You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Cannabis is here to stay. And now, the medical cannabis industry is becoming a major entity.
DENVER — It is being called the green rush. With more states moving to legalize medical marijuana, the business of growing and dispensing it is booming, even as much of the rest of the economy struggles.
Now, flush with financial clout, and with their eyes on pushing Congress to further loosen laws, medical marijuana industry leaders are forming a national trade association. While there are smaller, local trade groups, organizers around the country say this will be the first business organization working on the national level.
Based in Washington, the group, the National Cannabis Industry Association, will focus primarily on lobbying, but will also help medical marijuana businesses navigate a patchwork of laws that differ depending on location.
I expect to see new stress lines between an emerging medical cannabis industry and the push for legalization. In the long run, legalization will win, because every step forward that medical cannabis takes is also a step forward for legalization. There may be some short term profit-taking that could put temporary wrenches in the works for legalizers…
But in the long term, the fact is that medical cannabis users like cannabis and they would not put up with any move by the medical cannabis industry to make it non-recreational (ie, an unpleasant yet necessary medicine), which is the only way that the medical cannabis movement could end in anything other than legalization.
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Prop 203’s Passage Means Billion-Dollar Industry By Ray Stern
CN Source: Phoenix New Times November 23, 2010
In Arizona, you can ride a motorcycle without a helmet, conceal a handgun, and buy an AK-47. And soon, if you qualify, you’ll be able to smoke a big, fat doobie. Legally. Proposition 203, the state’s new medical-marijuana law, passed by the slimmest of margins once all the votes from the November 2 election were finally counted. But it passed by 4,341 votes, and now Arizona is on the verge of establishing a billion-dollar pot industry.
Kush Magazine
Dailybuds
FIND DISPENSARIES IN YOUR AREA!
Colorado’s Medical-Pot Rules By Stephanie Simon
CN Source: Wall Street Journal November 22, 2010
Colorado state regulators are putting the final touches on a fat stack of rules aimed at monitoring, recording and tracking every aspect of the booming medical-marijuana industry, from seed to sale. The regulatory system—more rigorous and comprehensive than in any other state—will likely require pot growers to place tags on every plant and train security cameras on their cultivation rooms around the clock.
It is amazing to me that a win by over 5000 is by the slimmest margin but in CA a loss by 5000 is a landslide victory,,,according to the prohibs.
The formation of a trade organization opens the door for investors of the kind we need to move forward with legalization,corporate involvement.
As much as everyone,nearly everyone,worries about corp
involvement in the marijuana market,we must have it to ever fight the corporations wanting to keep it illegal.
Fight greed with greed.
A very good read,but take a bong and something to drink.
Hawaii’s Medical Marijuana Program
http://www.honolulumagazine.com/Honolulu-Magazine/November-2010/Hawaii-039s-Medical-Marijuana-Program/index.php?cparticle=1&siarticle=0#artanc
As we go onward,thru the fog!
But how can you have a National association of cannabis businesses? Wouldn’t federal law “supercede” it? 😉
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Three Cheers!!Three Thousand Cheers!!
Fifteen million cheers!!
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For a number of years I’ve been telling my fellow potheads, “you people know that this country is owned and operated by special interests. The way to our freedom is not by force, or by depending on the kindness of strangers named Kerlifries or yOmama, it is to become a ‘special interest’. At the end of the day money talks and bullshit walks.” It really is that simple. Did anyone ever stop to calculate that (assuming correct the reported number of) 15 million potheads (past month users) in the US making a contribution of $1 per month per pothead is an annual warchest of $180 million? For the love of Jiminy Glick, that’s almost 3/4 of a 1/4 of a billion dollars! We’d have almost as much money to work with as the ONDCP. C’mon a dollar a month, how hard is that? I’m going to look at you as if I think you’re an asshole if you try to perpetrate the fraud on me that you can’t afford to contribute less than the loose change under your couch cushions every month.
AC/DC agrees that money talks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsvqOkQ35Cc
Just listen to the money talk.
A buck a month. Just cough it up.
Hey Pete, is there any way to block the posting that every Twit who Twitters a blog entry has done so?
