Some More News - SMN: Hey..... How's The Legal Weed Going?

Episode Date: September 13, 2023

Hi. Hi. ....... hello....hi. Today Cody looks at the states where cannabis has been legalizedw asn't legal weed supposed to help communities that had been priorly...prior... previously criminalled? Wasn't it supposed to tax raise money funding for schools and things further more? howd that go? lets invetigate. SOURCES: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1i0gYTWTUkT9e2FZPFrZX9hYMrX7IaNOjomU9E5X8MuU/edit?usp=sharing Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/somemorenews Check out our MERCH STORE: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/somemorenews SUBSCRIBE to SOME MORE NEWS: https://tinyurl.com/ybfx89rh Subscribe to the Some More News and Even More News audio podcasts: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA?si=5keGjCe5SxejFN1XkQlZ3w&dl_branch=1 Follow us on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomeMoreNews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SomeMoreNews/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomeMoreNews/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@somemorenews Slow down the news ticker in your mind. Upgrade to better Natural Solutions from NextEvo Naturals. Go to https://NextEvo.com and use promo code MORENEWS to get 25% off.

Let's see. Duh! Upbeat euphoric vibes. I like that. And take half of one and see how you feel. I'm not doing that. Okay, so 45 to 590 minutes to take effect. That is enough time.

Okay. Okay. Oh, they're so sour. Mm-hmm. Oh, they're so sour. Mm. Take that, YouTube monetization! Hi, hello, news horses. Here is some more of the news.

You know how people get high? We love getting high, don't we folks? And the government knows this about us. They know, they know, the government knows. As of this episode, 38 states have legalized cannabis for medicinal use, along with three inhabited US territories and the District of Columbia. Additionally, 23 states, as well as Guam and D.C.,

have legalized cannabis just for the purposes of hanging around and getting really stoned. Eight more states have declined to go for full legalization, but have at least decriminalized most or all pot-related offenses. In 2014, Congress passed the Rohrbacher-Farr Amendment as part of an omnibus spending bill. While this didn't change the federal legal status

of cannabis, it prohibits the Justice Department from spending any funds to interfere with the state's implementation of medical weed laws. Big picture, the federal government agreed to get out of the way of states and let them make decisions on this stuff for themselves. That law has to be renewed each fiscal year to remain in effect,

and is currently active through September, 2023, the current month and year. Congratulations to laws and months and years. So with all of this movement in the last decade or so, the US should be well on its way to become a stoner's paradise. Like the first half of a Cheech and Chong movie before the local highway cops figure out what they're up to.

Or an ad for Cheech and Chong weed gummies under every single post on Twitter. It's everywhere. And culturally, we have seen a major shift in terms of pot uses mainstream cultural acceptability. While the archetypal pot smoker used to be a lazy, slovenly slacker with zero motivation, like knocked up Seth Rogen,

today's pot smoker is a sexy, ambitious go-getter who's coming to steal your girl like the fabelman Seth Rogen. But despite weed being so much more acceptable and available in more varieties and assorted products than ever before, not all of the promises we were made about decriminalization and legalization

have actually come to pass. And that's what today's episode is all about. Weed, legal weed to be specific. And to be more specific-er, how is the legal weed industry doing in America? Buckle in for this hard hitting, in depth. Oh my God, it's kicking in. Ah, it's kicking in too much.

It's kicking in too much. It's kicking in too much. It's kicking in too much. It's kicking in too much. It's kicking in too much. It's kicking in too much. It's kicking in too much. Am I bleeding or sweating? It's kicking in too much. Checking in with Legalized Weed.

I should watch Eon Flux. You guys remember that show? Oh, okay. Wow. Get it together. Okay. I should watch Eon Flux. Flux.

Okay. Hi. I'm Cody Johnston, here with the news. You know that. Okay. All right. So we're, we're talking about weed in America. You just got to read the teleprompter, man. You just got to read the teleprompter and that's all you got to do. Okay. Here we go. Hi. So back when president Nixon declared an American war on drugs, only about 12% of the populace felt that cannabis use should be legal. Cut to October of 2022 and a Politico poll found that six in 10 voters approved of legal weed

in the United States. That jumps to 71% if you just include Democrats, but even if you look exclusively at Republicans, 47% want to keep the leaf on the streets. Even 45% of voters over the age of 65 agree, and those people are old. And this isn't coastal elites versus real Americans in the heartland either.

When you map out the responses, it turns out that red and blue states are both pretty green. In addition to just being something a lot of people wanted for getting high purposes, the case to decriminalize and or legalize cannabis also included a multitude of practical benefits. States that legalized cannabis sales were expected to get a major financial boost

and a new source of tax revenue. In California alone, advocates predicted that legalized pot would bring in around $1 billion per year. Massachusetts projected that recreational pot sales would net them $63 million in new tax revenue in their very first year. This money wasn't just promised in the abstract on a theoretical basis, politicians and lawmakers were laying out grand ambitions,

helping to make the case for cannabis legalization by pointing to all the benefits we would share from the resulting revenue boost. And in 2012, Colorado and Washington would be the first states to legalize recreational pot. After that, several more states like Alaska and Oregon would follow with the general understanding that the revenue would at least in part

go to things like schools. In 2016, California voters passed Proposition 64, legalizing recreational cannabis in that state. And a big part of the argument was that the new tax revenue would go into things like youth programs, substance abuse treatment, other public health initiatives, and restoring the natural environment. They also really tried to pretend that they were the first state to do this. We want to turn to the historic night here in California. What affects you the most?

