped into a safe nobody there can access.
They have cash-handling processes similar to a casino, but again, they have much less than a casino or bank to take.
Employee theft is a much bigger problem than robbery, because you can imagine who works at them, but even then, it's hard to get away with.
You'd be much better off robbing a busy gas station or the like.
> Employee theft is a much bigger problem than robbery, because you can imagine who works at them
This is lazy thinking.
Any business dealing in cash and desirable inventory will have theft problems. In fact, the inventory doesn’t even have to be desirable. Consider office supply theft. It’s rampant; a cost of business to some degree. And part of the motivation is simply the righting of perceived wrongs.
Employees will always take from their employers, in every industry and at every class level. In industries where there are no “things” to take, the employees simply take back their time.
I see why you would say that, but you probably have not met very many people who work at a dispensary, I have. My brother got promoted to supervisor in a month for the simple reason that he is the only person who could wait until after work to get high.
He’s told me quite a bit of what goes on there, and I am sure different dispensaries are different, but in any state where it is relatively recently legalized and there aren’t that many, it’s just the biggest stoners working there. You would have to be kind of special to decide to steal things with that much security around, they always get caught
You might want to be more careful then. This empty space is a well known rhetorical device used to allude that you're making a negative judgement about people.
What it meant was, if you work at a place with all the cash controls of a casino, you have to be stoned to steal petty cash from them. You’re going to get caught, and you’re going to get a felony over a small amount of money. Nobody sober does that.
It was not meant as “all stoners are thieves” but as “you’d have to be high to think that’s a good idea”. And since nearly everyone who works at a dispensary is high all day every day, it happens, a lot more than armed robbery which almost never does.
I don’t think there is much data to be had, at least public. But I can tell you in the 5 years my brother has been there, they have had zero armed robbery attempts, and several employee theft attempts. And a quick Google about whether dispensaries get robbed frequently will show you people from the industry saying the same thing.
But no, no data, only anecdotes. Still, I feel like only somebody who has never been in a dispensary would think they are attractive robbery target. I’ve been in them and maybe 10 states, and they are all pretty tight Security, because they know they have a lot of cash and people would like to steal it.
Why? Society doesn’t owe you acceptance for your personal choices. For the vast majority of people, smoking marijuana is an anti-social choice that makes them a less productive member of society. Why should anyone have something other than a negative opinion of such a choice?
"You judged someone on a separate occasion, so you can't object to judging people now" would be tu quoque. What I actually did was point out the internal contradiction in your stated position.
I've said a total of four sentences on the matter, none of which hinted at its importance or lack thereof to me, so it's interesting that you've come to that conclusion. Either way, my internal motivations are a non sequitur. You are continuing to take a self-contradictory position by stating that a certain behavior, namely judgment, is not "ok", which constitutes a judgment. You have offered no defense of doing so. Should I conclude that you simply believe that oxymoronic positions can in fact be correct?
No it's not. Judging people is extremely important in order to enforce social conformity and norms. It's how we as social animals maintain civilization.
Which is why if you want to steal from dispensaries, just work in security, like your brother. Who's to say he's not stealing, and simply not bragging to you about it?
I said he’s a supervisor, not in security. He’s not an idiot. He’d be caught very quickly. Cash controls are such that everyone is.
I don’t know if every state is like mine, but here they have to do complete inventory every night. You can steal but they’ll know it happened by the end of the day and then start checking the footage. It happens.
I’m not sure you even read the comment you were replying to. Click “parent” a few times and you’ll see “My brother got promoted to supervisor in a month for the simple reason that he is the only person who could wait until after work to get high.”
The federal illegality of the weed business (and downstream effects of that illegality on working/business conditions) affects who works there, and that includes white collar employees (also investors, etc.)
I think the ATM isn't actually dispensing cash. You're doing an ATM transaction for a certain amount of money, but what you're actually getting is weed.
It's not just "You can buy with cash, and we conveniently have an ATM available to get cash if you didn't go to your bank."
It's not just "You can buy with cash, and we conveniently have an ATM available to get cash if you didn't go to your bank."
