When I was a young lad growing up in a neighborhood freshly carved out of the pine forest, one of the favorite pastimes of the neighborhood boys was hiking in the woods.
As we walked, we were on the lookout for a bonus – piles of porno mags discarded along the dirt roads.
These were mild stuff by today’s standards. But the former owners were afraid to throw them in the garbage can. A marauding raccoon could expose their secrets to the neighbors.
Nowadays, of course, hard-core porn is available on the internet for free. The market for such magazines as Playboy has dried up. The final print edition of that trail-blazing men’s magazine came out last spring. It was discontinued in favor of a “digital-first publishing schedule.”
There’s a lesson in that for our legislators who are addressing another furtive activity in which young men tend to engage.
A week ago the voters approved a ballot question that was labeled – rather misleadingly the – “Constitutional Amendment to Legalize Marijuana.”
This was misleading because the amendment in question in fact bans “marijuana” – which the amendment defines as pot sold on the black market. It legalizes “cannabis,” which it defines as pot sold through state-approved dispensaries.
The goal is to flood the market with legal cannabis to drive out of business those selling illegal marijuana – much in the way internet porn drove print porn out of business.
After attending the state Senate hearing Monday on the bill designed to accomplish that end, I am forced to conclude that the transition will not be easy.
If you doubt that, consider how pot smokers in New Jersey now acquire their marijuana. They take a wad of cash to the local dealer and he hands back a baggie full of weed. It’s a simple free-market transaction.
Compare that to the bill setting up the state’s system for the sale of weed. Even the title of the bill – the “New Jersey Cannabis Regulatory, Enforcement Assistance and Marketplace Modernization Act” – is long and cumbersome. As for the actual bill, it goes on for 216 pages..
The snags surfaced immediately. I learned of one of them last week in a press release from the New Jersey Society of Certified Public Accountants.
It seems that under current law, businesses cannot deduct business expenses for enterprises that are illegal under federal statutes, as pot sales are.
When I spoke with the society’s Melissa Dardani, she told me that New Jersey law mirrors federal law. That means dispensaries won’t be able to deduct routine expenses for rent, utilities, etc.
That means such costs have to be passed on to the consumer as a sort of hidden tax. And it also means that smaller start-ups won’t have the capital to compete with the big operators.
“We don’t want to stifle the business to only large, out-of-state operators who have been in the industry,” Dardani said. “They are much more likely to have the cash on hand to support the tax burden.”
Dardani said that it could be two years before any dispensary opens under the complex regulatory scheme in the bill.
What’s a poor pothead going to smoke during that time?
Like us kids out in the forest, he will have to seek his pleasures furtively. Fortunately, he won’t be hauled off to the hoosegow. The bill contains language to decriminalize the consumption of marijuana. If that passes, a person caught smoking a joint would be more or less the same as getting caught smoking a cigarette in a place where smoking is outlawed. The bill also decriminalizes the possession of up to five pounds of pot.
That’s a marijuana dealer’s dream. One such dealer testified before the committee, Edward Forchion, aka “New Jersey Weedman.”
Even if the bill is signed into law, Forchion said, “People are going to keep coming to guys like me. You’re not going to eliminate the black market if you don’t include us.”
When I spoke with Weedman after the hearing, he said that the current dealers would be glad to collect the taxes that were part of the referendum, a state sales tax of 6.625 percent and a local tax of 2 percent.
“I’d gladly pay the taxes,” he said. “Taxation is better than incarceration.”
I can’t see how that could fail to accomplish the stated goal of eliminating the black market.
As for this approach, it stands about as much a chance of success as the efforts by our parents to keep us from reading girlie magazines
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