Yeah, voters legalize the recreational use of marijuana. And it is time for change and California now has sent that message powerfully to the rest of the nation. That is a point of pride from my perspective. We did medical marijuana and that was a ground breaker for the rest of the country as well. We followed some other states. Yes, California, the historic first state to be the fifth state to legalize recreational weed. Great work, get over yourselves. Anyway, voters were also told that decriminalization

was going to free people who were unnecessarily or unfairly imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses. We weren't just going to prevent people in the future from being thrown in prison for cannabis possession, but we're going to give those who had already been convicted of related charges their freedom while also providing them a shot at a better future by clearing out prior convictions. Expunging the records of felons with drug-related offenses

provides them with a host of benefits, making it easier to apply for new jobs, loans, homes and apartments, professional licenses, along with all the other basic services the rest of us take for granted. This was about righting historical wrongs, correcting the drug war's 50 plus year legacy of brutality, racial bias, cruelty, and trauma,

while also allowing people to get super high so they can finally understand the film Cloud Atlas. Not a bad film when you get past all the Hugh Grant and tribal makeup stuff, but maybe it's a bad example. I don't know, I don't remember it. Have I seen it? Watch that, watch movies.

Another thing this would promise to destigmatize was of course the process of buying and selling weed. Legalization advocates claimed that legalization would make the cannabis industry safer, bringing it out of the shadowy underworld of drug cartels and into the light of overpriced Apple store-esque dispensaries taking over all the storefronts where Froyo shops and Barnes and Nobles once stood.

Free and open competition in the cannabis market should naturally drive prices down and quality up. As well, the pot industry would now be subject to the kinds of regulation, oversight, and transparency that you get for other legal industries. Along with making the product safer, this also meant the consumer would be spending way less time surrounded by Scarface posters in a basement apartment waiting for a dude named Donkey Punch to get home from his shift at Ruby Tuesdays just so you can stare at his fish tank

while he pauses Madden and weighs out a single eighth. Ferret interaction would go down 200%. Cannabis research was another area that was promised to see big benefits post-legalization. Until this point, studies into the potential advantages and therapeutic uses for cannabis have long been stymied by its legal status. But states that passed these new reforms were now going to open up new avenues for research and funding.

In 2019, NBC News health policy analyst Dr. Vin Gupta pointed out that the FDA can't evaluate cannabis products for their health and safety impacts because the federal government continues to view cannabis as a Schedule I drug, the same classification as heroin, which is wild and something we will circle back to because despite all the progress we've made and seen, that currently remains true. Weed and heroin are on the same tier

in the eyes of the federal government. And for that and a lot of other reasons, spoilers, most of the promises we're outlining here did not pan out. That is why we're doing this episode. But before we go any further, it's worth noting that it's okay to want to legalize weed just for the sake of doing that. There doesn't need to be an added benefit.

Everyone likes getting high, even nuns and bears. So it's super okay to simply celebrate that the weed doors are slowly opening. But you should also want that industry to be thriving and effective and safe. Otherwise, those doors might shut once more. In fact, in terms of state legalization, the process has slowed.

Part of that is because there are only so many states and a lot of them have already legalized it, but there are still many holdouts, specifically red states, because they're squares, you see. And despite its national popularity, most people seem to agree that we're a long way off from any federal legalization, because Joe Biden is also a square.

I mean, they all work in the government after all, bunch of nerds, except for Ted Cruz, who is rugged and loves his beers in a very natural way and not at all desperate kind of way. Mmm, the taste of beer. Aside from politicians, the weed industry itself also stalled in 2022. And in some places, weed sales even reversed. In California and here in the salad bowl of the world, crops are thriving, according to the Monterey County crop report released on Tuesday, except cannabis. The report

shows that cannabis value saw a decline of 54% from 2021 to 2022. If you ask the business owners themselves, they'll point to the same stuff a lot of retail shops complain about. Lack of foot traffic, oversaturation, and competition with bigger fish, taxes, and of course, regulation. But that's on top of a lot of additional problems unique to this industry. Problems we will be getting into, along with looking at what exactly cannabis legalization has done to the industry as a whole and where those taxes are going. It's all not great. So that's where we will be coming from here. But to do a second cooler disclaimer,

I'm not saying these new legalization and decriminalization laws have not done any good or that we're never going to see any of these positive benefits. If you care about smuggling at the border, you might be happy to hear that legalizing the pot has likely reduced the flow of illegal cannabis into the country. And if you care about the precious jerk children, a March 2023 paper from the Journal of Economic Literature also found that minors weren't using cannabis at any higher rates post-legalization.

