It’s an indisputable fact. Americans spend billions and billions of dollars on cannabis, legal and illegal. In states with a legal adult-use or even medicinal cannabis market, the numbers are staggering. Illicit weed still overtakes legal in dollars spent.
Why is this so in a state where cannabis is legal? For starters, the regulatory agencies that are tasked with creating maintaining a legal regulatory market just aren’t up to the task. They try to make it appear that cannabis is still quasi-legal, which it’s not. It’s legal. If they handled the market the same as the alcoholic beverage market, things would slowly improve. This includes growers. Some states just haven’t figure out how to deal with this new market. They’d better learn fast because if they don’t, the legal market will be dwarfed by the illegal market for years.
In states where there’s only a medicinal market, the vast majority of people who want weed are going to go to their dealer. Sad. These states are passing up on a great source of revenue. And this is revenue they could use, especially because of their economy.
There’s still a stigma attached to cannabis. It’s going to be a long time going, but it will go and cannabis will take its place among all the other things that humans do to alter their consciousness.