I have heard from a very reliable source that the ATMs in most weed shops on the Eastside of Seattle dispense cash because you're going to be required to pay with cash at the counter. There are allegedly a few exceptions, but the majority of shops accept only cash and the ATM dispenses bills.
Nope, it's just a regular ATM operated by a 3rd party company. You get cash from it then give them the cash. The store will also often reimburse for the ATM fee.
Business 2 owns the building and the atm, renting it to business 1, the dispensary. B1 pays the cash as rent to b2 who puts it into the ATM again. A SWAG but it's common enough in other business setups to alter costs as I understand it.
Here in Ontario Canada I can walk into a local neighbourhood cannabis store (one of many on every block, it seems) and make a purchase using my debit or credit card. I'm not sure if any of them even keep a cash float although I imagine they must, just in case granny comes in "for medicinal use". Alternatively, I could just go to the government-run web store and get home delivery through Canada Post at no extra charge.
You can in the U.S. too. For instance, in Portland we have a neighborhood shop and you can use a debit card there because each transaction is classified as an ATM transaction. All the ban ever did was making accounting and reporting more complicated, it didn't stop state legal sales or transactions.
The difference is in Canada it's actually fully legal at all levels of government, so the transaction is a normal point of sale transaction, it can also go through a credit card as a normal purchase without being subjected to the expensive cash advance interest rates, and so on. It can even be a tax-deductible and reimbursable business entertainment expense under similar conditions to alcohol.
Its super weird how america can make things half legal. In canada the responsibilities are divided up between different levels of government. None of this legal at one level but not another level bullshit.
The same is true in Canada. There are things that are federally illegal that are not illegal at the provincial level. There are also local laws that supersede federal law. E.g. There is no federal law against woodburning for home heat, but many local jurisdictions have banned it for air quality reasons, and provinces also have pollution laws. You can have something be illegal in one town, and legal outside of it, or illegal province wide but legal in another province.
What is going on is that not that weed is 'half-legal' in the states. It is fully illegal. What is true is that the federal enforcers have more or less decided to leave people alone when the state allows the use of Marijuana. Pre 2017, the exact same thing was happening across Canada where local jurisdictions allowed cannabis use and sales, and the RCMP basically turned a blind eye. Vancouver is the most obvious example, where there was actually a decline in the number of dispensaries after weed became federally legal.
> There are also local laws that supersede federal law. E.g. There is no federal law against woodburning for home heat, but many local jurisdictions have banned it for air quality reasons, and provinces also have pollution laws
That's not what supersede means.
There is no federal law about wood burning stoves because the constitution assigns environment to the provinces.
It was supposed to be that way in the US but then populists decided they wanted the federal government to do all the things the constitution said it couldn't.
If you mean provinces in Canada's context, then no, the number of provinces does not fit on one hand. In fact it barely fits on two, and that's only if you don't count the territories as well.
A bigger factor is that the Canadian prohibition was only controlled at the federal level in the first place, like all Canadian criminal law, so only the federal government had to legislate to change it. The provinces have however done lots of subsequent legislation to regulate the details (e.g. distribution channels and the exact minimum age limit) in a wide variety of ways.
Extended banking services are difficult. Finding a fdic insured bank that will do business with a dispensary is hard. The business, esp those that aren't already multinational or national conglomerates with enormous amounts of cash
I’ve done it in New York City, in a really clean and hipstery shop in park slope, Brooklyn. Paid with a debit card, the whole process felt legit and professional, that was a great experience. They also offered really fancy teas and coffees.
Wouldn't that be leaving money on the table? The bank that accepts business with marijuana vendors is at a competitive advantage to one that doesn't, no?
There is no liquor store in the country where you can't pay with a card. Well, maybe not Uncle Ted's Moonshine Shack, but realistically it's not something anyone has to worry about. Different funds may not invest invest in those thing, payment processors might charge some businesses a slightly higher premium, but Visa/MC are not gonna police your legal consumer purchases.
Hopefully this will also help internationally. Many countries are just copying what the US is doing since they run a large part of world commerce and finance
But will they be able to write off business expenses? Section 280E of the US Tax Code is, as I understand it, is the major killer for the whole industry right now.
