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> A recent survey conducted by Abacus Data for Medical Cannabis Canada found that those who access medical cannabis legally pay on average 34 percent more for t

> A recent survey conducted by Abacus Data for Medical Cannabis Canada found that those who access medical cannabis legally pay on average 34 percent more for their medicine than if they bought from the unregulated market. I’m unfamiliar with the weed market in general, but it seems like this problem is self-inflicted. They’re simultaneously oversupplied and overpriced. Lower prices and both problems sort themselves out, plus they can slowly out-compete the illegal sellers by undercutting their pricing. It seems the real problem is that they are afraid to cut their margins because it would break their financial models and risk the stock price. It’s strange that they’d rather destroy excess product than try to move it at a steep discount. I’m also afraid this could create other problems by giving them a huge incentive to try to push more and more weed consumption among the public. Whatever your thoughts about weed, I hope we can all agree that over-consumption is not good and that it could be a problem if multi-billion dollar companies are stuck in a situation where they need to greatly increase the public’s consumption of weed to become profitable.

Closi 5y ago
> those who access medical cannabis legally pay on average 34 percent more for their medicine than if they bought from the unregulated market. I mean, that’s true with most things isn’t it? If you buy meat from the dodgy guy in a pub then it’s cheaper. Bloke selling televisions from a van? Cheaper. Cigarettes from a corner store that have been imported from a low tax country? Cheaper. Getting the electric/gas done in your house from someone who is unlicensed? Cheaper. Not sure why we would expect this to be different.
- slapfrog 5y ago
  > Cigarettes from a corner store that have been imported from a low tax country? Probably just smuggled across state lines. Bought in a state with low taxes, then sold in a state with high taxes. The store pockets the taxes instead of passing them along to the state, which it can do because the cigarettes being sold were smuggled so the high-tax state doesn't have any record of them existing.
  - blt 5y ago
    The comment you are replying to does not look like it was written by someone from the USA.
    - Symbiote 5y ago
      It's relatively common for cigarettes to be smuggled between EU states. You see people in Sweden with packaging with the health warning in Polish, for example.
      - smnrchrds 5y ago
        I was under the impression that anything bought within the EU single market can be legally taken anywhere within the single market, at least for personal use, without taxes and duties. Is that not the case?
        Dma54rhs 5y ago
        You can for personal use and low quantities, but these things are sold in big quantities, it's a huge black market.
        mollusk 5y ago
        You can as an individual. And people do that, it's sometimes refered to as alcotourism, when you cross the border to buy cheaper alcohol in the neighbouring country. Finns go to Estonia. Estonians go to Latvia. But as a company, you can't just import cigarettes or alcohol from another country and sell them at home. Cigarettes and alcohol have specific tax stamps on their packaging that make them restricted for sale in a specific country. People still do that, but at that point it's the black market.
        Closi 5y ago
        Absolutely - it's also worth saying that there is a sophisticated tracking system to trace the manufacture of cigarettes from where they were created to the point in which they are sold (and all intermediary stops) in order to ensure that the correct tax is levied (despite there being no physical borders). This means that you can scan an individual cigarette box and see where it was manufactured, what tax was paid on it and every point it has travelled through in terms of the distribution chain. This isn't fully implemented yet, but will be within the next few years.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
  > If you buy meat from the dodgy guy in a pub then it’s cheaper. I don't know about that. First of all, I've never had a dodgy guy in a pub try to sell me meat. Second of all, the market for meat, at least in the U.S., is relatively unconstrained and therefore the prices are pretty reflective of the cost to produce (including the costs for the various middlemen in the chain, etc.). So with meat, if some dodgy guy is selling it for cheaper, it's probably because it's subpar product in some way or another. Televisions from a van? Stolen. Has nothing to do with economics -- the guy didn't pay the costs of producing those televisions, so his prices don't reflect them. Among your selection of analogies, only the cigarette one seems comparable. But even with this it's a little different. In that case, the cigs are cheaper because the tax is not being paid. That might be a factor in the black market price difference for weed in Canada, but according to this article, price manipulation by producers is a big factor, which isn't reflected in the cigarette analogy.
  - Closi 5y ago
    Ha, maybe getting dodgy people selling you meat in a pub is a unique UK experience then! Of course there are differences between all of these analogies, because there isn't anything exactly like the drugs trade and everything will have a difference, I just mean that in every example I can think of where I could buy the same product from illegitimate and legitimate sources, the illegitimate source is cheaper (so I don't know why we would assume it would be any different here). > In that case, the cigs are cheaper because the tax is not being paid. Well that's interesting, as Weed sales have between 27% - 38% tax in California and OP said that there was a 34% price increase compared to illegitimate sources, so actually the tax rate is approximately equal to the difference in cost here. (Source: https://www.leafly.com/news/lifestyle/california-weed-tax-guide https://www.leafly.com/news/lifestyle/california-weed-tax-gu...)