Plus, they also noted that teens seem to consume less alcohol when medical weed is also available. Some early data also suggests legal weed may be having an impact on the levels of opioid deaths, but the researchers haven't reached any firm conclusions yet. Authors Mark Anderson and Daniel Rees suggest that everyone's predictions about dispensaries

were spot on, specifically that it's trickier for teens to access cannabis now that licensed dispensaries requiring proof of age have largely replaced independently operating drug dealers. Some studies have also linked wider access to legal weed with a drop in suicide rates, particularly for males between the ages of 40 and 49. But again, we don't necessarily need any benefits here

because we like getting high, except when we get way too high right before filming. But what was I to do? I'm not eat the apples i mean i had them so oh see if it is from katie so hey buddy that's nice watching on the hidden cams that you've got too high too high too high too high she's repeating it too high too high tooth die tooth die do you want me to call the cops so they can come help if you don't text back I'll

call the cops and or the FBI happy Honda days that's oh one second okay please don't call the cops thank you he's not texting back fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck man I cannot deal with the cops right now fuck okay oh okay thank god uh it's just an emoji of a tooth. What does that mean? God damn it. Okay, okay, okay, okay. I'm gonna call her. I'm gonna call her. I'm gonna, oh, I don't wanna.

Can't text. Okay, I'll call her. I'm gonna build up the confidence to call her and work up to some ads while I do that. Okay. Hello to my past and future selves. There's a collar and we're gonna do some ads while I do that. Hello to my past and future selves. You know, being trapped in a temporal paradox loop can be stressful. I literally just killed like four versions of myself.

There they are. They had it coming, patooey. And luckily, afterward, a box of NextEvo natural CBD gummies materialized in front of me, and boy, they really took the edge off. According to NextEvo, their CBD products are clinically proven to absorb four times better than regular CBD oil.

They're heavily tested so that you get exactly what's on the label, and they taste good too. None of that hempy aftertaste you get in other CBD products. I take their sleep support complex whenever I get the time shakes at bedtime, which is every night or every previous night. Ah, time, she is a confusing mistress. You know, I should put some in the time machine actually

and send them back to past me to make sure I try them. I'm gonna do that later. I should include the next Evo Stress CBD complex as well which combines CBD with ashwagandha to help defeat stress. Take that! Just like how I defeated all those pharaohs and me's down there. It turns out pharaohs can't handle dynamite very well so tip for you slow down the news ticker in your mind. With this upgrade to better natural solutions from NextEvo Naturals, go to nextevo.com and use promo code more news to get 25% off.

That's 25% off at N-E-X-T-E-V-O.com, promo code more news. That's 25% off at N-E-X-T-E-V-O.com. Promo code more news. Okay, so either something's wrong with my phone or I keep calling her. She picks up and then says she can't hear me, but I can hear her just fine. She says I sound a fuzzled and I don't know what that means.

And now she's threatening to call an ambulance to have them perform defuzzling on my tongue. She's, I think she's messing around, right? She's just being funny, right? She's not gonna call anyone. She's not gonna call anyone, okay? Breathe. I just gotta breathe like Prodigy.

All right, let's keep going with the weed stuff, all right? Before the break, we were outlining the current state of the cannabis industry and foreshadowing that a lot of the promises linked to legalization didn't come to pass. Now, here, after the break, we will dig into that, starting with the tax of it all. As Max Lord might say, legal weed is good,

but it could be better. From Wonder Woman 1984, that's the bit from Wonder Woman 1984. You can rewatch it on Max if you don't believe me, it's probably still on there. 90% sure, the hit, Wonder Woman, 1984. It's true that many states are now collecting a new kind of tax that has very quickly

become a key source of revenue. In fact, in some states like Colorado, pot taxes are already generating more revenue than their boozy counterparts. In 2021, aggregate revenue for all states that had legalized recreational cannabis sales hit $3.7 billion. Nonetheless, actual revenue from weed taxes

has fallen well short of the wide-eyed pre-legalization projections. As we pointed out, many states have recently seen sales drop but that's not new either. In 2019, California's cannabis excise tax revenue came up short from their projections. Early in the year, Governor Gavin Newsom's proposed budget expected $355 million from the industry.

And just a few months later, that prediction would be brought down to $288 million. And while not the highest, California taxes the shit out of their weed. In fact, one of the theories why sales are down is because the state simply made its cannabis tax rate too high, driving some consumers back to the illegal market. This stumble robbed residents of the initial financial boost

that a lot of other states have seen in the immediate post-legalization period. Same thing apparently happened in New York State, which brings in less cannabis tax revenue than Montana, Illinois, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Michigan, despite a significantly larger population. Still, by 2022, cannabis tax revenues were down essentially nationwide.

