The Weekly Weed

New Pot Laws Needed to be written by City

Jan 31, 2010 Online Issue

Source: Aurora Sentinel

Colorado — Here’s the dope, Aurora: Mary Jane is coming, and it looks like she’s going to stay. While Denver and much of the rest of the metro area has been inflamed by the medical-marijuana controversy, Aurora officials have decided to take a look-and-see attitude about the whole thing.

Not any more. Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates this week waved the red flag in front of apathetic city officials, making it clear that like it or not, the medical marijuana controversy is going to boil over at the state Capitol and spread right into our very own medical-marijuana-free community.

The city has been approached at least four times by people who want to open up medical pot-shops, lovingly dubbed “dispensaries,” but Aurora’s official opinion has been that Uncle Sam says that the famed cannabis plant and anything to do with it is illegal, and therefore the city can’t grant any dispensaries a business license because they’re not a lawful business.

Meanwhile, more than 300 of these “illegal” businesses have opened up mostly in Denver but elsewhere in the metro area to serve Colorado’s 30,000 “patients” in need of some weed. The denial is on the scope of early settlers refusing to sell picks and shovels, predicting that the gold rush thing was going nowhere here in Colorado.

Not long after City Hall made clear its excuse for sitting on the pot, in fact, almost the next day, the Obama administration gave Colorado and other states with medical-marijuana laws the green light, saying it would ignore pot-shop controversies and allow the states to sort it all out themselves.

So some city officials said then that they would at least wait until the state Legislature comes up with some kind of regulation of the fastest-growing business in the Colorado.

Don’t wait.

Here’s some stuff to consider, with 300-plus of these places growing like weeds across the metro area, the competition among them is about to get tough. Let’s say each of the area’s 300 dispensaries equally serve the state’s 30,000 card-carrying members of Club Ganja. That’s 100 customers each.

Now, for the sake of argument, let’s say half of the customers go through an ounce of pot each month, a pretty serious habit, which would likely indicate a very serious ailment, or a lot of friends and folks stopping by frequently to wish the Club Ganja patient well and maybe even partake in the treatment, for the sake of being a sympathetic friend.

At $400 an ounce, that comes to $20,000. So now let’s say that the other 50 patients aren’t as ill, and only need a little treatment after work, or before bed, or on weekends during the football games. Or they don’t have many worried and sympathetic friends, they might purchase a quarter-ounce each month for $100. That’s $5,000 a month.

If you were growing your own stuff and producing something better than what friends of mine called ditch-weed a long time ago, you’re talking about a pretty high-profit business. And for those who have a special fondness or appreciation for the charms of the cannabis plant, being able to easily sample the merchandise, for the sake of customer service of course, makes this an especially compelling proposition.

And with more than 300 pot-shops clamoring for customers just a few miles from here, can you imagine what’s going to happen when Aurora turns on the “open” sign to provide services for any club members in this city of 300,000 who for whatever reason would just as soon not to have to drive very far to get their prescriptions filled?

The city needs to figure out right now just how many pot-shops it’s going to allow among the pawn shops and furniture rental stores on East Colfax. Given the news about break-ins and other crimes at some of these shops, the city must also consider whether it can and should impose security regulations.

Consider this, too. The way this is working out, medical-marijuana aficionados are one good court case away from proving that the Colorado Constitution guarantees the right to grow pot for medicinal purposes. With so much good farmland in east Aurora, and even in the basements of many Aurora homes, how is the city going to handle what is sure to become the biggest gardening craze since Chia pets?

And finally, look at this. Given my high-times math up above, each one of these little pot shops might easily sell $300,000 or more each year. If we imposed a 10 percent tax on the stuff, that’s $30,000 in sales taxes each shop could produce. It means that 300 of these shops can offer up $9 million a year in sales taxes. And figuring that each shop has to have at least three employees, that’s almost a 1,000 jobs all producing income taxes on what’s sure to be some pretty good salaries and excellent benefits.

Now of course the real argument here is the end of marijuana prohibition. If a little medical marijuana can generate this kind of cash, imagine what something closer to Amsterdam’s system would generate. Here’s where I add that Americans of all ages, especially younger ages, dabble in the evil weed here at twice the rate they do in Holland.

But that’s a column for another time. For now, Aurora needs to get busy on planning how it’s going to handle the inevitable before the whole thing goes up in smoke before their very eyes.

Dave Perry is editor of the Aurora Sentinel.

Source: Aurora Sentinel (CO)
Author: Dave Perry
Published: Thursday, January 28, 2010
Copyright: 2010 Aurora Sentinel
Contact: editor@aurorasentinel.com
Website: http://www.aurorasentinel.com/
URL: http://drugsense.org/url/NwqAEAUN