psychonautLorax 5y ago
> I’m unfamiliar with the weed market in general, but it seems like this problem is self-inflicted. >I hope we can all agree that over-consumption is not good. The following is for the purpose of conversation only, food for thought if you will, and does not constitute any sort of condonement or endorsement, tacit or otherwise, of the use of cannabis products. Tread with extreme caution if you have any personal or family history of schizophrenia or schizotypical personality disorder as their is rather strong evidence that cannabis can have particularly profound effects on this group. Everybody reacts differently to different psychoactive substances, you only have one brain and one body, and treat them as your greatest asset: What is the “over consumption” of weed? Unfortunately we really don’t have much reliable data on marijuana consumption, that I’m aware of anyway, and the longitudinal studies that do exist are from institutions with an obvious agenda, the National Institute on Drug Abuse being chief among them[1], and there was a ban on marijuana research until 2015 [2]. NORML has a pretty comprehensive overview of what data we do have with context of other substances.[3] Another good, more traditional take, is this review in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry[4]. The biggest problem I see with most of the data is that, for obvious ethical reasons, all the marijuana users are self-selected, I’m personally of the belief that many people who consume cannabis, especially into adulthood, are self medicating, and as [4] suggests this may have a lasting effect on their psychiatric outcomes. I don’t know how much experience you (or other readers) have with weed or drugs in general, but I have decades of experience (with sometimes lengthy breaks) of what by most definitions is “heavy” use, and know some extremely heavy (i.e. nearly constant) users who are also extremely capable. Before I delve further, I’d like to stop (again) and point out that I’m not trying to focus on the exceptional here, but I feel in the context of recreational drug use, it is important to look at the whole spread of users. Most of the following is anecdata: One interesting thing about cannabis use that I wanted to highlight for non-users in the context of “over-consumption” is that a very common sentiment among long-term chronic (pun intended) users, is that you develop a sort of “permanent tolerance”, even if such a user has a long period of abstinence, upon recommencing use they will rapidly return to their previous state of tolerance—-a (lower) level of efficacy that might have taken years of use to get too will return in a matter of days/weeks. This seems particularly pronounced in cannabis relative to other psychoactive compounds. I would, based on my experiences and those of all the (hundreds of) people I’ve met and had frank discussions with about their use, rate weed on a “problematicness scale” between coffee and alcohol, but much closer to coffee. Their is a component to cannabis use that it was[5] seen as something of an act of rebellion, and that people who are past the “teenage rebellion” stage tend to self moderate similarly to coffee drinkers—-many of whom have a cup in the morning with the spectrum going all the way to people who drink coffee all day. I say its closer to coffee than alcohol because if someone is an alcoholic, and drinks all day, it will absolutely be noticeable to most people around them, and have an obvious and severe effect on their health. Conversely, I’ve known near constant weed users who were able to keep their use a secret from their family, employer and colleagues, were in athletic clubs and in some case on the extreme end of physical fitness. I’ve yet to meet someone who drinks all day and is otherwise extremely healthy, but I definitely don’t feel I have enough data to make any claims one way or the other about physical fitness. Overall though, I think the jury is still out about how harmful cannabis consumption is, especially if taken independently from smoking, and one of the best things about legalization movement, in my opinion, is that its given users much healthier alternatives to smoking, gummies are great! [1] https://www.drugabuse.gov/news-events/nida-notes/2018/02/long-term-marijuana-use-associated-health-problems-later-in-life https://www.drugabuse.gov/news-events/nida-notes/2018/02/lon... [2] https://www.marijuanatimes.org/medical-marijuana-research-ban-has-been-lifted/ https://www.marijuanatimes.org/medical-marijuana-research-ba... [3] https://norml.org/marijuana/library/cannabis-mental-health-and-context-the-case-for-regulation/ https://norml.org/marijuana/library/cannabis-mental-health-a... [4]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3221171/#ref47 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3221171/#ref47 [5] https://archives.drugabuse.gov/news-events/news-releases/2016/12/teen-substance-use-shows-promising-decline https://archives.drugabuse.gov/news-events/news-releases/201...
jbuhbjlnjbn 5y ago
>I hope we can all agree that over-consumption is not good and that it could be a problem if multi-billion dollar companies are stuck in a situation where they need to greatly increase the public’s consumption of weed to become profitable. First, this is semantics, "over-comsumption" is bad no matter the substance, but who is able to define it generally? But this is an experiemnt I would love to see, big companies pushing weed the same way then, say, the tobacco or alcohol industry before them. I have a hunch from all the information I have, it would be not nearly as problematic as the former, possibly even have generally a more positive impact on society.
- atatatat 5y ago
  I know two dozen pain patients under consuming right now, and for decades.

