Posted on 01/01/2018 4:40:21 PM PST by Mariner
It was six hours past midnight, but the crowd inside the Berkeley Patients Group counted down the seconds.
“Happy New Year,” they yelled at precisely 6 a.m. as a cashier rang up the cost of three joints, a $45.37 purchase representing one of the first recreational marijuana sales in the state.
The moment marked the launch of a new industry in California, one that’s heavily regulated and taxed, with revenue reaching several billion dollars per year.
The day has been long anticipated by cannabis advocates who pushed for voters to pass Proposition 64 in November 2016, largely decriminalizing marijuana and allowing for the commercial sale of products to adults 21 or older.
Earlier, Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin and Democratic state Sen. Nancy Skinner joined a couple dozen people outside the Berkeley Patients Group waiting for the first sales.
“I’m stoked about this historic moment not just for Berkeley but for the state of California.” Arreguin said. “This is a long time coming.”
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
I’m not a big fan, but others sure seem to be.
Respectfully, I have been sober for years, and though I have unfortunately tried most illegal drugs, the first time I had the nerve, was at a keg party. Thank you.
The only place along the west coast where it isn’t legal is Mexico. Ha!
We have problems with vaping where I work. Can’t really tell what people are vaping at break. You can still get fired for failing the wizz test if you are injured on the job.
It’s Kali. I’m sure co-ops will form and growers will donate excess weed to the less fortunate stoners.
This was ‘t forced on them by the government. This is a result of a vote of the people.
I don’t get it... legalize weed, criminalize tobacco. Doesn’t weed contain more carcinogenic hydrocarbons than tobacco?
So, if you grow 10 lbs a year, smoke or give away a couple, you can accrue a pretty good amount. I know a guy that would do the Scrooge McDuck in that much weed. If he weren’t too lazy and stupid to grow weed.
Being high makes it easier to accept illegals and muslims taking over
That’s pretty funny. I know an old hippie that winters in Baja.
Like Colorado, the state will bulk up on freeloaders and homeless hippies and they will never get the tax money they expect because independents and the Mexcan cartels will undercut the price and the gubmint has no way of knowing whose pot they are smoking, eating or taking rectally. After a year or so, the pot high will not be high enough and they will move up to better sh!t.
Hope Texas offers deferred prosecution if the perps here move to Ca. or Co. for a minimum of 10 years.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/how-alcohol-conquered-russia/279965/
How Alcohol Conquered Russia
A history of the country’s struggle with alcoholism, and why the government has done so little about it.
STAN FEDUN SEP 25, 2013
...Today, according to the World Health Organization, one-in-five men in the Russian Federation die due to alcohol-related causes, compared with 6.2 percent of all men globally. In her 2000 article “First Steps: AA and Alcoholism in Russia,” Patricia Critchlow estimated that some 20 million Russians are alcoholics in a nation of just 144 million...
“The Kremlin’s own addiction to liquor revenues has overturned many efforts to wean Russians from the tipple,” as Mark Lawrence Schrad wrote in the The New York Times last year. “Ivan the Terrible encouraged his subjects to drink their last kopecks away in state-owned taverns” to help pad the emperor’s purse.
“Before Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power in the 1980s, Soviet leaders welcomed alcohol sales as a source of state revenue and did not view heavy drinking as a significant social problem,” as Critchlow put it. In 2010, Russia’s finance minister, Aleksei L. Kudrin, explained that the best thing Russians can do to help, “the country’s flaccid national economy was to smoke and drink more, thereby paying more in taxes.”
..By the 1970s, receipts from alcohol again constituted a third of government revenues...
...Some have claimed that heavy consumption of alcohol was also used as a means of reducing political dissent and as a form of political suppression...
Prices will be nose diving. In fact, the only reason they would increase the price, would be because so few would be purchasing it by the end of growing season this year.
Insanely greedy govt and an army of dopers who think a drug is manna from heaven. What could go wrong.
No one is overdosing on pot. Such a statement illustrates great ignorance.
Let me correct that..lol
Prices will be nose diving. In fact, the reason they will be *decreasing* the price will be because so few will be purchasing it by the end of growing season this year.
The dispensaries will still have the derivatives and edibles to fall back on. Been doing some googling... Washington state is the only west coast jurisdiction without legal recreational cultivation. The west is gonna be the weed basket of the rest of the country until it goes national.
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