The ride that’s legal weed is still throwing all for loops. Last weekend, serious people were fretting about the stock market doldrums.
Days later, the MORE Act easily passed out of its U.S. House committee and investors were singing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” only cautiously and to themselves.
Stock market performance only tells the surface narrative of cannabis. Legal weed’s new spate of unemployment and disfunction is the backdrop against which the legalization’s latest act took shape.
East Bay Express/LA Times
- Social media was aflame with news of a California tax increase going into effect on New Years Day. Talk of organized protest snowballed in one popular and active Facebook group. Sacramento entrepreneur and podcast guest Kimberly Cargile wrote to WW California on Friday, “For the last two years since regulations were enacted in CA, the regulated industry has been failing to thrive for 3 main reasons: 1. Lack of local government permitting. 2. Lack of capital. And 3. Extremely high tax rates. Our industry has been advocating to lower taxes so that we can bring in more consumers and compete with the unregulated and untaxed market… It came as a huge surprise and quite frankly a slap in the face when CDTFA raised the taxes this eeek.”
- Inevitably, libertarian critics have come to blame the current business environment on California liberalism‘s collective effort to shoehorn social justice issues into what was supposed to be a simple Green Rush. Big Pot, the claim goes, has licked its chops because of this, and is waiting to pounce. Only part of that sentence is true.
VICE
Quick Hit
- A coalition representing the industry petitioned Contra Costa’s Board of Supervisors to rescind its ban on vaping devices.
MJ Business Daily - The The San Fernando-based company best known as Kushy Punch lost its license . Reportedly $21M in cartridges and other product was seized from the company’s Canoga Park site by law enforcement.
CA.gov