Closi 5y ago

> those who access medical cannabis legally pay on average 34 percent more for their medicine than if they bought from the unregulated market. I mean, that’s true with most things isn’t it? If you buy meat from the dodgy guy in a pub then it’s cheaper. Bloke selling televisions from a van? Cheaper. Cigarettes from a corner store that have been imported from a low tax country? Cheaper. Getting the electric/gas done in your house from someone who is unlicensed? Cheaper. Not sure why we would expect this to be different.

slapfrog 5y ago
> Cigarettes from a corner store that have been imported from a low tax country? Probably just smuggled across state lines. Bought in a state with low taxes, then sold in a state with high taxes. The store pockets the taxes instead of passing them along to the state, which it can do because the cigarettes being sold were smuggled so the high-tax state doesn't have any record of them existing.
- blt 5y ago
  The comment you are replying to does not look like it was written by someone from the USA.
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    It's relatively common for cigarettes to be smuggled between EU states. You see people in Sweden with packaging with the health warning in Polish, for example.
    - smnrchrds 5y ago
      I was under the impression that anything bought within the EU single market can be legally taken anywhere within the single market, at least for personal use, without taxes and duties. Is that not the case?
      - Dma54rhs 5y ago
        You can for personal use and low quantities, but these things are sold in big quantities, it's a huge black market.
      - mollusk 5y ago
        You can as an individual. And people do that, it's sometimes refered to as alcotourism, when you cross the border to buy cheaper alcohol in the neighbouring country. Finns go to Estonia. Estonians go to Latvia. But as a company, you can't just import cigarettes or alcohol from another country and sell them at home. Cigarettes and alcohol have specific tax stamps on their packaging that make them restricted for sale in a specific country. People still do that, but at that point it's the black market.
        Closi 5y ago
        Absolutely - it's also worth saying that there is a sophisticated tracking system to trace the manufacture of cigarettes from where they were created to the point in which they are sold (and all intermediary stops) in order to ensure that the correct tax is levied (despite there being no physical borders). This means that you can scan an individual cigarette box and see where it was manufactured, what tax was paid on it and every point it has travelled through in terms of the distribution chain. This isn't fully implemented yet, but will be within the next few years.
asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
> If you buy meat from the dodgy guy in a pub then it’s cheaper. I don't know about that. First of all, I've never had a dodgy guy in a pub try to sell me meat. Second of all, the market for meat, at least in the U.S., is relatively unconstrained and therefore the prices are pretty reflective of the cost to produce (including the costs for the various middlemen in the chain, etc.). So with meat, if some dodgy guy is selling it for cheaper, it's probably because it's subpar product in some way or another. Televisions from a van? Stolen. Has nothing to do with economics -- the guy didn't pay the costs of producing those televisions, so his prices don't reflect them. Among your selection of analogies, only the cigarette one seems comparable. But even with this it's a little different. In that case, the cigs are cheaper because the tax is not being paid. That might be a factor in the black market price difference for weed in Canada, but according to this article, price manipulation by producers is a big factor, which isn't reflected in the cigarette analogy.
- Closi 5y ago
  Ha, maybe getting dodgy people selling you meat in a pub is a unique UK experience then! Of course there are differences between all of these analogies, because there isn't anything exactly like the drugs trade and everything will have a difference, I just mean that in every example I can think of where I could buy the same product from illegitimate and legitimate sources, the illegitimate source is cheaper (so I don't know why we would assume it would be any different here). > In that case, the cigs are cheaper because the tax is not being paid. Well that's interesting, as Weed sales have between 27% - 38% tax in California and OP said that there was a 34% price increase compared to illegitimate sources, so actually the tax rate is approximately equal to the difference in cost here. (Source: https://www.leafly.com/news/lifestyle/california-weed-tax-guide https://www.leafly.com/news/lifestyle/california-weed-tax-gu...)

