I guess that makes sense. After all, there are huge companies like Anheuser Busch InBev that swallowed up many other businesses on the way to becoming global conglomerates. It stands to reason that the economics of the weed industry will eventually resemble those of the beer market.
In Miller's vision of the future, selling marijuana won't be any different than selling DVDs or paper. Presumably that'll be nice for him and others who have gotten in on the ground floor.
The measurements by which it's sold will have changed. As soon as there's federal legalization, the tobacco, alcohol, and pharmaceutical industries will all get into cannabis. Add the two inevitabilities of legalization and consolidation together, and it seems unlikely that tomorrow's teens will even be afforded the choice of becoming either becoming sandwich artists or dime-bag-slinging outlaws.
Perhaps they'll all be working at either the Starbucks of weed or actual Starbucks. Franciosi, the grower, says that soon most of the weed on the market will be pharmaceutical grade, and that the people with , square-foot warehouses will be forced to use pesticides and other nasty chemicals to keep up.
He hopes the people who want to deal with that will be motivated to buy his stuff, which he likened to small-batch whiskey.
But he also thinks the black market will probably remain an option for the foreseeable future. Still, the people that I know who are local and have been here for a long time in Colorado say the store prices can't ever compete with the underground. Follow Allie Conti on Twitter. Sign In Create Account. This story is over 5 years old. When I was growing up, drug dealers always seemed to have cushy jobs that were a license to print money. But what are the actual economics behind the legal and illegal sides of the marijuana industry?
October 30, , pm. Massachusetts must open social cannabis consumption spaces. Boston Marathon electrifies city after day absence. Emerson community receives vaccines, and online learning for international students.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons Three weed dealers——Jamie, Alex, and John——who spoke with The Beacon on the condition of anonymity, discussed their life as dealers on campus and how it impacts their customers.
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Comments are reviewed and must be approved by a moderator to ensure that they meet these standards. For the first time in my experience in formal education, I actually opened my notebook and took notes. As things started to calm down, I hooked back up with some of my friends from high school.
When I was choosing my classes, they were the only ones with interesting titles. In one of my philosophy classes, I was lucky enough to have one of my best friends from high school in there with me. We had smoked a lot of weed together and I did ecstasy the first time with him and some other people.
Sam and I had a lot of similar interests. When I wanted to try out for the football team in my sophomore year, I dragged him along with me, which turned out to be a good idea because we played for three years. I remember one day after class, or possibly the gym, we were sitting in his car and smoking a blunt. Instead of buying an eighth every week, just buy an ounce and sell half of it.
Then you smoke for free and have some money left over. That made a lot of sense to me. I had partially wet my whistle for dealing in Arizona, but because of a lack of suppliers, I had a hard time getting the logistics down for a smooth operation.
That problem was solved for me in LA because of the more relaxed laws and the better connections I had through my friends. How am I going to sell it? Call me if you want some. So I bought another ounce and made some calls. He was about a year younger than me and was known as the troublesome sibling of the family. But fortunately for me, he had a lot of friends. And they had friends. My life for the next two years looked something like this:. They had an apartment in Culver City which turned out to be our hang out spot of choice and get stoned out of my mind.
Periodically, we would get phone calls and make trips around the city to sell small bags of weed. There was a long period of my life where I would look back on those two years as the golden years of my life. I had no worries and plenty of money for what I needed, which was food, water, weed and prescription pills. He was a troubled kid as well, making frequent trips to the psychiatrist, so there was always plenty of Xanex and Ambien on hand.
The good thing about selling drugs is that it is a very liquid business. Drugs can be traded for other drugs at street value as well as cash. It was a common occurrence for me to sell someone a bag of weed and have them ask me if I could get them ecstasy. Or they would ask me if I wanted to buy some of their ecstasy. Mike liked to smoke weed and take pills, though it was rumored that he snorted lots of Oxycontin and even shot heroin.
That being said, I got his number through another one of my dealer friends and he became one of my best customers. He would go through periods of sobriety which, in his case, meant only smoking weed.
He would also go to some doctor who would prescribe him Norco, which is basically maximum strength Vicodin without the acetaminophen. Normally, Vicodin is anywhere from — mg of hydrocodone with some acetaminophen thrown in.
Norco is mg of pure hydrocodone. It is a relatively expensive and sought after drug. When you are dealing with a hundred pills, this turns out to be a lot of money for someone my age. And that was just one example. This is because at the end of the day, people want to consume the drugs as well, not just sell them. Sometimes even the dealers. There were no set prices, and they changed based on how much I liked the customer and how much I had paid for whatever I was selling them.