Really, no offense intended if I’m mistaken that those who frequent Twitter are called Twits. It just seems to make sense to me.
Clay, I would be just amazing if we could beat this racist,greedy,BS policy with its own greed. The problem is….once you start down that path. I guess it dont matter… if this economic storm takes root , any corporate interst will be moot, they wont have they power to enforce shit if the dollar is dropped as a world reserve currency.
But I like the ‘fight greed with greed’ idea.
Many MMJ profiters will find themseves “on the wrong side of the fence” you could say, if the dollar collapses.
I expect Obama and his right-wing government to arrest all of these people, the First Amendment right to free speech and freedom of assembly doesn’t apply to drugs per the drug exception to the Constitution. If they can get away with what they did to Sioban Reynolds, they can get away with shutting down this NCIA group. They’ll do it with a swat team and they won’t even have the courtesy of knocking.
While that could be true BruceM don’t you see and sense the disgust all around over the actions of the g’ment? If they attempted something like that it would be horrible, however, it would also be a grand opportunity to smear their propaganda even further.
It’s as if these Bozo’s are trying to drive us to a revolution, only thing is they don’t understand is that they’ll lose. Guess they feel they’ll win because they have for so damn long but that’s changed, the playing field is loaded with intelligent and wise people.
We will win this ridiculous fight. And as a new medical marijuana patient you bet I want Legalization.
Clay, greed is good. Do you know the best way to get really rich in this country? Figure out something that makes a few million (or more) people’s lives easier and/or more enjoyable and sell it to them. How about Henry Ford’s perfection of the assembly line which made automobiles affordable to the masses? Cry about gasoline all you like but it was his hope to fuel them with vegetable oil and he favored that derived from hemp seeds. Thomas Edison and the light bulb? One of my great great uncles died when he came home drunk off his ass one night, tossed his hat aside, and passed out in a drunken stupor. Unfortunately for my great great uncle his hat landed on one of the gas jets that the people of his day used to illuminate their homes, snuffed out the flame and he suffocated and died.
I won’t entertain the notion that my life isn’t better because Edison perfected the phonograph. The man deserved to be as rich as god.
For the life of me I can’t see how any tobacco companies have screwed up the tobacco market. People still get to choose which they want to smoke, and there are lots and lots of gourmet tobaccos to choose from. The thing is that gourmet tobacco users prefer cigars. There are actually several thousand cigarette companies operating today. The idea that Lorillard, RJ Reynolds, and Altria own the market is unsubstantiated horse hockey. The equation is significantly altered when you include that which you can’t see or have no reason to recall other than accurately stating the fact.
Richard Lee would have deserved to have more money than he could ever spend if he had gotten Prop 19 passed, because it would have made 10s of millions of lives easier and more enjoyable. The thought that he could control the cannabis retail chain may well turn out to be the absurdity of the century. Hard to tell as the century is just under 10 years old and there are millions of Know Nothings at work generating mindless stupidity every day with little reason to think that’s going to stop anytime soon. But if the government can’t control the potheads and their retail distribution chains with guns and prison cells it is actually beyond absurd to think it within Mr. Lee’s ability. Like Barney Fife said, “…there are some things beyond the ken of mortal men that shouldn’t be tampered with… There’s plenty going on right now in the Twilight Zone that we don’t know anything about…” Controlling the lives of potheads is definitely one of those things. Shit we can’t even get them to cough up a lousy buck a month to get themselves set free.
I’m all for corporations. I’ve started a couple of my own. God I recall the one day I read the ravings of an anti-corporation guy who had just found out that MPP and NORML are corporations. Let’s not tell him that so are fire departments, Buddhist temples, and public libraries. Sheesh!
(PS, the first year of the first century was the year one. The first year of the 21st century was the year 2001)
If the dollar “collapses” you’d do better on the side of the fence that understands economic theory than on the side that is clueless. Have you ever heard a person railing about the dollar having lost 95% of its “value” since 1907? I have no clue why they cherry pick 1907 but it’s absurd and irrelevant regardless. I find it ironic that it’s almost always those who live from paycheck to paycheck screeching about it. These people don’t have any 2007 dollars left over, much less any from 1907. The first clue that they’re innumerate is when they refer to the “value” of the dollar. The only value that a dollar has is as a piece of toilet paper in the event of the collapse of civilization, and only paper dollars have that potential value in that event.
