Monthly Archives: January 2020

Here it is the beginning of the new year and it is time to do taxes and try to figure out how you are going to expand your business, or at least keep your business alive, for the next twelve months. A good place to start is to sit down at a desk or table, turn off the television, pour yourself some of your favorite beverage, and light up a bowl of  your favorite weed. 
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Cannabis legalization has been, for many people, a sucker’s trap. It has presented lots of opportunities to make a lot of money through growing, manufacturing, testing, distributing, delivering, and retailing cannabis products. Unfortunately, in most states, the Black Market cannabis industry was so well-established prior to legalization that the legal newcomers had an uphill battle to attract customers that had been buying from their favorite dealers for decades. While the risk of buying illegal weed 
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The biggest problem dispensary owners are having is price competition from the Black Market cannabis providers. An illegal dispensary can sell for low prices because they don’t have the expenses that legal shops incur even though the illegal businesses run the risk of shut-down. One new idea that might have some promise is California’s move to enable cannabis customers to find legal weed shops by using their smartphones. It doesn’t solve the problem of lower 
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The Los Angeles Times recently highlighted the disappointing experience of Costa Mesa, a town that had expected to benefit greatly from the legalization of marijuana in California. In the first year, 2018-2019, the city budgeted for a  $1.56 million tax windfall but instead collected $163,803. During the 2020 tax year, Costa Mesa’s budget projects cannabis tax revenues of $1.143 million but after the first six months of the year, tax revenues amounted to only $217,511. 
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There is a buzz on the street about yet another huge name in the Cannabis business that has run into trouble. Rumor Has It that MedMen is running around trying to reorganize the financial roots of their company. This is the same thing that happened to the dot-com’s. There was a big rush to the gold fields of the internet during the 1990’s, and we all know what happened — the Dot-Bomb. New internet companies 
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There is a theory that the War on Drugs has morphed into a new strategy: Legalization or Regulations. The main idea in this theory is that the strategy was to legalize cannabis, create all kinds of social equity programs that go nowhere, and then apply such difficult application processes, extremely high fees, legal and operational costs that only big money can possibly afford to open licensed cultivation, manufacture, distribution, or dispensary operations. Part of the 
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Our cannabis industry has gone from a scattered and secretive bunch of rebels operating outside the law to multi-millionaires heading up billion-dollar public companies that provide everything a person could possibly want in terms of weed. This has all happened in the previous decade — 2010 to 2019. What can we expect from this new decade? The Big-Weed land grab will continue. Despite the best intentions of many involved in the legalization of marijuana in 
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You probably thought the War on Drugs had ended with cannabis legalization. It didn’t. As a socio-political tool to manage the accumulation of power, it is still alive and active. The identification of certain social groups with certain drugs has long been a way of legally controlling the political power of those ethnic and civic groups. Anti-opium laws were directed at the Chinese. Anti-marijuana laws in the Southwest were directed at Mexican laborers and immigrants. 
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