No More Pandemic Specials?
Colorado marijuana sales “have fallen for thirteen months in a row on a year-over-year basis.”
The No-Sniff Rule
Westword reader “Shane” asks the Denver publication’s weed columnist Herbert Fuego why dispensaries won’t let him sniff the merchandise anymore. Fuego’s answer is that the prohibition on sniffing open samples isn’t a requirement under Colorado law—it was one of the voluntary precautions instituted during the COVID-19 pandemic that has simply been kept on through inertia.
I’m told that sniff samples are increasingly rare in California dispensaries as well. The trend there is toward all weed being sold in pre-packaged form—no more watching the budtender use chop sticks to load your selection from a big jar onto a scale and no more sniffing your prospective purchase.
These restrictions—promoted under the all-powerful banner of Safetyism—have a lot of downsides. They make it difficult for consumers to compare and evaluate the merchandise and to discover their preferred varieties. How can the industry build consumer knowledge and connoisseurship if the product is sealed up tight?
Soft on Crime
California mj growers and retailers pay big money for licenses and to adhere to burdensome state regulations. Meanwhile they are being undercut on price by black market suppliers who pay neither license fees nor taxes, and who often illegally tap electrical lines and pump scarce water from aquifers to run their operations. Not to mention using illegal, highly toxic pesticides like carbofuran which contaminate the weed and the groundwater.
You would think that in a state as energy-strapped and environmentally aware as California they would throw the book at these illegal grows. You would be wrong.
In May, when a major raid of illegal grows in Antelope Valley netted 105 arrests, 40 firearms, and 270,000 plants, law enforcement wanted to charge felonies for the environmental violations. But progressive Los Angeles DA George Gascon refused to do so. Nine people were charged with firearms offenses; everyone else merely got citations.
Meanwhile California law enforcement continues to play Whack-A-Mole: they destroy illegal grows but the operators just pop up somewhere else, often using non-US nationals as a sort of slave labor. If the state won’t enforce its own environmental laws and won’t protect its tax-generating Golden Goose of a legal weed industry, how does this end well for anyone?