Opinion: The Weekly “Meh” 3-22-2024

This week: Fat Joe hits the White House, cannabis magic, black-market shenanigans in New York and Canadian giant is happy to lose big

Back from our break and somehow, despite headlines about New York’s 2,000 illicit dispensaries and a cannabis White House event featuring Fat Joe, I honestly found the cannabis magic show as the most compelling – go figure.

Time is a precious commodity here at Marijuana Venture, so when it comes to news briefs, we like let the more incremental coverage fall to the wayside.

Here is a candid, possibly even antagonistic, recap of the stories from the past week that we didn’t cover in full detail:

Criticisms from Vice President Kamala Harris

Okay, so what do you get when you put a handful of pardoned cannabis offenders in a room with the governor of Kentucky, Vice President Kamala Harris and Fat Joe? Give up? The answer is: absolutely nothing. Everyone was on their best behavior and exchanged high-minded rhetoric about the current status of cannabis as a controlled substance, but the meeting brought about absolutely nothing of consequence. I mean, I didn’t expect the VP and Fat Joe to have a c-walk contest or anything, but this event was so uneventful that the biggest news was Harris describing the current situation as “absurd.” What a crescendo.

New York’s thriving black market

I’m a bad-news-first kind of guy, so first: New York has more than 2,000 unlicensed dispensaries and they are reportedly selling cannabis to anyone and are crushing the state-licensed retailers. The good news is that New York now has 85 licensed retailers, so take that. And here’s some double-good news, NYC has more than 36,000 police officers, but, uh-oh, here comes the super-gross-double-bad news, they don’t seem to give a shit about the illicit operators. Which is understandable with all the killings and whatnot.

Canadian giant loses less money

The reason I love to kid Canadians is because, well, they’re Canadians and that’s what siblings do.  Anyways, SNDL, an alcohol and cannabis giant up there in Alberta, just announced that it cut its annual losses in half, down to a cool $130.5 million for 2023. While this would shutter any family-owned business, it only leads to a round of high-fives over at SNDL. The company credits the massive loss to “strong sales,” to which I would suggest including a credit to “poor decision making” and the fact that the Canadian market is so flooded with product that the illicit market is more or less obsolete. Also, what the hell were they doing to lose twice as much in 2022? No setup, I honestly want to know.

Destigmatizing cannabis-themed magic show

Cannabis-fueled magician Ben Zabin is putting on a series of marijuana magic shows scheduled to hit Arizona, Massachusetts, Washington and Oregon (in Portland of course). Zabin told Cronkite News they will help destigmatize cannabis and empower cannabis users nationwide, which, if it actually does, would make him the most powerful magician in the world. But given that Zabin is a magician with a residency in Vegas (alongside all the biggest magicians in the world mind you) who is touring several states with a cannabis act, means it’s probably pretty good if you like weed and magic.

Least appealing of the week

Considering all the amazing headlines I got to pick from this week, I can’t even imagine what the two weeks I took off would have offered. I can only venture to guess that it was something along the lines of speculation about what’s happening in Thailand, Germany and at the DEA. But I digress.

This week we’re looking at Florida aiming to award licenses to a whopping three Black farmers (in a state of more than 20 million residents!), Kansas throws its hat in the ring to propose an incredibly strict medical cannabis program, and Japanese citizens in their teens and 20s accounted for more than 70% of cannabis-related offenses in 2023. And, as tradition dictates, in that same order: Don’t worry Trulieve, they are only “aiming” to award the licenses; I think Missouri might be paying Kansas off on this one; and I am surprised that number is so low.