Looking forward to this, silly to see so many Kia "boys" being used for gross violence crimes when regulation changes could lessen it.
> https://www.king5.com/article/news/crime/seattle-pot-shop-cr... for example
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-28/marijuan...
One of the first to open a few years back got hit early and everyone seems to have learned the lesson.
Well the static, bright yellow pole didn’t waltz into the side of your car now, did it?
People are so ignorant it’s actually unbelievable.
https://x.com/WorldBollard/status/1781394728899993984
Edit: reminds me of my neighbour who dropped his motorbike because a car pulled out on him from a fuel station. I asked how fast he was going, he said with absolute conviction he was doing no more than 5mph.
When I told him that was too fast he couldn’t wrap his head around it.
As someone who hits the road most days, whether in a car or on a motorbike it’s absolutely crazy to witness the state of affairs going on on the roads.
My uncle, who isn’t far off 80, but very fit and healthy has given his licence up this year after some pressure from family - I’ve been in the car with him driving and he isn’t safe, he can drive for sure, but he isn’t fast enough to respond to a bad move by others, nor if there is an accident ahead.
I’ll be personally removing my mother’s car when she is unfit to use it too. I don’t care what it costs in taxis or public transport, I don’t want her risking someone else’s life, nor her own, over the ability to get up and go immediately, rather than wait 10 minutes for a driver.
I’m grateful that they are willing to accept this and agree, I’d like to think my mother has another 10 years or so in her at this stage, but the moment it’s clear she’s not fit, that vehicle is gone.
I was also lucky enough to grow up in a place that provided generous benefits to people who couldn't see well enough to get a license - free public transport and 50% subsidised taxis. Having access to this mitigated the loss of economic opportunity significantly. Where I'm living now I don't get those benefits, but I'm in a position where I no longer need them.
(sorry!)
It's up to each city/county if they allow any stores at all and their own regulations / licensing.
A recent change a lot of shops seem to be going through is removing the "lobby waiting area" (so 2-3 shop "in private") and just adding more shelves and display cases while building up a huge line. Never liked the farce before (and probably a holdover from when they were medical only) so its a nice change.
Meanwhile these are cash-only businesses, so if you're gonna steal then go for the money. Esp. since most dispensaries I've seen do a reasonably brisk business.
>"The owner says around $15,000 of products and items were stolen from the store."
It doesn't mention anything about cash.
"Smash and grab" in weed shops doesn't usually have much to do with having piles of cash sitting around (though I'm sure that might happen too) - it's the product that thieves want to steal because it's got no serial numbers, it's pretty light-weight and easy to run out with thousands of dollars worth of product, and it's easy to resell.
If there's any cash in the register that's often secondary to grabbing a few pounds of high-quality product. 3 pounds of high quality weed can be valued at $20k. I doubt there's that much in the cash register at the end of the day, and good luck getting into the safe. It's much easier to run out with 3 pounds of weed.
For example, banks often had special "night safes" allowing small business owners to drop off bags of cash outside of branch opening hours. Some businesses would get daily armoured car visits to collect the day's takings. There were even supermarkets with a system of pneumatic tubes allowing cashiers to transfer money to the back room without leaving their stations, so their tills never had enough cash to be worth robbing. You could also get safes with a deposit slot, so employees could drop the takings into the safe, but didn't have the combination needed to get anything out again.
Assuming these all still exist, there are options for keeping cash secure, and getting it off the premises fast.
Of course, by similar logic they could store all the product in a safe out of hours. Jewellery stores manage to store loads of diamonds without getting robbed, after all...
I mean... I can leave a 2000 USD Macbook for a toilet break in Starbucks over here without any issues and have done so regularly.
Schedule 1 -> banned from the financial system.
Schedule 3 -> OK to use the financial system.
How the DEA schedule and the financial system interact is still unclear. The important part is that once regulations are updated weed businesses won't be restricted from access to the financial system. There may be some more regs around that access, but I'm sure they'll be worked around.
You already answered this already :)
> the point is that you CANNOT legally sell schedule 1 drugs commercially
Schedule 1 means illegal under (nearly) any circumstance, commercial dispensaries fall under “any circumstance.” Drug scheduling is just a tiered system for classification in order to determine which rules to apply to its sale, distribution, and possession of the substance.
This is not true.
Here is a legitimate business selling schedule 1 drugs: https://www.caymanchem.com/product/10801/mephedrone-(hydroch...
Regulatory Information: DEA Schedule I
With a schedule I DEA license, you can buy this product, and the manufacturer can deposit your money into a bank.
That's why I'm not sure moving marijuana from schedule 1 to 2 or 3 will really change much from a banking perspective.
Marijuana dispensaries will still be violating federal law, no different than if they were selling sleeping pills illegally.
So you do an ATM transaction, but the money goes to the dispensary somehow. I do not know how it works on the back end, but I've used it as a customer. It's lovely and can even be done over your phone.
They have cash-handling processes similar to a casino, but again, they have much less than a casino or bank to take.
Employee theft is a much bigger problem than robbery, because you can imagine who works at them, but even then, it's hard to get away with.
You'd be much better off robbing a busy gas station or the like.