psychonautLorax 5y ago

> I’m unfamiliar with the weed market in general, but it seems like this problem is self-inflicted. >I hope we can all agree that over-consumption is not good. The following is for the purpose of conversation only, food for thought if you will, and does not constitute any sort of condonement or endorsement, tacit or otherwise, of the use of cannabis products. Tread with extreme caution if you have any personal or family history of schizophrenia or schizotypical personality disorder as their is rather strong evidence that cannabis can have particularly profound effects on this group. Everybody reacts differently to different psychoactive substances, you only have one brain and one body, and treat them as your greatest asset: What is the “over consumption” of weed? Unfortunately we really don’t have much reliable data on marijuana consumption, that I’m aware of anyway, and the longitudinal studies that do exist are from institutions with an obvious agenda, the National Institute on Drug Abuse being chief among them[1], and there was a ban on marijuana research until 2015 [2]. NORML has a pretty comprehensive overview of what data we do have with context of other substances.[3] Another good, more traditional take, is this review in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry[4]. The biggest problem I see with most of the data is that, for obvious ethical reasons, all the marijuana users are self-selected, I’m personally of the belief that many people who consume cannabis, especially into adulthood, are self medicating, and as [4] suggests this may have a lasting effect on their psychiatric outcomes. I don’t know how much experience you (or other readers) have with weed or drugs in general, but I have decades of experience (with sometimes lengthy breaks) of what by most definitions is “heavy” use, and know some extremely heavy (i.e. nearly constant) users who are also extremely capable. Before I delve further, I’d like to stop (again) and point out that I’m not trying to focus on the exceptional here, but I feel in the context of recreational drug use, it is important to look at the whole spread of users. Most of the following is anecdata: One interesting thing about cannabis use that I wanted to highlight for non-users in the context of “over-consumption” is that a very common sentiment among long-term chronic (pun intended) users, is that you develop a sort of “permanent tolerance”, even if such a user has a long period of abstinence, upon recommencing use they will rapidly return to their previous state of tolerance—-a (lower) level of efficacy that might have taken years of use to get too will return in a matter of days/weeks. This seems particularly pronounced in cannabis relative to other psychoactive compounds. I would, based on my experiences and those of all the (hundreds of) people I’ve met and had frank discussions with about their use, rate weed on a “problematicness scale” between coffee and alcohol, but much closer to coffee. Their is a component to cannabis use that it was[5] seen as something of an act of rebellion, and that people who are past the “teenage rebellion” stage tend to self moderate similarly to coffee drinkers—-many of whom have a cup in the morning with the spectrum going all the way to people who drink coffee all day. I say its closer to coffee than alcohol because if someone is an alcoholic, and drinks all day, it will absolutely be noticeable to most people around them, and have an obvious and severe effect on their health. Conversely, I’ve known near constant weed users who were able to keep their use a secret from their family, employer and colleagues, were in athletic clubs and in some case on the extreme end of physical fitness. I’ve yet to meet someone who drinks all day and is otherwise extremely healthy, but I definitely don’t feel I have enough data to make any claims one way or the other about physical fitness. Overall though, I think the jury is still out about how harmful cannabis consumption is, especially if taken independently from smoking, and one of the best things about legalization movement, in my opinion, is that its given users much healthier alternatives to smoking, gummies are great! [1] https://www.drugabuse.gov/news-events/nida-notes/2018/02/long-term-marijuana-use-associated-health-problems-later-in-life https://www.drugabuse.gov/news-events/nida-notes/2018/02/lon... [2] https://www.marijuanatimes.org/medical-marijuana-research-ban-has-been-lifted/ https://www.marijuanatimes.org/medical-marijuana-research-ba... [3] https://norml.org/marijuana/library/cannabis-mental-health-and-context-the-case-for-regulation/ https://norml.org/marijuana/library/cannabis-mental-health-a... [4]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3221171/#ref47 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3221171/#ref47 [5] https://archives.drugabuse.gov/news-events/news-releases/2016/12/teen-substance-use-shows-promising-decline https://archives.drugabuse.gov/news-events/news-releases/201...

jbuhbjlnjbn 5y ago

>I hope we can all agree that over-consumption is not good and that it could be a problem if multi-billion dollar companies are stuck in a situation where they need to greatly increase the public’s consumption of weed to become profitable. First, this is semantics, "over-comsumption" is bad no matter the substance, but who is able to define it generally? But this is an experiemnt I would love to see, big companies pushing weed the same way then, say, the tobacco or alcohol industry before them. I have a hunch from all the information I have, it would be not nearly as problematic as the former, possibly even have generally a more positive impact on society.

atatatat 5y ago
I know two dozen pain patients under consuming right now, and for decades.