And while voters and taxpayers were told that this revenue would go to things like education or rehabilitation programs or other projects that would benefit them and their communities, in reality, these funds are largely going, this is going to cops. We're giving our weed money to cops? The ones who had already spent decades

profiting greatly off of weed in America. Those cops, surely, surely this is a different, cops we're talking about. Like the TV show Cops, or maybe Stripper Cops, Cop Rock. Please tell me that the money is going to a second season of the musical TV show Cop Rock. I wanna know if LaRusso finally gets what's coming to him. In rock form.

Sadly, we are not getting a new season of the hit series Cop Rock. Yet. But rather there's a whole lot of the hit series, Cop Rock. Yet. But rather there's a whole lot of states using weed money to fund the police in various ways, including but not limited to funding police raids on weed growers themselves. Meanwhile, Oregon tried, but thankfully failed,

to reallocate $32 million in pot revenue to the police by taking that funding away from substance abuse recovery services. Super cool, not at all whack. Currently, 15% of their cannabis taxes go to the state police there. California has been using weed to fund the highway patrol. And one study that looked at 28 California cities

that legalized recreational weed found that 23 of them had since increased their police budgets. Meanwhile, their schools are running out of money. Neat. And in fact, a lot of public schools have not seen the boost they were promised. In Nevada, public schools have started formally complaining about missing cannabis tax revenue.

In 2022, the state earmarked $100 million in cannabis revenue to go to schools, a drop in the bucket compared to the $2 billion that officials say that they actually need. But hey, it's technically something. Still, Amanda Morgan, executive director of the nonprofit Educate Nevada Now, noted that a lot of the funding

isn't actually going where it was intended. Through a process called supplanting, state legislators frequently move funds around and redirect them on a whim to other areas of the state budget. Meanwhile, as states pad their annual policing budgets with cannabis tax revenue, on the farms where they grow the cannabis,

it's largely business as usual. As in the usual business of exploiting workers. A series of 2022 exposés by the LA Times found that cannabis workers across California continue to face abuse, wage theft, hazardous and squalid conditions, and even violence while working on the state's weed farms. At least 37 workers died on California cannabis farms

in just the five years between 2016 and 2021. And only one of these deaths even triggered a workplace safety investigation. That seems like too many deaths. This show has been around for a decade and we've only killed like half that many employees. Prompted by the Times reporting, state authorities have now set up a new unit

to look into human trafficking across California cannabis farms. That's also been a concern for authorities in Oregon where in spite of legalization, illegal weed farms have still continued to flourish. Some of them using nearby legal operations as cover. According to Politico, the quasi-legal semi-regulated situation in many states

has made them more appealing for human traffickers and others relying on undocumented immigrant labor. So basically it's legal, but there's still crime. And while I don't think undocumented migrant labor is a threat, it's of course a way to exploit those people. And it also contributes to this cycle of over-policing. Weird, I thought legalization was supposed to get rid of the over-policing.

What with all the weed pardons and such. Like, remember what the old guy did? You know the guy. And President Biden announced he is pardoning all Americans convicted of simple marijuana possession under federal law. There he is. In October of 2022, just ahead of the midterm election,

President Pseudonym Biden pardoned thousands of Americans who had been convicted under federal marijuana possession laws, clearing Americans who had been convicted under federal marijuana possession laws, clearing everyone who had been convicted on these charges all the way back to the 1970s. But while this is certainly a positive step in the right direction, you might've noticed the very specific wording in that clip,

simple marijuana possession, meaning that this doesn't relate to anyone whose charges include anything beyond being caught with weed. Federal convictions for selling or distributing pot still stand. Also, this doesn't apply to any state charges, which when you think about it makes this really useless. Who the hell is getting busted for possession

on a federal level? Is that something the FBI really goes after? Is Agent Fox Mulder sticking the fluke man in his cuffs for a dime bag? So only around 6,500 people were convicted of simple possession by the federal government between 1992 and 2021. And not a single person was in federal prison

on these charges when Biden issued the pardon. Instead, those charges got wiped for people who had already completed their sentences, making it easier for them to find housing, apply for jobs or education programs, get federal benefits, all that good stuff. And it is good stuff. In fact, generally, if you've served your sentence,

maybe it shouldn't still be hard for you to get housing or apply for jobs or education programs or good federal benefits. That's like the whole point of serving your time. It's in the phrase, you served it. But also, this is not really the kind of sweeping reform you would expect. The president also urged governors on the state level

to follow his lead, and that would certainly have a lot more impact if they listened to him. But it's more likely that they are just gonna do whatever they feel like doing. It's not like they need Biden's blessing here. In fact, back in 2019, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker granted more than 11,000 pardons

for low-level cannabis convictions, all by himself. In Illinois, the expungement process was actually baked into the legalization law, easing the process for Pritzker specifically. You could argue that Biden recommending pardons will actually do the opposite in some states like Florida, where the meaty governor is specifically seeking to undermine the current president.