This is lazy thinking.
Any business dealing in cash and desirable inventory will have theft problems. In fact, the inventory doesn’t even have to be desirable. Consider office supply theft. It’s rampant; a cost of business to some degree. And part of the motivation is simply the righting of perceived wrongs.
Employees will always take from their employers, in every industry and at every class level. In industries where there are no “things” to take, the employees simply take back their time.
This is disgracefully elitist. White collar crime hurts more people.
He’s told me quite a bit of what goes on there, and I am sure different dispensaries are different, but in any state where it is relatively recently legalized and there aren’t that many, it’s just the biggest stoners working there. You would have to be kind of special to decide to steal things with that much security around, they always get caught
Some software engineers do partake of the weed. So yeah I’ve met them.
Tattoos, piercings? They’re just people.
Getting high isn’t a sign of larceny
You might want to be more careful then. This empty space is a well known rhetorical device used to allude that you're making a negative judgement about people.
It was not meant as “all stoners are thieves” but as “you’d have to be high to think that’s a good idea”. And since nearly everyone who works at a dispensary is high all day every day, it happens, a lot more than armed robbery which almost never does.
But no, no data, only anecdotes. Still, I feel like only somebody who has never been in a dispensary would think they are attractive robbery target. I’ve been in them and maybe 10 states, and they are all pretty tight Security, because they know they have a lot of cash and people would like to steal it.
I don’t know if every state is like mine, but here they have to do complete inventory every night. You can steal but they’ll know it happened by the end of the day and then start checking the footage. It happens.
But he is high every single moment at work by your reasoning, yes?
"And since nearly everyone who works at a dispensary is high all day every day,"
Be careful in dealing in generalities and infinitives.by your own logic, your brother is simply an exception that proves a rule.
Your own words have worked harder against you than anything that any of these replies stated.
For instance, Fannie and Freddie don’t recognize your income, so getting a mortgage is difficult.
The pay isn’t that great either, but they get a discount, and for a lot of people weed is one of their bigger expenses.
In WA, it felt like it was a pretty even 50/50 split (maybe with a heavier lean towards cash) between places accepting cash-only and those that accept debit as well (in addition to cash obviously). I dont remember any that accepted credit cards. All of this is a more recent situation though, as I still remember that just 6-8 years ago, pretty much every single place used to be cash-only. I also noticed some dispensaries experimenting with rather unconvential methods at different points in time too (e.g., Uncle Ike’s using a payment terminal for like a year that worked similarly to a regular debit card one, but it was using crypto as an intermediate medium on the backend to process the payment).
In NYC, it feels like everyone just accepts cards like usual, from grey-market ones to the legal ones.
However, I infinitely prefer the WA situation with cannabis over the NYC one for bajillion other reasons that are entirely unrelated to payment methods.
Probably a good number of people don't.
It's not just "You can buy with cash, and we conveniently have an ATM available to get cash if you didn't go to your bank."
I have heard from a very reliable source that the ATMs in most weed shops on the Eastside of Seattle dispense cash because you're going to be required to pay with cash at the counter. There are allegedly a few exceptions, but the majority of shops accept only cash and the ATM dispenses bills.
It's also the product that's the target much of the time - it's got no serial numbers and it's light-weight, and easy to resell.
(Call me crazy and old-fashioned, but I don't think I'd want 50+ illegally-correlated transactions on my financial record that the government could lump into other charges...)
it's just a function of time and process, and while you can dispose of plants and bury money in your back yard, you can't undo old bank transactions. 20 years later those records may not be a thing, but last year sure will be...
That said, I imagine it would only get done if they really wanted to throw the book at you...
Of course people are still being convicted of weed and firearm, but it gets recorded as gun law violation and nobody cares, cuz left hates guns and right hates weed, so they'll never repeal it.
When 3rd order anonymous interspecies hearsay is sufficient for a warrant it means a warrant is just a rubber stamp.
Warrants aren't supposed to be hard to get. They are only supposed to stop the most blatant fishing expeditions.
https://www.leafly.com/news/politics/surrender-your-guns-pol...
It should also be noted that while DEA is instructed by the executive to not go after cannabis users in states where it's legal for recreational use, there's no equivalent directive issued to ATF.
So imagine you're in a car, get pulled over, it smells of weed so the cop executes a search, and he finds a pipe in the glove compartment. You're getting arrested for PDP there 100%. Even if it genuinely wasn't yours, you stand very little chance of acquittal. Beyond a reasonable doubt doesn't mean 'is there some other viable explanation' because there literally always is. It means is it reasonably likely that one of these other explanations is what really happened.
>922 g (3) ... who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C. 802));
DEA isn't kicking down doors to bust dudes doin 'roids, mostly nailing low-hanging fruit like doctors who blatantly spam fake steroid prescriptions
And if you're truly abusing it and costing them massively with fees, they can always close your account.
It’s probably better to say “nearly all CU withdrawals” because they don’t have a perfect monopoly.
Here in Ontario Canada I can walk into a local neighbourhood cannabis store (one of many on every block, it seems) and make a purchase using my debit or credit card. I'm not sure if any of them even keep a cash float although I imagine they must, just in case granny comes in "for medicinal use". Alternatively, I could just go to the government-run web store and get home delivery through Canada Post at no extra charge.
