Tag Archives: marijuana legalization

Marijuana dispensaries may begin recreational sales in Nevada starting July 1: Report

– The Washington Times – Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Marijuana dispensaries may start selling recreational weed within Nevada as soon as July 1, the state tax board voted Monday, six months earlier than previously expected.

While Nevadans voted last November in favor of legalizing marijuana, lawmakers aren’t expected to draft rules governing the state’s recreational weed program until January 2018. With medical marijuana dispensaries already legally operating across the state, however, the Nevada Tax Commission on Monday voted 6-1 in favor of granting temporary retail licenses to currently existing pot shops.

Monday’s decision means licensed medical-marijuana dispensaries in Nevada can submit applications to the state Department of Taxation starting May 15 seeking permission to sell their wares to patrons other than patients. Dispensaries deemed to be in good standing with the state are expected to receive the first temporary licenses July 1, at which point they’ll be legally allowed to serve medical and recreational weed customers alike.

Temporary retail licenses will expire January 2018, giving the state several months to study the immediate impact of legalizing marijuana before finalizing the framework for its voter-approved recreational weed program.

Indeed, politicians have said they expect retail weed will do wonders for Nevada’s coffers, provided of course its recreational pot program gets off the ground without a hitch. Gov. Brian Sandoval said he intends for recreational marijuana to rake in $70 million within its first two years, the likes of which may not be easily achievable unless some pot shops are given a head-start.

“If we don’t adopt the regulations, we will not have a temporary program. If we don’t have a temporary program, we will not have the revenue that’s included in the governor’s budget,” Deonne Contine, the director of the state Department of Taxation, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Is Legal Weed Hurting the Restaurant Industry?

Colorado’s restaurants are feeling the pinch

How a Federal Crackdown on Marijuana Could Affect Mexican Cartels

President Donald Trump campaigned on making the United States “great again,” but if his administration follows through on a threat to crack down on legal marijuana, it’s Mexican drug cartels that could be restored to their former glory.

TOM ANGELL – MARIJUANA.COM

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Thursday that states with legal recreational marijuana will likely “see greater enforcement” of federal laws, which prohibit all use of cannabis. Spicer’s statements echo what Attorney General Jeff Sessions said during his confirmation hearings: “It is not so much the attorney general’s job to decide what laws to enforce. We should do our job and enforce laws effectively as we are able.”

The Department of Justice declined to comment.

Eight states and the District of Columbia currently allow the retail sale of marijuana for recreational use, all thanks to voter referendums.

In Colorado, where in 2012 voters were the first in the nation to back retail sales, the marijuana industry generated over $1.3 billion in revenue last year, adding about $200 million in taxes to the state’s coffers. In California, the first state to legalize the medical use of cannabis, marijuana has become the state’s leading agricultural commodity, according to the Orange County Register, which estimated its value at $23.3 billion — even before voters legalized recreational sales last November.

Most people think that’s a good thing. A poll released Thursday by Quinnipiac University found a majority of the U.S. public now supports marijuana legalization, and 71 percent oppose a federal crack down on states that have legalized it already.

The rise of the homegrown weed industry has come at a cost, though: In 2016, U.S. Border Patrol reported that “marijuana seizures along the southwest border tumbled to their lowest level in at least a decade,” The Washington Post reported. Between 2011 and 2015, seizures dropped 39 percent, according to Fortune.

Read Full – http://www.attn.com/stories/15170/how-president-trump-could-affect-mexican-drug-cartel

Legal Weed Is Hurting Beer Sales

It would appear that citizens of states with legal marijuana are switching out their beers for joints: A study from research firm Cowen & Company into the beer industries of Washington, Oregon, and Colorado asserts that those states’ beer industries are “underperforming.”

Craft beer industry news site BrewBound has some of the report’s details. “Domestic brewers” (that is, Big Beer) have seen the largest drops, with so-called premium brews (Coors Light, Bud Light) going down 4.4 percent in terms of the volume being sold. Economy brews (the regular, “non-fancy” forms of mainstream beers such as Budweiser or Coors) fell 2.4 percent.

Craft beer isn’t totally immune. The report suggests craft beer continues to grow in these three states (all of which are known for their robust microbrewing scenes), but those smaller breweries aren’t doing as well as their peers in other parts of the nation. However, the U.S. craft brewing scene was already slowing down, so that’s not entirely the fault of cannabis.

The epicenter of this trading-beer-for-weed phenomenon has been Denver, where beer volumes dropped by 6.4 percent Strangely, the report notes that import beers are relatively unaffected, indicating that lighting up a joint and drinking a Corona may be a more popular pastime.

Since only three states were studied this perhaps isn’t the most definitive look into the trend — but as marijuana goes on sale in several more states in the near future, there will be plenty of opportunities to see what legal weed might do to the beer industry.

sourced from – http://www.eater.com/2016/12/5/13847656/legal-pot-beer-sales-down

Celebrity Mad Dash to Supply Legal Grass