STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. – What could go wrong once legal weed is finally available in New York?
A lot.
Just take a look at what’s happening in Oregon, in many ways the poster child for legal weed in America.
A recent story by the Associated Press showed that legal marijuana in Oregon hasn’t quite gone according to plan.
Not only did legalization fail to eliminate the marijuana black market, but it actually made the black market stronger.
Talk about unintended consequences.
Oregon legalized weed for recreational use in 2014, one of the first states in the country to do so.
Oregon voters, as the AP points out, were told that legalization would eliminate problems caused by “uncontrolled manufacture” of marijuana, i.e., the black market.
But illegal production of marijuana has instead exploded in Oregon, leading to complaints from police and legal weed growers.
It’s gotten to the point that famously liberal Oregon is looking to toughen its drugs laws, with an eye toward cracking down on illegal growers, many of whom are foreign gangs from Mexico, China and Russia. Proposed laws would double prison terms and fines for illegal growers.
Or, what the cartels likely consider “the cost of doing business.”
The Oregon situation should be a red flag for anybody looking to get into the legal weed business in New York.
Not only will you have to hack your way through miles of government red tape and jump one regulatory hurdle after another in order to launch your business, but you could quickly find yourself undercut by illegal growers who don’t have your overhead and don’t have to answer to regulators, health inspectors or the Internal Revenue Service.
You can already see this happening in New York City, where weed is already being sold in numerous stores. That’s not going to stop once the legal weed businesses open.
And how do you as a legal ganjapreneur compete with foreign cartels? Those folks settle their business disputes with guns.
Not only have we yet to figure out how we’ll deal with stoned drivers and how we’ll keep weed out of the hands of underage kids here in New York, we’ll also have to stop the cartels.
So far this year, the AP said, police have seized over 105 tons of illegally grown marijuana in Oregon, according to the Oregon-Idaho High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force. That’s up from at least 9 tons in 2019.
However, as the AP goes on to point out, those numbers are dwarfed by the “uncounted tons that are smuggled out of state and sold for high profits.”
None of this is a surprise.
If you make weed legal you’re going to embolden black marketeers to either get into the game or to increase the amount of illegal weed that they’re already selling.
It’s users who keep the cartels in business and starve the state of all that tax revenue from weed. By legalizing, you’re only increasing that demand, a demand that the cartels are clearly more than willing and able to meet.
The increase in black market production of weed has also had bad effects on Oregon’s environment, according to the AP.
The illegal growers steal water in drought-stricken areas for their operations, the AP says, pollute the environment with chemicals and employ migrant laborers, who live in squalid conditions.
Anthony Johnson, the chief petitioner for the Oregon marijuana-legalization law, acknowledged to the AP that legalization hadn’t stopped illegal growers.
He said he thinks it will remain a problem until the federal government legalizes marijuana nationwide.
Or, more likely, that would only increase opportunities for black marketeers. After all, legalization of weed in 21 states and Washington, D.C., has only emboldened them.
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