What is going on is that not that weed is 'half-legal' in the states. It is fully illegal. What is true is that the federal enforcers have more or less decided to leave people alone when the state allows the use of Marijuana. Pre 2017, the exact same thing was happening across Canada where local jurisdictions allowed cannabis use and sales, and the RCMP basically turned a blind eye. Vancouver is the most obvious example, where there was actually a decline in the number of dispensaries after weed became federally legal.
That's not what supersede means.
There is no federal law about wood burning stoves because the constitution assigns environment to the provinces.
AFAICT it’s the federal laws about pollution.
A bigger factor is that the Canadian prohibition was only controlled at the federal level in the first place, like all Canadian criminal law, so only the federal government had to legislate to change it. The provinces have however done lots of subsequent legislation to regulate the details (e.g. distribution channels and the exact minimum age limit) in a wide variety of ways.
This is really exciting to see.
Assuming banks/processors don't decide to restrict them for other reasons.
Rx under DEA scrutiny is nothing like rec or laughable state controlled medical 'recommendations'. You pull that shit as a provider on controlled scripts and your charts get audited, your DEA license gets pulled.
Imagine a noncitizen in that situation being able to tell a border officer, or a citizen being able to tell a security clearance investigator: "Yes, I do use THC. Here's my prescription and the bottle from the pharmacy." and being confident of no negative repercussions. Wonderful progress compared to where we are now.
My parents are still alive and they were alive when THC was legal.
This is what's bonkers to me, THC being criminalized happened very recently.
Then it was legal for like a year until feds realized they didn't need to follow the Constitution and they just outright made it illegal, no matter if it's actually interstate.
You could already get THC script, in that context this seems like a half hearted concession for flower to stall and poison legalization efforts by giving a victory poisoned with DEA licensing that inserts the nasty tendrils of the weed hating DEA into medical flower.
Interesting point of history, the Federal US Government has actually been running a small medical program for almost 50 years. https://www.mpp.org/policy/federal/federal-governments-medic...
I know of several grocery stores without pharmacies or a local Rx license selling 1% hydrocortisone/hydrocortisone acetate - Schedule 4, 3, AND 2, simultaneously.
No different than buying Tylenol at a gas station.
Also, it doesn't seem like it would be that hard to find someone to accept it as payment, since they can convert it to cash too. And the sort of landlords/suppliers/employees willing to do business with a dispensary seem like exactly the sort who would accept Bitcoin.
I show up and convert cash to bitcoin, presumably losing some of its value to exchange fees.
Pay the merchant my bitcoin, who then has to convert it back to cash losing more of its value to fees so that he can pay all of his staff, suppliers, utilities, etc...
Why not just skip the bitcoin step and save time and money?
Crypto scams are... completely unrelated? It's like being worried about using a bank account because there are ponzi schemes that use bank transfers.
If you're going through all that hassle, it's much easier just to be a cash-only business in the first place.
Keep it in a safe somewhere undisclosed instead of a retail storefront everybody knows is holding a ton of cash, or spend it.
The point is that it moves the cash from the publicly visible location to somewhere nobody knows to rob.
How expensive do you think weed is? You can get baked every day for two weeks for $50, probably less
"Unsound ponzi scheme" could just as well be applied to any fiat currency. It has all the same rules (early entrants are more privileged in "the game" and can invest to out-perform younger players). It is very odd to hear people applying such qualitative judgments like this when the alternative is a currency that is actively debased by its issuers. Or do you think the inflation we've all suffered under isn't a problem?
That is the benchmark you are competing against.
That's why I specified "for the consumer", who is typically the person that is going to make a purchasing decision.
Using crypto for dispensaries has been tried, and it hasn't gained traction in the many years that its been an option. If you introduce friction (by forcing people to transact using a novel payment form), you are going to lose customers. The fact that the very few dispensaries that accept crypto continue to accept cash and debit should tell you what consumers like.
It takes the same amount of time to make change for the consumer as the store. Or more, because now you have to wait while they make change for the person in front of you, then for you on top of that.
And nobody wants to be at a store which is more likely to get robbed. Not only do you lose your cash, you could lose your life.
> The fact that the very few dispensaries that accept crypto continue to accept cash and debit should tell you what consumers like.
There are multiple consumers. If you can get half of them to use Bitcoin, you have half as much cash on hand to lose in a robbery, and on top of that half as much incentive for someone to rob you to begin with.
L2s fix this (~immediate settlement, cents in fees), but it's another layer and another account for users to manage (which is annoying).
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-eth...
Edit: yes
https://www.duanemorris.com/alerts/tax_implications_reclassi...
Does alcohol consumption show up on credit card bills and filter back to insurance companies?
This also assumes that grocery stores aren't aggressively aggregating and selling sales data, esp. those from Membership Cards. Insurance companies would love to get a hold of that data, not only for alcohol, but things like sugar and junk food purchases. I'd bet my hat they're already doing so.
Maybe recreational ketamine and codeine will be a thing?