Well, aside for the overwhelmingly down side to weed, this is more about a revenue stream for the state because they don’t know any other way (like tax cuts) and just something else to tax. They couldn’t give two craps about the individual themselves.
I've talked about this a little bit before, but one of the main things that happened today with marijuana is that cultivators are no longer allowed to sell directly to dispensaries. (Used to sleep with a supplier chick who supplied 80% of the valley . Technically she was a middleman/woman. And more recently was sleeping with a lady who was a licensed cultivator who owns an enormous Grill House..also security for her) There has to be a third party. There has to be a middleman now. So now if youre a cultivator, you have to sell the middleman first and the people who got the licenses to distribute marijuana or the people who already had licenses to distribute alcohol. Supposedly it was easier that way rather than vetting a whole new industry. I forget who's responsible for rent the testing and quality control of the product now if it's the cultivator or the middleman... Not bangin the chic anymore to ask. I believe the cultivator supplies the middleman with the raw product and it's the middle man's responsibility to test (they test for fungus eggs bacteria pesticides herbicides.. Shit like that. in addition to testing the THC, CBD,& CBN ) and package it... I think that's how it was explained it to me.
Every kind of product changes hands it's got to be text. Every time a product is tested it's taxed. Not sure what they're going to do about banking and what not cuz as of a a few months ago we were still doing cash transports. I was reading an article in the paper no long ago with a high end boutique style dispensary owner who is saying he was working on "very thin margins"... Total bullshit. The First Lady, the supplier, explained it that for the most part the guys running the dispensaries (at least back then, before recreational use laws were passed and the big money investors started getting involved) didn't have a whole lot of business experience. Meaning the accounting was I bawled and kept simple as far as profit margins and what not.
Basically meaning "everything was doubled" along the pipeline, and that was coming practice in the industry. (Ill start from the top down, price wise) let's say a dispensary charges $20 per gram of "top shelf" stuff (Girl Scout Cookies or Gorilla Glue #4 for example). They purchased it for $10/gram from the supplier lady, who in turn purchased it from either a grower or another middleman for $5/g... so long as everybody was on the same page and everybody was a team player in the industry everybody got a little bit of money, sorta like our steroid industry. All of us have generally accepted minimum prices that we charge for any particular product...
and I guess it took awhile for these potheads to put two and two together and realize that if the cultivator and it retailer we're closer together they were both turn a higher profit by eliminating the middleman. No more of this "doubling" bullshit. The cultivator knew what the retailer was charging for their product and what they were paying, and the retailer knew what the cultivator was charging for their product... For the most part.
So instead of the cultivator charging $5/g, they can charge $7.50... And instead of the retailer/ dispensary paying $10/g, now they're paying $7.50, so both the Growers and the dispensaries are pulling in a lot more cash now, so adding in the gov't regulated middleman (I don't mean government agents or some shit. I just mean companies licensed by the government the same way the ATF or Bureau of Alcohol whatever checks in on Jack Daniels to make sure they're doing everything right or some shit) is the first step in the government getting its share of the profits via taxes.
I believe the cultivator lady said she can still sell two individuals so long as they have a medical card... Crap, maybe it's the other way around maybe back then she could still sell it, hell she could even mail it so long as the person receiving it had a medical card, but now with the new law maybe now she can't sell it directly to end consumers.. Whatever.
The law passed because the government knew it was sitting on a cash cow and not collecting