Will they? Since it will be Schedule III, “weed stores” that aren't pharmacies distributing properly labelled drugs to people with prescriptions will still be violating the Controlled Substances Act and will probably have the same banking problems.
How? It's still federally illegal to sell schedule 3 to consumers without a DEA licensed rx and dea licensing. The banks would still be knowingly in conspiracy to transmit illegal drug money and a litany of felonies for recreational or purely state-licensed 'medical'.
Rx under DEA scrutiny is nothing like rec or laughable state controlled medical 'recommendations'. You pull that shit as a provider on controlled scripts and your charts get audited, your DEA license gets pulled.
But it does mean that it will actually, for the first time ever in living memory, be possible for someone to fully federally legally possess a THC-active form of cannabis without further Congressional action. I'm not sure if a state-legal cannabis supply chain could be fully federally legal in this context, but imagine if a pharma company goes through the FDA approval process for a THC pill and then doctors prescribe it for patients based on their medical judgment that it will help alleviate pain for some chronic condition like Crohn's disease. (I expect both of those steps to happen in practice, over time of course due to how many prerequisites exist for FDA approval, to the extent they haven't already been begun.)
Imagine a noncitizen in that situation being able to tell a border officer, or a citizen being able to tell a security clearance investigator: "Yes, I do use THC. Here's my prescription and the bottle from the pharmacy." and being confident of no negative repercussions. Wonderful progress compared to where we are now.
Very briefly. Until recent history the 10th amendment was understood to constrain the government from going outside enumerated powers, like intrastate commerce. This is why they needed an amendment instead of law to federally outright ban alcohol. Thus weed had an essentially unpayable 'tax' that got overturned by Timothy Leary
Then it was legal for like a year until feds realized they didn't need to follow the Constitution and they just outright made it illegal, no matter if it's actually interstate.
> it will actually, for the first time ever in living memory, be possible for someone to fully federally legally possess a THC-active form of cannabis without further Congressional action.
Agree with the sentiment but isn't legal marinol roughly fulfilling that niche of THC pill?
You could already get THC script, in that context this seems like a half hearted concession for flower to stall and poison legalization efforts by giving a victory poisoned with DEA licensing that inserts the nasty tendrils of the weed hating DEA into medical flower.
Fair point, yes. I was unaware of marinol when I typed that. I assume something more than just synthetic THC is being rescheduled, then. Maybe it will actually become possible to be prescribed a joint and to receive it at DEA-licensed pharmacies? Will the FDA be approving joints as drugs after clinical trials?
I think the point is that banks are no longer automatically required to reject any customer that deals with weed, because some of those transactions are going to be legal under the federal law. Which basically allows them to look the other way for all such transactions.
I know of several grocery stores without pharmacies or a local Rx license selling 1% hydrocortisone/hydrocortisone acetate - Schedule 4, 3, AND 2, simultaneously.
There is a cannabis dispensary here offering delta-8 and -9 THC products (legal in Texas because they derive from hemp) takes credit cards. Perhaps they are too small to matter while living on borrowed time, but most/all dispensaries around here take CCs.
they might not be able to see the purchases if you're in a state where you can buy booze in a 7/11 or grocery store; in that case it's just a grocery purchase. but they sure as hell can see that you have a charge from "CORNER LIQUOR STORE - $47.61 - 12 APRIL 2024" and can make guesses.
This also assumes that grocery stores aren't aggressively aggregating and selling sales data, esp. those from Membership Cards. Insurance companies would love to get a hold of that data, not only for alcohol, but things like sugar and junk food purchases. I'd bet my hat they're already doing so.
What does that matter? You can convert Bitcoin into cash. But then you can do that in an undisclosed location at your leisure instead of keeping a mountain of cash in your publicly advertised storefront location and becoming a huge robbery target.
Also, it doesn't seem like it would be that hard to find someone to accept it as payment, since they can convert it to cash too. And the sort of landlords/suppliers/employees willing to do business with a dispensary seem like exactly the sort who would accept Bitcoin.