A unit of currency has buying power, not value. It is the stuff that it buys that has value. Those people with dollars left over from 1907 almost certainly knew how to hedge against inflation and have 20x the number of dollars or more. No worries about losing 95% of it’s buying power, they still have at least 100%.
Just about everyone here has the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of the next spectacular break through in human medicine, and therefore the opportunity to be richer than god by 2020. Cannabinoid medicine is on the level of medical breakthroughs as of antibiotics and anesthesia for surgery.
If you think that anyone but the people of California and Colorado will be using whole plant cannabis as medicine in 2020 you’re sorely mistaken. The “patients” in those two states in that year will be comprised of the malingering 100% and only exist because of the difficulty of overturning citizen generated ballot initiatives, and that only in the unlikely occurrence that we don’t get a regulated retail chain up and running in the meantime. Whole plant cannabis really is only a stop gap measure because the idiots stalled this breakthrough for nearly 20 years. Get a clue about the fact that you have the inside scoop on something that such a huge percentage of people think is a “joke”, and get rich. These opportunities come along only once or twice a decade as most, and it’s only those with the inside scoop that end up wealthy.
Guess what? You’ve got the inside scoop on a breakthrough that’s going to generate the creation of 10s of trillions with a T of value in the next decade, and may top a quadrillion before 2050. That’s a 1000 trillions for those keeping score at home. If it really cures cancer we can entertain the thought of a motherfucking quintillion with a quint dollars by the turn of the 22nd century, and I’m talking constant 2010 dollars, not nominal. A quintillion is a million billions. Christ on a crutch I can’t even get my brain around a quintillion it’s so fucking large. If you think I’m going to let that go you’re mad, you’ve got another think coming.
Think of the things you can do with your share of that money if you don’t want your available share. Choose any charity, give to the poor. Keep the rat bastards that will just buy cars and houses and diamond rings and women from getting their dirty hands on it, hell that’s enough reason to take your cut wouldn’t you agree? Take it out and burn it because you hate money. Well assuming that we still have physical cash then, which isn’t bloody likely. You don’t have to turn into a wealthy asshole if you’re not so inclined.
Our National Forests came from the Rockefeller fortune. Yeah, JD was a wealthy asshole rat bastard and his boy gave away the dough. Hmm, that’s almost like keeping it out of the hands of today’s JD Rockefeller and giving it away before he has a chance to do his dirty work.
Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are going to do more to help the poor with their billions than 1000 do gooders with no cash could ever hope to do in a century of working 20 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Hey, don’t think I’m not appealing to your greed when I’m talking about these alternatives. Just because you don’t want cash or money or trinkets and junk doesn’t mean you’re not greedy. Put that in your vaporizer and vape it.
I dunno Clint, you say we MUST get the corporations involved in order to fight the corporations who want to keep cannabis illegal. After seeing what the “corporations” have done to America I’m a little reluctant to want them involved in anything, let alone the budding cannabis industry. In other words I would be less likely to believe anything anyone has to say when they are in bed with a corporation.
Duncan, you faith in the free market is amazing. If only it really worked like that.
Yes greed is good up to a certain point in my hopes for the National Cannabis Industry Association. I wonder about the concerns addressed (if any) as to how far up the spectrum of use of cannabis as a therapeutic agent should be in on the template at NCIA.
Probably the most renown names in mass producing plants with specific cannabinoid profiles are David Watson and Robert Clarke (Marijuana Botany and Hashish!). These most elite cannabists run the Dutch R&D company Hortapharm, assembling what is arguably the world’s most comprehensive cannabis-seed library. For a decade now they have been providing the most stable pharmaceutical-grade marijuana seeds to GW Pharmaceuticals. Health Canada’s approval of their therapeutic agent Sativex in 2005 was based on one four-week study.
