A Column by John Sinclair
Hi everybody and welcome to our first column for the new year, which was held up a month by the magazine’s problems finding a printer to print and deliver the magazine according to our published schedule. Our publisher, Ben Horner, says we’ve found the right guy and everything will be alright from now on, which is just what us writers want to hear.
Now that we’re back in the saddle, I wat to start out this month with a startling story out of California, where the marijuana industry is suffering from the same sort of governmental greed and mismanagement as we are facing here in Michigan.
Associated Press writer Michael R. Blood filed a story titled “California cannabis industry warns of possible collapse” that claims “Leading California cannabis companies warned Gov. Gavin Newsome that the state’s legal industry was in need of immediate tax cuts and a rapid expansion of retail outlets to steady the shaky marketplace.
“The industry leaders asked for an immediate lifting of the cultivation tax placed on growers, a three-year holiday from the excise tax and an expansion of retail shops throughout the state. It’s estimated that about two-thirds of California cities remain without dispensaries, since it’s up to local governments to authorize sales and production. The current system ‘is rigged for all to fail,’”the cannabis industry spokespersons wrote.
“The opportunity to create a robust legal market has been squandered as a result of excessive taxation,” the letter said. “Seventy-five percent of cannabis in California is consumed in the illegal market…. We need you to understand that we have been pushed to a breaking point,’’ they told the governor
According to Blood, “Companies, executives and groups signing the letter included the California Cannabis Industry Association, the California arm of NORML, the United Cannabis Business Association, Flow Cana Inc., Harborside Inc. and CannaCraft”.
I don’t know the exact numbers involved in getting a licensed cannabis business operating in California, but here in Michigan the State wants $60,000 paid down in cash before you can obtain a license to operate a dispensary, and I believe there are county and municipal requirements of several thousand dollars each before a license will be issued.
This is totally nuts. Our marijuana community has developed ways and means over the past 80 years of the War on Drugs to take care of the needs of all marijuana smokers in the USA. Any reasonable person would conclude that the correct way to respond to the legalization efforts of the marijuana community—and our many victories, state by state—would be to find a way to bring these heretofore illegal entitles into the legal atmosphere and develop a way to charge a nominal fee that would be small enough to allow all black market growers and dealers to enter the legal arena.
But oh no, this would make too much sense and allow too many people without significant funds to enter the legal marijuana industry at this time, while the boundless greed and unbelievable nerve of the state—the same people who used to put us in prison for these activities, seize our bank accounts, houses, cars and other properties—and the big marijuana interests to whom a $60,000 entrance fee means nothing, keep the majority of black-market growers and distributors from entering the legal sector of the marketplace.
The problem is that these people never wanted legalization, they did everything they could to resist it, and after the voters instituted new marijuana laws they have pigheadedly refused to alter their thinking on the issue and continue to do everything they can think of to cling to their old ways of unmitigated greed and punishment.
The reason that the marijuana industry is having big problems is because the state will not accept the will of the voters to legalize marijuana in a way that preserves our hard-won culture and makes sure that everyone who wants to get high can get some weed cheaply and easily.
It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure this shit out. When Michigan voters legalized medicinal weed in 2008, we specified that the system we desired was one where we got our weed from caregivers or either grew it ourselves. There was no mention of dispensaries or any sort of profit-oriented sales model, only caregivers who could grow up to 12 plants for 5 patients plus themselves, a total of 72 plants.
The State of Michigan spent the next 10 years trying to ignore legalized medical marijuana and created no set of rules and regulations to govern the medical marketplace. In Detroit, 282 illegal dispensaries opened their doors in the most broken down parts of this broken down city, reclaiming long-abandoned commercial building sites and firing an increase in grass-roots entrepreneurship previously unseen in the city’s history.
When Michigan voters—that’s us!—undertook another citizens’ initiative in 2018 and legalized recreational marijuana, there were a lot of conditions written into the ballot issue that would become law upon passage of the initiative. But nowhere was it written that growers and dealers would have to front the state $60,000 to enter the business.
Well, I could go on for days about the injustices that remain in our legal system with respect to marijuana, but it’s my preachment that we are a. long way from through with the issue of the state’s interference in our culture in very fundamental ways. Fight Back! Is the only genuine road ahead to the future we’re looking for.
In better news today, Kyle Kaminski reports that our friend and esteemed colleague Ryan Basore—who was arrested and charged with marijuana-related crimes alongside six others known as the “Okemos 7” in 2010 and spent time in prison until 2015—has not only created a “multi-million-dollar cannabis brand with dozens of dank products lining the shelves at nearly 100 dispensaries statewide” but has successfully launched the non-profit Redemption Foundation as a means of “raising awareness, funds and other resources for about 1,200 people still serving time in Michigan’s prisons for pot-related charges.”
In addition to being the president of Redemption Cannabis, the Redemption Foundation and the Great Lakes Expungement Network, Basore is the co-founder of the Michigan Association of Compassion Centers, the original Lansing Cannabis Association and Cannabis Patients United.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Basore says,“I’m living my dream job. I love selling and marketing marijuana, but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to right the wrongs of prohibition.”
“Since the Redemption Foundation launched last year,” Kaminski points out,“it has cultivated partnerships and doled out almost $250,000 on services for those still imprisoned for cannabis-related charges and their families.
“Among those charitable efforts this year was $60,000 in free legal care for those with cannabis convictions, as well as a program that provides direct support to families and children of those incarcerated for marijuana-related crimes.“
Redemption also partnered with the Last Prisoner Project and the Michigan Cannabis Caucus to launch the Michigan Cannabis Freedom Coalition, a network dedicated to freeing cannabis prisoners and supporting them after release.
Yeah you rite, brother Basore. Keep up the good work! Free The Weed!