All of the legit Bitcoin-to-cash orgs will report that to the IRS, and then you're back to square one: what do you do with that wad of cash? Orgs that don't report to the IRS probably aren't giving you a good exchange rate, and you're still left holding the bag afterward.
If you're going through all that hassle, it's much easier just to be a cash-only business in the first place.
No sane person uses Bitcoin as a currency because it is a fundamentally unsound ponzi scheme for suckers. I don't want my salary to be subject to the vagaries and manipulations of the Bitcoin exchange rate.
There are plenty of sane people who use Bitcoin as a currency. Making blithe moral declarations like this doesn't spark curiosity and is incredibly tired after so many years (you're not the first).
"Unsound ponzi scheme" could just as well be applied to any fiat currency. It has all the same rules (early entrants are more privileged in "the game" and can invest to out-perform younger players). It is very odd to hear people applying such qualitative judgments like this when the alternative is a currency that is actively debased by its issuers. Or do you think the inflation we've all suffered under isn't a problem?
If you don't want to hold Bitcoin or be exposed to price changes, you can set your hourly rate in dollars, be paid at the current exchange rate and immediately convert it back into dollars. The advantage of this over being paid in physical cash is that it's electronic and then you're not carrying two weeks salary in physical cash on your person for somebody to mug you.
I show up and convert cash to bitcoin, presumably losing some of its value to exchange fees.
Pay the merchant my bitcoin, who then has to convert it back to cash losing more of its value to fees so that he can pay all of his staff, suppliers, utilities, etc...
Why not just skip the bitcoin step and save time and money?
Because you don't have cash to begin with, you have money in a bank account, which you have to convert to something else to pay the dispensary. Converting it via cash instead of Bitcoin just makes it easier for you to be mugged.
To be honest, I’m far more concerned about crypto scams, wallet hacks, etc, than I am worried about getting mugged for ~$100 at the dispensary parking lot.
That seems like a weird set of priorities? If someone hacks your crypto wallet with $100 in it, you could lose $100. If someone mugs you when you have $100 in your wallet, you could lose $100 and get shot.
Crypto scams are... completely unrelated? It's like being worried about using a bank account because there are ponzi schemes that use bank transfers.
> Cash transactions require you to make change and are a target for theft. This is neither free nor zero time.
That's why I specified "for the consumer", who is typically the person that is going to make a purchasing decision.
Using crypto for dispensaries has been tried, and it hasn't gained traction in the many years that its been an option. If you introduce friction (by forcing people to transact using a novel payment form), you are going to lose customers. The fact that the very few dispensaries that accept crypto continue to accept cash and debit should tell you what consumers like.
It takes the same amount of time to make change for the consumer as the store. Or more, because now you have to wait while they make change for the person in front of you, then for you on top of that.
And nobody wants to be at a store which is more likely to get robbed. Not only do you lose your cash, you could lose your life.
> The fact that the very few dispensaries that accept crypto continue to accept cash and debit should tell you what consumers like.
There are multiple consumers. If you can get half of them to use Bitcoin, you have half as much cash on hand to lose in a robbery, and on top of that half as much incentive for someone to rob you to begin with.
Ethereum average block time is 12s (with low variance) and high chance of getting tx included in the next block. Still too long for a point-of-sale payment, but its feasible. Then there's fees that are too high on L1 (several dollars minimum).
L2s fix this (~immediate settlement, cents in fees), but it's another layer and another account for users to manage (which is annoying).
That's just because crypto shills just don't get obvious facts about reality, not because obvious facts about reality aren't objectively and provably true. That's just the way cults and get-rich-quick pyramid schemes and fraud work, so stop being a shill and wondering why nobody believes or respects you, because there's a lot you don't get.
Weed being illegal on a federal level has had some interesting effects. Because of these laws, all legal weed has to be grown, processed, and retailed within a single state. So much industry and local employment has been created by the legal barriers in place.
It’s probably still a net positive to release the federal restriction, but I hope all these small/mid sized businesses don’t get gulped up by big tobacco or other mega corps
It's sometimes even smaller than states. Many waterways are federal, meaning islands have to grow their own in order to avoid having to transport weed from one part of the state to another part of the same state across a federal waterway.
