Breaking News!
Hello and welcome to another edition of the Crossroads Cannablog. I do apologize for the delay in any posts but life interfered and I was giving thought to where I'd like to take things here at Crossroads. More on that at a future date. For now, let's discuss some current events related to our community and culture.
First up is a rather disturbing piece via The Daily Beast on the USCC (the US Cannabis Council) and what looks like a really corrupt "legalisation" lobbyist organisation that wants some special cutouts for themselves.
As an emerging industry with sky-high revenue projections, lofty social-justice promises, and ground rules currently being written from scratch, no business in America prompts ready comparisons to Silicon Valley like legal cannabis.
But though analysts project legal weed sales to balloon from $17.5 billion last year to $70 billion by 2028—exponential growth fueled by the beginning of adult-use sales in East Coast states like New York and the potential of a legal national market, as the U.S. Senate for the first time seriously debates federal legalization—cannabis businesses in legacy West Coast states like California and Oregon are struggling. Among other problems, they’re being squeezed by high taxes, low margins, and oversupply as companies large and small rush to enter the fray.
To avoid this uncertainty and to guarantee high profits, the country’s biggest cannabis companies—some of them publicly traded with valuations in the billions of dollars—are angling for regulations that would see government hand them what critics say is a near-oligopoly, according to source who leaked an internal document to The Daily Beast.
“They don’t want to compete,” claimed an industry insider who provided the “privileged and confidential” document—a presentation dated June 17 titled “Intentional Federal Regulation,” given to the policy committee of the United States Cannabis Council, a Washington lobbying group representing some of the country’s biggest cannabis companies—to The Daily Beast.
The source spoke under the condition of anonymity, for fear of being removed from the organization and suffering other professional repercussions.
Leadership from the USCC—a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying organization that’s spent $337,500 so far this year lobbying the Senate, according to recent filings, and whose members include major cannabis companies such as Curaleaf, PharmaCann, and Cresco Labs—rejected the characterization of its policies as false.
Most significantly, they said, the presentation—which actually suggests nationwide marijuana legalization without careful rules could produce a Big Tobacco-style oligopoly in cannabis, and that current companies are a bulwark against that—was merely a third-party pitch the organization didn’t accept.
"Themselves" being the big cannabis organisations that look to comprise the bulk of the USCC. Now, don't get me wrong. I have nothing against these people wanting to free the market via lobbying for legalisation of cannabis. But, if this report and the leaked documents are to be believed, this is another example of crony capitalism looking to benefit from legalisation at the expense of others, (most notably smaller operations), while getting back pats from the grassroots. We've already seen these corporate "takeovers" of the cannabis markets in some states, (yes, I'm looking at you Illinois) and the people who suffer from it are, as usual, the consumers.
This is one that we all need to take a long hard look at and let these people know that we don't want Big Weed taking over and carving out special privileges for themselves. Especially when they are the ones who may well be helping craft legislation and regulations (as the current crony corporatist lobbyists do for the other big monied corporations in DC to get their carve outs). What are your thoughts? Let's discuss this, while we can! - *M*
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