The culture matters. In fact, it’s essential to your success. Some companies, like MedMen, just ignore it. Others, like Lowell, fabricate it. Neither one will cut it. It is way past time to get the people who planted the proverbial seeds for legal weed in on the harvest.
With MJ BizCon in full swing this week the global cannabis market will converge on Sin City to make a gameplan for 2020 and the years to come. But beyond the bright lights of the Las Vegas Strip, the Nevada cannabis industry can get pretty dark.
The holidays can be full of highs and lows but if you’re like us, they’re always better with some cannabis. Join our worldly guest contributor Sharon Letts for some sage wisdom about how to balance your tolerance for both weed and family as we wind down the decade.
In 2016, there were more than 14,000 certified organic food farmers here in America, up a whopping 58% from 2011. California cannabis can follow this same model but the barriers to entering the industry must be lowered and the incentive to grow environmentally responsible, high quality, organic craft cannabis must be higher than it currently is. As for the rest of the country, we should really be careful what we wish for when we discuss federal cannabis legalization.
Clearly, the unregulated market in California is draining the potential of the regulated one, but it is the very taxes and regulations that differentiate them that provide that unregulated market with such a distinct advantage. We have no doubt that if we could get accurate totals on the unregulated cannabis sales in each state, Cali would shine as it should, but instead those stats stay in the shadows.
The state has done little or nothing to instill confidence in either the folks who have taken the enormous risk to enter the regulated market or the folks on the outside looking in. In a recent interview, California Bureau of Cannabis Control Chief Lori Ajax admitted that there are no “short-term fixes” for the hamstrung industry. How do you fix something that becomes more broken by the day?
If you have ever driven with Bill it might surprise you to learn that most cannabis users tend to actually slow down after a toke or two 😉 but according to some half-baked research released earlier this month, when cannabis users drive slower and steer straighter than average motorists, that’s somehow a problem.
There are many reasons why we think that wholesale prices for cannabis will continue trending upward well into 2020. Is this a good thing? Well, that probably depends on who you ask. Growers making more money is a good thing. But what if it comes with higher risk as well? Consumers are already shunning dispensaries due to high retail prices, so those can’t really go higher to make up for the higher wholesale prices, which is cool but it could cut into the margins of the dispensaries. $100 wholesale pounds sound like a surefire way to keep any discerning cannabis consumer far, far away from any regulated outlet. Lower the taxes at all links along the supply chain and lower the costly barriers of entry that currently keep so many legacy operators from entering the industry and maybe, just maybe, Cali can begin to live up to its potential as the largest legal cannabis marketplace on the planet.