But even democratic governors face a number of obstacles that have kept these thousands of cannabis offenders in prison, even as people on the outside enjoy the very same activity for which they were convicted and jailed. In Massachusetts, former Republican Governor Charlie Baker has said the pardon process is too complicated to use for the scale of cannabis convictions.

In Louisiana, Democratic governor John Bel Edwards praised Biden's decision, but said he lacks the authority to do likewise in his state. State law blocks the governor from issuing bulk pardons, so the Louisiana Board of Pardons would need to sign off on each individual case, which unfortunate and tedious, but also still do that. Oh no, extra paperwork.

But basically Biden urging governors to issue pardons is like if I urged everyone to buy a horse. Maybe some of you could do that, but for others it's logistically impossible, and that's assuming you even want a horse, which you should, horses are very useful. Two words, edible carbs. So by most estimates, there are still 30,000

to 40,000 Americans behind bars on state level possession crimes. Remember, that's not selling or distribution, that's just having some cannabis on your person. Normal estimates that 350,000 Americans were arrested for cannabis related crimes in 2020 alone, 91% of which were limited to just possession. While that sounds like a lot and is a lot,

it's actually a 36% decline from 2019's totals. 350,000 weed arrests in a year is the lowest number recorded by the FBI since the 1990s. According to the ACLU, out of the 8.2 million weed-related arrests in the U.S. between 2001 and 2010, 88% were simply for having some of the drug. And of course, black people are nearly four times more likely than white people to be arrested for weed. In Mississippi, a black man named Allen Russell

has been sentenced to life in prison on a weed possession charge. Last year, the state Supreme Court actually denied his appeal. He had about 1.55 ounces of cannabis on him, which is probably more than you need for a night of adult swim viewing, but come on, life in prison?

There wasn't a human head in the bag next to the weed or anything? So there's a disconnect between federal and state governments at work here. And even at the state level, a lot of legislatures left key decision-making details up to local authorities, including mayor's offices and city councils,

some of which lack the information and experience to make these kinds of frequently complicated and nuanced calls. It's a patchwork system that's made up of even smaller patchworks, a set of rules more immediately bewildering than your first time watching a Christopher Nolan movie that's ultimately as unsatisfying

as your third time watching that Christopher Nolan movie. Creating a new quasi-legal industry that starts accumulating massive sums of money overnight with little to no oversight beyond local officials who may or may not have any idea what's going on is an invitation for corruption roughly akin to adding a Danny Ocean's only rear entrance to your new Vegas casino. People are going to get ripped off is my point. After searching the Atalanto mayor's home for hours this morning, FBI agents walked out carrying boxes of potential evidence. Atalanto City Hall was also raided today.

We found the doors locked with this sign saying the building would be closed for the rest of the day. The third location that was hit, the Jet Room Medical Marijuana Dispensary. Mayor Kerr was recently quoted as saying he wants to make Atalanto the Silicon Valley of medical marijuana, but why these three locations were raided is not clear. Ah, yes, what a mystery as to why the mayor's house, office, and a local weed shop were all raided. Yeah, dude was taking bribes, and he's not the only one. Of course, to be effed and beed, most state legislatures

that approved legalized cannabis simultaneously set up oversight and safeguards, perhaps a statewide limit to the number of dispensary licenses that could be issued or boards that consider new proposals for how and where pot can be legally sold and consumed. But these mechanisms usually rest in the hands of local political figures, the aforementioned mayors,

city counselors, and so forth, who either make the decisions themselves or appoint the boards that then make the decisions. So it's a system by which a few carefully placed bribes can open all sorts of fun doors. In Massachusetts, state law requires that weed businesses have a positive impact in local areas that have been disproportionately impacted

by past anti-drug regulations. But in 2019, the state's Cannabis Control Commission discovered one pot store had been spending the money on local police details and also dropped $1,000 to sponsor an oyster festival. Well, hey, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe those oysters had been disproportionately impacted by past drug laws. You don't know. Over in Fall know, maybe, maybe, maybe those oysters had been disproportionately impacted by past drug laws. You don't know.

Over in Fall River, Massachusetts, Mayor Jaisal Khurraya was arrested by federal agents in 2019 for attempting to extort $600,000 from cannabis companies in exchange for licenses to set up shop in his city. He's now serving a six-year sentence for fraud and corruption, though my guess is he won't have too much trouble job hunting after he serves his sentence. Meanwhile, two public officials from Calexico, California

were sentenced to two years in prison after taking $35,000 in bribes from cannabis businesses in exchange for permits. Part of the legal case against former LA council member Jose Huizar, included allegations that he used extortionist tactics to pressure local cannabis businesses into making donations to his campaign.

Federal prosecutors charged Ukrainian-born Andrew Kukushkin, funnily enough, a close ally of Rudy Giuliani's Russian friends Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, with funneling illegal foreign political contributions to candidates in Nevada and New York as part of a scheme to secure cannabis licenses there. You get the idea.