> I hope all these small/mid sized businesses don’t get gulped up by big tobacco or other mega corps
Calling it: CVS and Walgreens will move into the medical market for this. You think these little shops will be able to process health insurance payments when that sector gets in on it? lol
the marlboro man has traded in his horse and cowboy hat for some natty dreads and a gravity bong. Joe Camel now sports a wook blanket and a heady crystal wrap. can't wait to see what the overly happy and diverse Newport pleasure party goers have adopted
I agree it's unlikely. THC may have some medical uses, but smoking it certainly does not.
Perhaps gummies/edibles would be covered under some circumstances -- but to be a prescription or even an OTC "medication" it has to go through FDA approval to demonstrate efficacy and document the side effects, and it will have to be manufactured to pharmaceutical standards of potency and purity, which will make it more expensive.
I think it will most likely be like alcohol: sold for recreational use, age-restricted, and not medical.
I bet that CBD will be covered very quickly, because it really does work very well for so many things, so it shouldn't take long to have enough studies clearly in support of it.
Honestly, yes you can but from what I’ve seen it’s the most useless form because it’s the cheapest: magnesium oxide. Good for laxative effects, bad for uptake. I prefer glycinate personally.
I'm not sure exactly how this works, but you can get CBD as pills with no THC in them.
(Although anecdotally the best results are obtained from taking mostly CBD with a tiny bit of THC; it appears that the latter does something that makes the former's effect more potent. So you see stuff like e.g. 20:1 CBD:THC pills around - can't get high on that, but very effective at pain management. However pure CBD pills are still more common.)
I could see them carrying CBD in pill / gelcap form. (It pretty much snuffs out my migraines.)
I don't think they'll carry intoxicating forms of marijuana, though. (I've never seen a CVS with alcohol, but that could be because of how my state handles liquor licenses.)
Walgreens sells cigarettes, cigars, basic alcohol (beer, wine, hard seltzers etc), occasionally liquor, nicotine patches & packets, and snuff. They sell OTC Narcan, and now OTC birth control. They moved into the last two items pretty much immediately upon availability.
They'll definitely look at their options for the marijuana business as they can safely do so legally.
This discrepancy had the effect of jump starting the prominence of large chinese gangs in the marijuana and fentany and money laundering business in the USA, incidentally contributing to home shortage because they bought homes in California to grow pre pandemic and in Oklahoma now.
There’s lots of older articles about California but some recent OK news https://www.kosu.org/news/2024-03-18/gangsters-money-and-mur...
I thought it was of most relevance that gangs stepped in when the comment I was responding to was more concerned with larger companies and them being Chinese is a weird detail since one would have expected one of existing gangs in USA already like those with central or South American cartels instead.
It's also made touching the financial aspect radioactive- none of the big credit cards want to have anything to do with it so all transactions are cash, which makes things more difficult/risky for operators.
Under Wickard even all-in-state marijuana trade would still fall under the Interstate Commerce clause and be subject to federal criminal statutes, regulations, and taxes.
Yep, some people tested this same theory out for firearms (or was it suppressors?) all produced and sold in one state in accordance with state laws. Of course the Feds shut that down and the courts agreed. The only reason they don't do this with pot is because they don't feel like it.
A couple quick thoughts, having worked in the legal cannabis industry (now a few years out):
- Consolidation is already happening in a lot of ways, in some cases despite state laws designed to prevent it
- Consolidation by big tobacco seems less likely than probably other major industry incumbents (in the long run, I’d bet on companies primarily oriented around alcohol)
- Federal posture since Cole (when first states legalized recreational, partially rolled back under Trump/Sessions but seemingly not as much as was feared at the time) is largely what prompted strong local laws; it’s based in analysis of interstate commerce; federal legalization could have a similar analysis without undermining existing strong local laws; the tradeoff would probably be large disparity of justice between states (on party lines)
- A much better outcome would be a central rule not just to legalize, but to more strongly incentivize justice for people affected by draconian laws in the first place. This is a pipe dream, but it should be the focus because any compromise will start with that.