Will the makers of Sativex® or worse; Marinol® etc. end up controlling the direction of the NCIA board?
Duncan,you can use two dimes and a nickle to wipe with if you don’t mind the funny taste of your cheetos.
As each of today’s events such as 19 and 203 plus since the media coverage has expanded beyond the pot jokes,more of America is listening now than ever before and it is driving the price of prohibition up for the corporations trying to keep marijuana/hemp off the open market.
In order for legislators to ignore their constituents over m/m and drug law reform,they will require larger “donations” to maintain their blinders,especially if enough of the prohibs are voted out in 2012.
As the dollar slides down,the cost of prohibition goes up
and it is becoming unsupportable,even for the corps.
Open a North American association in Canada, where hemp and medical are clearly legal. Hey, I’ll even help run the Toronto office! Then expand or move it when things get more legally stable.
While you have to keep the obviously crazy away from this to maintain credibility, just make sure that so-called activists who put their business interests first do not gain control of it…
Here’s some good news out of California. Drug warrior Cooley concedes in CA AG race.
Wow you have low expectations for Obambi the jesus messiah Bruce M. Remember Oprah said he is the one.
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There’s no “invisible hand of the marketplace”. In this world, it’s the “invisible thumb” on the scales. How ya gonna get the politicians out of the pockets of the corporations long enough for your cherished free market principals to kick in? How is the little guy supposed to get rich when patent lawyers and and stock brokers get their hands on weed? By buying stock? The stock market wiped people clean last time, and it was a few speculators screwing around with Too Much Money and bundling worthless investments together and calling them sound. That was all it took. Brought the whole financial world screeching to the brink, it did. And not just the banks, investments across the board took a huge hit. Bill Gates Jr. is giving his money away, it is true, while Bill Gates Sr. works to tear down our entire educational system, and replace it with one that will only teach what children “need to know” to be good little automaton worker ants. No critical thinking allowed, and no fancy-pants “arts” either.
“Conservatives” gave us the deregulation that allowed Goldman Sachs and AIG to become “too big to fail” by eliminating the Glass/Steagul act and allowing the free market to work it’s “magic”….
Sorry everybody, but the stench of right wingery was making me crazy. We should all discard useless shit like “ideology” and stay here in the real world for a change. What we need to do is work with what we got to do the best we can. The people keeping weed illegal aren’t conservatives or liberal. They are Corporatist, they are Statist, and they are Fascist. And they’ve got us arguing amongst ourselves while they sit back and laugh. Everything is NOT a Grand Ideological Struggle.
I’m still very skeptical about the mega-franchise model that Prop 215 organizer Lee envisioned, with the government approving only a few tightly regulated oligopolies in each market, similar to beer manufacturers and casinos.
This restriction to only a few players who are chosen by some kind of local government action is said to be necessary due to the need to properly tax on a per plant or per pound basis and account for all production (as is done in distilleries and breweries). It also follows this “dangerous drug” paradigm like the current federal facility at the University of Missisippi that pot farms, even indoors or in greenhouses, must be done in military level secured facilities.
Neither of these notions seems self-evident, but the experience of political corruption and lack of real oversight in the local awarding of valuable contracts in most other areas is evident with these contracts for privatization of government work, to say nothing of the inherent political donations scandals of bribed local officials sure to follow.
I don’t care for the franchise model for government permits. Anyone should be able to get a license to manufacture wholesale cannabis, just like any other legal vegetable or fruit which you can farm…that is a real “free market” alternative.
I suspect Mr. Lee’s proposal was rent seeking on behalf of a new class of politically connected entrepeneurs who, it seems, didn’t love the cannabis when it required real risks to freedom and not just the freedom to make as much money as you can get away with selling stuff to people.
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The Family Research Council (FRC), some of whose members have in the past strongly condemned medical and recreational marijuana while promoting a racist drug war, has just been declared a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which keeps tabs on 932 hate groups throughout the country.
The primary reason for the hate-group designation is the FRC’s anti-gay rhetoric, but the reasons hardly matter since “there is no difference between the FRC and the KKK in the eyes of the SPLC now.â€
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