There's a lot of these. I guess you could argue an added benefit of pot legalization is that it really flushed out the most obviously corrupt city officials we had, but you might notice that in most of these cases, the problem wasn't the weed shops themselves, but the shitty government folk exploiting their positions. For others, it seems impossible to even know when you're doing a crime.

In Los Angeles, staffers at dispensaries who believe they're working for legal above board companies are routinely arrested as part of LAPD raids. Cannabis has been legal in LA for many years now, but as of 2021, the majority of the city's pot shops, an estimated four out of five were unlicensed and therefore illegal.

But the city doesn't have any kind of public resource telling you which are licensed, so you just have to guess. Like a fun game where the prize is not being arrested. Drug testing is another example. In Pennsylvania, a state law theoretically protects workers from being fired or denied a job because they have a doctor's prescription for medicinal cannabis.

Hey, cool idea. Unfortunately, many jobs still have drug testing rules that are enforced at the state or federal level. Hey, cool idea. Unfortunately, many jobs still have drug testing rules that are enforced at the state or federal level. And if those same workers fail those drug tests, they lose all of their legal protections. In New Jersey, state laws allow employers to conduct random drug screenings,

but not to fire an employee just for testing positive for weed. A lot of this all points to the same issue, doesn't it? That cannabis as it stands now is in this weird twilight of being both legal and illegal, thanks to an inability to sanction it on a federal level. It's like we're in a house and in some of the rooms of that house,

we're allowed to wear shoes, but in other rooms you absolutely can't wear shoes, but also the floor is like, it's like sticky everywhere. So you wanna wear shoes most of the time. God, I'm, hi, let's take a break. And when we come back, we're going to talk more about how this environment makes it nearly impossible to be on the business side of the equation.

Goodbye, or wait, no, we're still doing the episode. Goodbye until after the ads. See you later, but soon. Hello, close friend. You know me, I'm Cody. You like Cody, don't you? Perhaps you like Cody and Katie, but maybe you like Cody and Katie

and don't like advertisements. Perhaps they annoy you or a billboard killed your parents or something. Sorry about that. But hey now, listen here. From one friend to another, you should check out our Patreon. That's patreon.com slash some more news. If you go to that place and give just five of your dollars,

you get all of these episodes plus even more news episodes without the troublesome ads. That's less than your daily box of nails from the hardware store. You can also get your name in the credits or sign up for an exclusive hangout sesh with myself, boss Katie, and the rest of the Some More News team. Who knows, maybe Warmbo will break into your house and spit in your mouth while you sleep.

Once again, that's patreon.com slash some more news. To recap, box of nails, no ads, Wormbo in your mouth, and we're friends. Close! Friends. Patreon.com slash some more news. Do it or don't, we love you either way. Oh, so thirsty.

Oh, Katie was nice enough to send over some water. Hi, we're back. Oh, no offense, but I am looking forward to this being over. So I'm gonna just relax for the day. Luckily, the edibles are starting to ebb, so I'm feeling pretty good right now. What's going on here? God.

It's from Warmbo. Okay. Miss Katie said you wanted to talk to Warmbo about friendship and Hunter Biden. Do you have time for a call? Okay, ignoring that completely god damn it katie not cool and speak of the fucking devil hey cody pants it's katie stole your pal boss did you enjoy the water i sent you don't have too much it's very strong god maniac marks eternal trans cannabis miscellaneous infused hydro assault

i drank like five of these fuck okay well this is one of the ingredients is rattlesnake fear. I don't know what that means, so we're just gonna, we're just gonna... Fuck. Okay, we're just gonna get through this before, whatever happens, happens, all right?

We're gonna go fast and we're gonna go... Focused, we're gonna be focused and fast. Okay, we were just talking about how weed legalization is in such a gray area that it makes it easy for people to do crimes, even accidentally so. And of course, such an uncertain and chaotic environment is extremely bad for business. As we noted earlier, cannabis is still federally classified

as a schedule one substance, you know, like heroin, LSD, ecstasy, and whatever else was in that water I just drank. And because of that, financial institutions like banks and major credit cards largely refuse to work with weed companies. It's just not worth the risk of drawing the ire of the federal government.

This creates a number of huge challenges for anyone attempting to start or grow a cannabis company, from securing a business loan to opening up a bank account. Everyday company type stuff like managing payroll or renting equipment becomes a huge headache when you lack access to the banking system. Additionally, cannabis companies can't yet file for most kinds of tax breaks,

business friendly state regulations, or even bankruptcy relief. Though a recent California ruling indicates this at least may be on the verge of changing in that one state. The banking situation is so desperate that cannabis entrepreneurs and startup founders are literally turning to crime

to get around it. In 2021, the former CEO of cannabis delivery startup Eaze pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud due to his attempts to get around rules regarding credit card purchases. That wasn't even the first Eaze lawsuit. The company had also been accused of violating rules around text message advertising in 2018.

Just like the people who work in their dispensaries, cannabis businesses are themselves poorly protected from theft, grift, and legal exposure. Remember that thing we just said about how they can't take credit cards and do business mostly in cash? Well, that makes them very appealing targets, not just for the cash, but the product as well.