Tobacco smoke killed ALL my grandparents, well, well one of them would have died from alcohol use, as he was a fisherman and they drink a lot. My uncle died from liver and bowel cancer, the liver cancer stems from alcohol consumption, or rather it's metabolite, acetaldehyde, which is _scary as hell_: It makes cancerous scar tissue of whatever it touches, thats why alcoholics die from liver failure: it becomes all scar tissue and cannot regenerate, which is part of its function (the average adult has a liver 3 years of average age). It is also what gives the alcohol buzz. He was not a heavy drinker, but only drank wine and aqua vit/liquor, 1-2 times a year he would get shitfaced -- he was a funny drunk. I miss him. I miss all my grandparnts, they were the best and did not deserve Emphysema , lung cancer and so forth. Grandma taught me soldering, welding, basic ircuitry, how to ride a bike, composting, growing veggies, all about berries in the wild and helped me save up for my Nintendo NES,encuraged mt curiosity...I would beat the crap out a tobacco exec if I crossed paths with one, a part of me wants to torture them.
I smoked for 15 years, turns out quitting was easy, once you undestood the way the addiction works, but nobody considers that they developed oral fixation from sucking on a potennt noootropic habit forming substance all day,
But then we have Silvy Listhaug (politician): Marijuana will continue to be banned because she is a mom, she told the reporter photographing her smoking cigarettes. I hope she gets lung cancer.
Personally, as a monkey with a lump of fat in my head called a brain, I think drinking fat solving solvents are a bad idea for that reason alone.fMRI scans shows white brain tissue in drinkers literally dissolves over time.
The increase in marijuana use is mostly due to 3 factors:
* Nobody is hiding anymore.
* We become more people every day.
* More & more people realise alcohol sucks.
The UK and CAnada's offcial stance on alcohol is that there is no such thing as a safe amount of alcohol consumption.
The war on drugs is going well in Norway: Cocaine & MDMA purity averages above 80%, Racemic amphetamine is cheaper than hash now, and the hash is good as anything you can find in dutch coffeeshops. ..and it is all getting cheaper at the same time. The war is being lost so bad the police have stopped issuing Narcotics stats 2 times a year as mandated and dropped it to once a year. Last year crystal meth averaged over 99% purity, 99.2%-99.6% according to Kripos Crimelab!! 5000 mafia families in Europe alone funds their organized crime with proceeds from the artificially high price of cannabis caused by the ban, legalizing and taxing it resoanbly would snuff out those and would be a massive blow to organized crime. GHB is fueling a rape epidemic here. Oh and you can legally buy poppy seed and grow them here...
'Time for them to perform due diligence and refactor their operations to take advantage of the new legal landscape to retain competitive pricing inorder for' all these small/mid sized businesses don't get gulped up by big tobacco or other mega corps.
If I could face consequences for using drugs, I will deny it even after being positive in a test. Of course, once legalized, I'll have no problem saying that I used in once or twice a year. Being it legal, safer and out of the dangerous black market, there will be some new users.
Same happened after alcohol prohibition: more people consumed after the ban was lifted, but consumption was safer. But rarely people that didn't consume during the prohibition went on alcohol binge after the end of the ban. They just drank a couple of beers per week, maybe even a glass of bourbon twice a year, now that they can buy and consume it safely.
Thus the stats you linked doesn't necesarily show a "massive" increase in use, but many people using it sparsely now and many people now admiting to use it that were using previously. In fact, while statista.com shows a 100% increase, the second and more controlled study shows only a ~20% increase that makes more sense (far from massive).
20% increase in consumption isn’t exactly what I would call massive.
Looking at historic trends the point where pot was first legalized for recreational use isn’t obvious. If anything the long term upward tends started long before legalization which didn’t seem to have significant impact. https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...
I’m surprised it’s not more personally if the numbers are accurate. A lot of pretty casual users in professional jobs were mostly not going to find a friend of a friend to do an illegal transaction with. But they’ll go into a dispensary now and then.
But you really see that reflected in the doubled number of users which is probably the more relevant number.
I have had my first legal weed experiences in the past year in New York and even the lowest THC % at the legal weed store is stronger than anything I use to get on the black market when weed was illegal.