Anyway, those two years were fantastic. When you sell drugs, you are king of the neighborhood. Well, that is unless you deal with some shady characters. Anyway, there was no public transportation up there, so sometimes there would be hitchhikers trying to get a ride up or down the hill. This one day, I picked up a kid who looked to be about my age. I gave him my phone number and told him to call me if he needed anything. I figured I had just scored myself another customer.
A few days later I got a call from someone, saying that they were a friend of this kid. I had been in business long enough not to be paranoid when strange people called me who said they knew a friend of mine. Maybe I had just gotten a bit lazy at this point, but I asked the person on the phone how much they wanted. QP stands for quarter pound, which is a fairly large amount. At the time, my friends and I were rolling in some very powerful stuff which had been quite expensive, even for us with our connections.
I remember sitting with Z at his house while on the phone with this kid. Z shrugged and told me the price. I was going to do a deal. So I stood outside with the goods at the appointed time and saw someone walking towards me. He seemed a little unsure of himself, so I waved at him and tried to call him over.
He approached slowly and seemed to not be looking at me, but past me. He came up to me and I greeted him like everything was okay. He just stared at me and then lunged for the bag. I kicked him in the stomach, but noticed that he was still looking past me. When I turned my head to see what he was looking at, I saw a huge guy come barreling down on me.
He took me down to the ground, sat on my chest and punched me in the head until I let the bag go. They ran off with a small fortune for us at the time worth of weed as well as my cell phone, which had fallen out of my pocket. My head was swollen from getting punched. I knew I should have gone with you! I shrugged. I told him the story.
I actually recognized the tall kid from the Palisades. When Z heard this he got excited. You know who it was? H was our dealer and one of the biggest in the city. He was a nice guy if you were one of his customers and one very tough dude. Rixon was killed by a rival gang in my senior year of high school, though the official story was that he died in a motorcycle accident.
Z spoke to him and told him the story, mentioning that I knew who it was. For such an affluent town on the west side of LA, the Palisades definitely had its fair share of punks who liked to fight and join gangs. H hated MK. When I told him who it was, he laughed. We hung up and waited. He said that they would shoot up the house unless he brought back everything he had stolen. The story is that MK began to cry on the phone. We did. We all had a good laugh about that. Personally I was relieved and amazed that everything had worked out.
From then on, I made sure to buy everything from H. Granted, it was in his best interests to get me back my property. So in effect, MK had actually stolen from H. Still, I had been won over. This whole time, I was accepted by my friends only because other friends of theirs had accepted me.
From Z to J to H to Mike, they all gave me the same respect as the bad kids because I was friends with them. It was quite nice. Eventually, the dream had to end and I had to wake up. Z went sober after having a grand mal seizure, caused by withdrawal from weeks of Xanex and Ambien abuse. Mike eventually died from a heroin overdose. I was actually doing quite well. After Z had dropped off the map, I begun hanging out with R, another one of our crew.
R had a place in Santa Monica and was also selling anything he could get his hands on. We both picked up our stuff from H and kept it at his house, meaning there was always about a pound of marijuana there between the two of us. Morse lobbied for legal recreational weed and founded the Oregon Cannabis Business Council.
The shift to recreational was costly. By last summer, new stores were popping up at a rapid pace. When we closed, we had six. That was the end of it. Just as mom-and-pop grocery stores gave way to big chains, people like Morse are losing out to bigger operations.
Chalice Farms has five stores in the Portland area and is opening a sixth in Happy Valley. La Mota has 15 dispensaries. Nectar has 11 storefronts in Oregon, with four more slated to open soon. Despite the record-low prices in the cannabis industry, these chains are hiring and opening new locations, sometimes after buying failed mom-and-pop shops. Please contact us if you are a dispensary owner interested in selling your business.
Because the federal government does not recognize legal marijuana, the industry cannot access traditional banking systems or even federal courts. They can try to liquidate their assets, destroy the product they have on hand and eat the losses. Stores are selling for pennies on the dollar, and people are losing their life savings in the process. Deep-pocketed companies can survive the crash and wait for the market to contract again.
Oregon faces another consequence of pot businesses closing up shop: leftover weed could end up on the black market. US attorney for Oregon, Billy Williams, has said he has little interest in cracking down on legal marijuana businesses, but will prosecute those shipping marijuana to other states.
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