Toby says since they opened in 2006, they've had several robberies, but this is the first one since 2014, and it's by far the biggest. He estimates the suspects stole about $500,000 worth of marijuana and cannabis related product. It's one thing when it's a big company, like who gives a shit then?

But a lot of these are local businesses carrying a fuck ton of valuable items that are really hard to insure thanks to their quasi legal status. And so every step of the endeavor from the farms to the dispensaries to the delivery drivers themselves, they're all extremely exposed.

It's unnecessarily risky, which means that it only attracts investors who are rich or careless enough to take on that level of uncertainty. Otherwise known as tech people, by 2017, Peter Thiel's Founders Fund had already jumped into cannabis investing, along with Silicon Valley VC's 500 Startups and DCM Ventures and New York-based

Great Oaks Venture Capital. One of the first companies they all backed was Eaze, which raised over $250 million in funding. And while sales in the U.S. will likely hit $33 billion this year, money for new weed startups is drying up. A lot of the potential new entrants into the marketplace have already been driven away. Despite the massive nationwide popularity of their product, the environment right now is extremely challenging for just about all small weed businesses. So rather than an egalitarian new industry

providing a lot of opportunities for ambitious young entrepreneurs and founders from previously marginalized communities. The pot industry has come to look like, what do you know? Every other industry, but possibly even worse off because of course that's the end result here. When you take an extremely valuable illegal product,

make it legal-ish and turn it into an industry that requires a ton of overhead in terms of security and legal scrutiny, it's going to end up in the hands of large corporations. This isn't new. See the historical document that is the film Casino, which follows the days before Vegas booted the mob in exchange for corporations.

And you, of course, can argue that both are insidious in different ways. I mean, one way involves a vice, so I can see why people prefer it like it is today. Although counterpoint, with the vice, you also get to hang with Joe Pesci, so that's cool. Counter counterpoint, you also get James Woods. My point is that we're seeing a trajectory

where weed is either sold by criminals or large corporations with nothing in between. And once more, will that system disproportionately affect non-white people? According to early data from 2017, 81% of cannabis business owners were white, while just 5.7% were Hispanic and 4.3% were black. In California, an LA Times study found that less than 8% of the people who were issued cannabis business licenses were considered equity applicants from underrepresented communities. A 2021 insider survey found that white men

make up 70% of the top executives at the 14 largest cannabis companies, while black executives held just 7% of the industry's most prominent C-suite positions. That's bearing in mind again, that black Americans are 3.6 times more likely to be arrested for cannabis than white Americans, despite similar usage rates between the two groups.

Many states have laws blocking government programs from considering factors like race and eligibility, which makes social equity programs within the cannabis industry harder to design and organize. Additionally, equity applicants often can't obtain loans because of the difficulty of getting banks to work with cannabis companies, and some have even resorted to relying on predatory lenders.

Landlords in lower-income neighborhoods often bump up the rental rates if they learn a property is going to be used as a dispensary. City governments are slow to review applications and grant licenses and on and on and on. So that's basically where we are now. An industry that promised so much is essentially becoming dead on arrival. Just more Walmarts and Amazons, but weed themed. Boy, seems like maybe they should just legalize it

on a federal level so we don't have to make it this confusing. Weird, we can't just do that. But there's good news. In fact, one of the coolest things about discussing this problem is that the path to full legalization is both obtainable and really, really simple. Are you ready?

Reclassify cannabis! That's it. I mean, there are other things that need to be done, but as we keep pointing out, weed is a schedule one drug, and that schedule one classification explicitly means that a drug has quote, "'No currently accepted medical use

"'and a high potential for abuse.'" And come the F on. Millions of Americans do the pot. You can smoke it all the time and be completely functional. You can even have America's number one anti-vaccination and ancient alien theme podcast. The potential for abuse isn't that high,

certainly not compared to many other drugs we treat with less legal severity. Oxycontin, fentanyl, and Adderall are all scheduled too, which makes them all less strictly controlled than weed. Fentanyl, the drug that kills cops if they so much as think about it. I heard an entire police station once looked at a picture Fentanyl, the drug that kills cops if they so much as think about it. I heard an entire police station once looked at a picture of fentanyl and exploded.