Then there are these incredible 10mg THC infused lemonades that are amazing.
On the other hand, the novelty of legal weed only lasted about 4 months for me. Because the store was there and there was this selection I never had access to before I wanted to try different things and was smoking more than I would have normally. At the end of the day though it is all still just weed. It is fun for me but only once a month at most now.
I also don't know a single person that didn't smoke weed because it was illegal and now they do because they can go to the store and purchase it legally.
I think that the polling has doubled for users because people can answer the poll honestly when weed is legal. The idea that weed being illegal is keeping 50% of the potential weed smoking population from smoking is utterly preposterous.
If anything, what is interesting is how many people who would never try weed when it was illegal, will still never try it when it is legal. They may say it is because it is illegal or they don't want to smoke but you can't sell them on 10mg legal lemonaid either.
Sounds like you are just saying it needs more marketing. Small timers are all over social media but big timers can buy segments on news and daytime television and pretend it’s a story when it’s really an ad.
Now that it’s “legal” I wonder if that was what was holding it back before.
I'd bet alcohol use went way up after prohibition too. Both in number of people consuming, and on how much they consume on average.
I've personally known people with terminal cancer who wouldn't use marijuana to manage pain and nausea because it is federally illegal. They suffered more than they should have. Is lower use always good?
Lobbyists don't care about uncapturable black market money. The legal market has led to massive increase in legal, taxable money, so now is exactly the time for big tobacco to start salivating over the idea of capturing all of those transactions.
Denver definitely had perverse consequence. people eking out a living selling weed on the street quickly turned to... harder substances. people will get their dollar and people will get their high
> Altria Group (formerly Philip Morris Companies), acquired a 35% stake in Juul Labs for $12.8 billion on December 20, 2018. Altria is the largest tobacco company in the United States.
Agreed -- but I think nobody knows quite how it'll play out.
I think of the thriving microbrewery scene (vs not just Budweiser et al but so-called "premium" beers from megabreweries that don't hold a candle to the local stuff).
I also wonder about the degree to which psilocybin might be following THC's path, wrt state vs federal laws....
Big tobacco means even more pressure to normalize it, globally, via UN just like they pushed it down the throat of every nation worldwide including those where its sacred plant for millenia like India or Nepal. US reversed decades of severe oppression and is leading free world (I know Canada, I know) so there is massive hope our idiots in EU and elsewhere will seriously wake up, even if in some primitive cargo culting effort.
I don't mean half-assed decriminalization here and there which still feeds very healthy criminal ecosystem and for end user of say weed doesn't change a zilch in anything, I mean same legal treatment as tobacco and alcohol, we don't prescribe that for anxiety do we, its all fun and chill and introspection (for me). Its 2024 FFS, and we see idiocy live where politicians are lying in the cameras to please old conservative folks for next elections.
I want to buy edibles, happy to pay any tax they slap on it. I want to buy a single joint, of strength and power I want to choose. Or vapes. Not some overpriced mediocre shit from paranoid desperate illegal immigrant standing in dark corners of shady parts of cities. Give that man an honest job on some weed farm or distribution system.
Yes really good point. Won’t it still be up to the states to decide what the regulatory environment will look like — eg they can choose to preserve these jobs through existing regulatory frameworks in the same way that certain goods cannot be shipped to certain states
Note, they're only planning to move it from Schedule 1 (alongside heroin) to Schedule III (alongside anabolic steroids and ketamine). So, it won't be fully legal in the same sense as alcohol.
Regardless, unless Congress does something to make it legal nationally, we'll still have the state frameworks. Just hopefully avoiding the most draconian criminal charges.
One very important thing this does is get rid of a really glaring error. As a Schedule I drug, Marijuana supposedly is completely useless, its only role is as a potential danger and that's why nobody must have any - except, we've known for many years a bunch of people find it useful as a therapeutic drug, so that's clearly wrong and the Schedule I status is an error. Perhaps there shouldn't be any Schedule I drugs at all, the idea seems misconceived, but certainly if there are Schedule I drugs, Marijuana doesn't belong among them.
