Op-Ed: Why legal weed is losing the war to illegal weed (via latimesopinion)
The market for legal weed is growing. But in California, as elsewhere, it faces serious challenges.
Legal-weed businesses must also register with the state every gram of weed that’s grown, sold or transferred between locations through a complicated “track-and-trace” system. Managing this process alone can cost tens of thousands of dollars per month in software and labor costs. Of course, none of these costs are faced by illegal-weed producers or sellers.
Add up all these licensing costs, taxes and regulatory burdens, and we estimate that California consumers often end up paying about twice as much for a package of legal weed as for a comparable package of illegal weed. Regulations and taxes are not free. Far from it. In California, many of the operations that made a good-faith effort to go legal and follow the rules have gone out of business from underestimating their costs or overestimating the size of the legal-weed market. A legal system works well when people and businesses are rewarded, not punished, for following the rules.
The best way forward is for policymakers to take a practical view about the real-world effects of regulations and taxes. Some careful cost-benefit analysis could yield a set of pared-down regulations that maintain the most effective health and safety rules while loosening up on some unnecessary restrictions that are strangling the young industry before it is up and running.
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