And I saw one of the explosions and the explosion looked at me. Then there's schedule three for drugs with a moderate to low potential for dependence like anabolic steroids, ketamine and Tylenol with codeine. But pot is schedule freaking one? Are you high? I guess not because I may have actually drank all the weed,

I think. So sorry to everybody. But also if you were high, you'd realize that it's not that bad. And luckily we are on our way. Like literally as we write this episode, the US Department of Health and Human Services has made an official recommendation for cannabis

to be reclassified as a schedule three drug. Fucking amazing it took this long. When it comes to this issue, the federal government is still crawling through the 80s while states zoom past on their utopian hover bikes. It's silly that we have to wait for them to catch up, but we do. And they finally might be there by our side,

out of breath wheezing. Because if they actually reclassify weed, then there's really no reason not to also make it federally legal, right? It would be silly not to. But even if we don't take any other major actions on the federal level, just taking this one step immediately starts course correcting a lot of the issues

we've been discussing. Most significantly, this would give states much more authority to determine how they would like to handle the people who remain in prison for cannabis related crimes, or who still have those convictions on their permanent records. Cannabis companies would also have the opportunity to work with banks and handle basic financial transactions,

which would make it easier to actually start these businesses and increase healthy competition. Shifting the Schedule I classification also makes things much easier for scientists and researchers. We didn't even dig into that aspect of this. It's currently very hard to research weed or administer it to subjects. This would eliminate much of the lengthy and complex approvals process that draws out these studies and makes them so expensive and also

less reliable. Mind you, there's still a long way to go, and it's clear that a lot of politicians don't want this to happen. Well, the Safe Banking Act just celebrated kind of a sad anniversary. It's been 10 years since it's been there on the floor of Congress for consideration. It's come up and it's passed the House in many different iterations over the years. The Safe Banking Act is a bipartisan measure that would have blocked the federal government from punishing banks that work with cannabis companies. It's been passed in the House of Representatives seven different times since 2017,

but never made it past the Senate. In fact, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer never even called it to a vote, because it's still very lucrative to wage a war on drugs, but it's also lucrative to tax the drug. And so by keeping weed in this quasi-legal state, everyone gets to have their cake and eat it too. I mean, unless they're small business owners.

Then they get their cake taxed and stolen while receiving very little resources to protect their cake until they are put out of business by a mega corporate cake company because those are the only people able to get the cake. Oh, I want cake. How do you like, how do you get cake? Like a wedding cake.

Can I order a wedding cake? Is there a cake app? Focus. Almost done. So, cake. Okay, so obviously legalizing cannabis was the right move and we should do it nationally. That's the clear solution here.

But no matter what happens on a federal level, states will continue to legalize weed. And there are ways for those states to legitimize the cannabis industry without national support. Stuff like streamlining onerous regulatory processes and making it easier for people to start new weed businesses. Cities like Los Angeles can also rethink

and overhaul these ineffective social equity programs to get them actually working for the people they're intended to help. Additional protections and aid for growers would also help to balance things out and prevent us from having a cannabis industry that's dominated by just a few showers. If we want to get high, we're gonna get high,

sometimes really high by accident, and we will be getting legally high more and more. But wouldn't it also be nice to make sure the industry itself doesn't become a nightmare? Don't we want the people getting us high to be taken care of instead of just some cog in a huge shitty corporation? That's ultimately what's at stake here. Let's do this right and treat the cannabis industry

like an actual industry. And that won't fully happen until we cut the shit on a federal level. Legalize the goddamn drug, you jabronisies boy i kind of want a steak too all right i i should probably go before it's starting to is really kicking in but like before it like really goes okay you know what does anybody have any water actually you know what else wait wait a second. I have water. I have it, God. It's a weird day. I got like water bottles everywhere. Okay, all right.

That's better and refreshing. Kind of tastes like pennies, but. Mr. Cody, are you home? Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. Oh fuck, he's right outside. Oh God, okay, everybody hide, everybody hide, everybody. Oh. Mr. Cody, we're gonna have so much fun today, Mr. Cody.

Warble for a cause against humanity. I can't be higher than Wormbo. He's gonna be so disappointed in me. I can smell you breathing! Coming, Wormbo! Fooled you! This was water the whole time. It was acting. Ah! Thanks for watching the video. Please like it with the button and please subscribe to our channel if you haven't yet.

We appreciate your support. One fun other thing about weed being like not legal but legal but also not is that we don't know if this is gonna be monetized on YouTube. Probably not. So we've got a patreon.com slash some more news that you can go to and support us there. If the YouTube gods are like,

ah, you drank a bunch of water and then acted silly. So do that, thanks. We've got podcasts called Even More News. This is a podcast called Some More News. If you don't wanna watch the video version, search for the word podcast online. You'll find it. And we've also got merch

stuff on it. We've got a... Someone's vacuuming now. They're going to start to vacuum in the hallway. So we're probably going to wrap this up. So, just kidding.

It's weed. Ah! That's just water. Fuck! Have you ever heard that story that Napoleon used the Egyptian Sphinx for target practice and shot its nose off? Or maybe you've heard that a French astrologer named Nostradamus correctly predicted nearly 500 years of human history. Or maybe someone told you that the legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson

sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in Mississippi. These stories are what I like to call historical myths. Great little tales that may or may not have any basis in historical fact. On Our Fake History, we explore these historical myths and try to determine what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story it simply must be told. If you dig stories about death-obsessed emperors, lost civilizations, desperate sieges, voodoo black magic, and famous historical figures you thought you knew, then Our Fake History might just be your new favorite podcast. If you dig it, then subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher,

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