Last year, I wrote several letters to the editor with my predictions on marijuana legalization in Maryland. I believe that those predictions are beginning to come true. First of all, brick and mortar “dispensaries” are having a “brutal year,” as recently bemoaned by Mitch Trellis of Remedy Dispensary (”After ‘brutal’ year, Maryland’s medical cannabis industry banks on recreational market,” Jan. 20). The dispensaries will always have operating expenses that their competition — the black market — will never have. Illegal entrepreneurs have no licensing fees, rent, salaries, insurance, gas and electric, advertising, security, or the big one, taxes, to deal with. The black market will be more than able to greatly undercut the legal dispensaries or “state smoke shops,” where the average “medicinal pot patient” spends $385 per month, and, ultimately, drive the legal places out of business.
If Ashley Colen (another pot profiteer) is awaiting the boom to happen from the recreational market, it will not happen. There might be a brief curiosity surge, but that will probably be it. People who smoke on a “recreational” basis will not continually pay top retail prices for something that goes up in smoke. Instead, they will seek to “invest” in higher amounts, like pounds, for themselves and hustle on the black market. These recreational users will be transformed into everyday felons overnight. The black market will do more than undercut the boom Colen hopes for in the recreational pot market, it will devastate it! Besides, who could tell the difference between the legal pot purchased from state smoke shops from those products purchased from the guy who hustles black market pot (and other) products on the streets? Is the state of Maryland that naive to believe their current and perpetual competition is going anywhere?
People who don’t know drugs, the disease of addiction or have never treated addicts (or themselves) have no idea about these issues entering this almost certain debacle. Why? Because none of those lawmakers had any experience in dealing with them. I have been a state and internationally certified addictions counselor for nearly 30 years, and I have been there myself. Nobody ever asked anybody in the drug treatment community for their input or experience on these matters that I am aware of. All of the state lawmakers and these pot investors saw were dollar signs. Hopefully, in time, they will all collectively get that faraway look in their eyes when they watch their dollars sprout wings and fly far away, just like in the old cartoons.
In all, reading this article cheered me up greatly because it thrills me to see that rich people who invest in human misery and capitalize on the societal disease of addiction may be stuck with all that product that won’t sell at their inflated prices. Yeah, the flower tops always get stale and nobody likes to smoke the “shake!” The state, also a big profiteer in human misery, will ultimately fall short as well. Good!
My solution, besides abstinence from marijuana, is basic, but revolutionary. I say the state should set up marijuana farms on all of the unused farmland all over Maryland and thus create many new jobs. I would impose a half-ounce limit of pot per day per adult person for a $5 service charge at pot pickup stations all over the Free State and thus devalue marijuana to nothing. Then, you’d blow away the black market and taxpayers would not be driven to commit felonies daily to deal with their “weed need.”
I’ve known and treated many people who sold coke and dope to afford their marijuana addiction. The original goal for Maryland was to keep the jails empty, right? Not only would there be no possession charges for marijuana, but there would be no more weed dealers, thus eliminating felonious drug distribution situations involving long-term incarceration and heavy duty state expense eternally.
Gov. Wes Moore and his people will have to commence their thinking “outside the box” leaving the gate on complex issues like this which have no apparent solution.
— George Hammerbacher, Baltimore
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