Meanwhile in Schedule III it's a judgement call. Schedule III drugs like K or steroids are drugs we know are useful, your doctor can prescribe them, your hospital pharmacy has them, but we also know they get abused. That sounds much more like marijuana, and, to be honest, alcohol. Can we justify Schedule III for Marijuana and yet not for Alcohol? It's at least a serious question whereas the Schedule I status was just nonsense.
Yeah, I largely agree. Alcohol is broadly available/legal due to historical quirks, not sane regulation in relation to other similar (social impact, not chemistry) drugs. Same for tobacco to an extent.
Also booze is really easy to make. Marijuana is hardly difficult but if you ain't got any plants somebody has to smuggle them to you, whereas if you've got a bunch of say, apples, or potatoes, or berries - which are just food - the only thing that prevents you from having booze is constant oversight to ensure you don't allow the food to be converted into booze.
I can see tobacco becoming effectively a Schedule III type substance, made only when it is deemed necessary for some reason and not generally available - New Zealand tried to set off on that path, the UK is attempting it now, unlike booze (or marijuana) which has a population of people who say "Hey, that's fun, don't take that away" the smoker are almost all against smoking, they see it as an unpleasant mistake they made rather than a choice they're glad to have taken.
I think they would make so much MORE money by making it federally regulated and generally accessible... the problem is that also takes away some incentive to keep spying on citizens in the name of drugs and related bad guys.
Keeping in state doesn't help. It's still interstate commerce even just picking a plant and smoking on site non-commercially. Just walking an object within 1000 ft of a school, non-commercially, is interstate commerce.
They'll never give it up. It would mean the end of the civil rights act, and tons of popular regulatory regimes that apply to in-state only trade. And the return of in state over the counter machine guns.
Wickard v. Filburn
United States Supreme Court case
Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111, is a United States Supreme Court decision that dramatically increased the regulatory power of the federal government. It remains as one of the most important and far-reaching cases concerning the New Deal, and it set a precedent for an expansive reading of the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause for decades to come. The goal of the legal challenge was to end the entire federal crop support program by declaring it unconstitutional. An Ohio farmer, Roscoe Filburn, was growing wheat to feed animals on his own farm. The U.S. government had established limits on wheat production, based on the acreage owned by a farmer, to stabilize wheat prices and supplies. Filburn grew more than was permitted and so was ordered to pay a penalty. In response, he said that because his wheat was not sold, it could not be regulated as commerce, let alone "interstate" commerce. [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn)
> It’s probably still a net positive to release the federal restriction, but I hope all these small/mid sized businesses don’t get gulped up by big tobacco or other mega corps
To add a bit, the importance of some inefficiencies are lost when viewed strictly through an investor lens. E.g., investigative journalism is expensive and largely inefficient regarding the profitability of a newspaper. Redundant inventory/equipment is largely inefficient until low-probability events effect supply. Small businesses may be inefficient but provide economic stability to a non-urban center etc. etc.
it's another good reason to advocate for more state autonomy . prior to 80s savings & loan crisis and then financial collapse, small family run banks were thriving too
I've got my tinfoil hat on but I totally believe this to be due to the lobbying efforts of big tobacco. Purely because cigarette sales continue to decline and vaping is becoming more and more regulated and, therefore, less profitable.
But marijuana enjoys high markups, pseudoscience "health benefits", and is becoming more and more acceptable to Americans each and every year.
Can't say I've ever felt that massive corps and the people that work there are super productive. In many instances they seem less productive than government.
Even without nationwide economies of scale, Michigan regularly has businesses selling weed vape carts for <$10 apiece. I don't know how much cheaper we want the weed to be, honestly. It's already at least 10x cheaper than the cheapest alcoholic beverage on a buzz-for-buzz basis.
What SMB has the luxury of being notoriously unproductive? Economies of scale are very real and tend to make larger businesses more efficient, it's true, but you'll find that causes SMBs to be lean and mean to remain competitive.
Your implied point that prices will drop with the introduction of interstate competition and access to finance and interest by mega-corps is well taken. You are certainly correct, there.
Notwithstanding grey-market limitations, people have their motives for accepting the inefficiency of starting or staying small. Potential, for example.
