Will Trumpy-the-Clown's Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, Destroy The Marijuana Industry?

The marijuana industry is growing by leaps and bounds across the country. And industry players are spending money on lobbying and have even been contributing to friendly candidates. Since 2010 the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) has given contributions of between $500 and $1,000 to, among others:

• Chellie Pingree (D-ME)
• Jerry Nadler (D-NY)
• Mark Pocan (D-WI)
• Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)
• Cory Booker (D-NJ)
• Earl Blumenauer (R-OR)
• Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA)
• Beto O'Rourke (D-TX)
• Alan Grayson (D-FL)
• Alan Lowenthal (D-CA)
• Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ)
• Steve Cohen (D-TN)
• Jamie Raskin (D-MD)

This cycle the Marijuana Policy Project has given around half a million dollars to candidates who support legalization, including to lots of conservatives. Their half dozen biggest recipients in 2014 and 2016 (combined):

• Rand Paul (R-KY)- $13,700
• Peter Aguilar (New Dem-CA)- $8,000
• Justin Amash (R-MI)- $5,750
• Michael Eggman (D-CA)- 5,000
• Ruben Gallego (D-AZ)- $5,000
• Ami Bera (New Dem-CA)- $5,000

The National Cannabis Industry Association is the trade organization for legal marijuana businesses and they lobby and give out contributions as well as does the Drug Policy Alliance. So, it's becoming a real thing in the way the Beltway judges "real."

And there has been some hope that this kind of thing-- coupled with tax revenues being generated-- $44 million in Colorado in sales and excise taxes on pot for 2014, for example-- will keep Trump and Sessions at bay.

This week, the music industry trade magazine, Billboard, tied the growing marijuana industry directly to the music business, which has been suffering and which has been a major American export revenue earner for decades. Andy Gensler asks specifically if growing weed sales can revitalize increasingly moribund record stores. Record stores have been dying off rapidly primarily because most people get their music online. "CD sales," he reported, "have plummeted from $9.4 billion in 2006 to just $1.5 billion in 2015, according to the RIAA-- an 84 percent drop-- and the much-ballyhooed vinyl resurgence has done little to staunch the bleeding, making up only 6 percent of physical sales in 2015." Most states now have some degree of decriminalization and 8 have pretty much decriminalized it completely: Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon and Washington (+ Washington, DC).

But there is hope on the hazy horizon, and it’s coming in the five-leafed form of marijuana, which is legal in a majority of states-- 28 of them have sanctioned cannabis for medical or recreational use-- following the 2016 elections. What does reefer have to do with records? With music retailers getting into the dispensary business or aligning their physical location with pot shops, the long-standing symbiotic relationship between music and weed may finally be (legally) monetized.

“There’s a history of marijuana and music that goes back to the jazz era,” says Michael Kurtz, co-founder of Record Store Day, who also notes retail’s role in selling paraphernalia-- record stores birthed head shops. “Anytime human behavior is decriminalized, it’s good for business.”

And the pot business is booming. Projected to generate more than $1 billion in revenue in 2016 in Colorado, where recreational marijuana is sanctioned, legal weed will soon stretch all the way down the West Coast-- from the border with Canada to the North to Mexico in the South-- once California’s Proposition 64 goes into effect in 2018. No wonder record stores are, for the first time in more than a decade, feeling optimistic.

“With marijuana, everything has gotten better,” says Paul Epstein, owner of Denver’s Twist & Shout Records, which has been in business for 28 years. “You would be hard pressed to find any business in Denver for which the legalization of recreational marijuana hasn’t had a positive effect.”

“Tax revenue [from cannabis] all told last year was $140 million for 2015,” says Andrew Freedman (aka “the weed czar”), director of marijuana coordination for Colorado, an outlier state that legalized recreational use in 2012. Today, Denver has nearly 400 licensed medical and/or recreational-cannabis retail outlets. According to a study by the Marijuana Policy Group cited by Freedman, pot revenue had a $2.4 billion economic impact in Colorado, creating 18,000 new jobs.

That said, Epstein and other music retailers Billboard spoke to in Colorado, Seattle and Los Angeles say they have yet to see significant dividends. “My sales aren’t up,” says Louis Lambert, co-owner of the Independent Records & Video chain in Colorado Springs, Colo., who also is a partner in two medical dispensaries. “I have a dispensary next to my store,” he says, “but there are 10 other dispensaries right next to them.” Other stores, too, spoke of a “weed glut,” along with strict regulations impeding them from fully capitalizing on a nascent pot market.

Another concern is that an incoming Trump administration and its attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions may roll back state marijuana laws. Recalling the hysteria of 1930’s propaganda film Reefer Madness and the Reagan administration’s benighted “Just Say No” policies, in April Sessions called weed “not the kind of thing that ought to be legalized” and a “very real danger.” In fact, Sessions, who was rejected for a 1986 federal judgeship for his alleged racist views, said he thought Ku Klux Klan members were “OK, until he learned that they smoked marijuana.” (Worth noting: Seven of the eight states legalizing recreational cannabis and the District of Columbia backed Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential bid.)

But California chain Amoeba Music, which is leading the state’s music-retail charge into cannabis, may be immune from future “re-criminalization,” as the dispensary license it recently obtained for its Berkeley location is medical and not the result of the recently won recreational rights that came with Prop 64’s passage. Meanwhile, its San Francisco store has opened Green Evaluations adjacent to its location. There, for $44, California residents can be examined by a physician and receive a medical marijuana ID card. That business now covers half of the Haight Street store’s annual rent. Amoeba’s Hollywood store, which is set to move from its current location within five years, may explore a similar strategy.

“We’ve gone to great lengths to keep the Berkeley store going for many years without making much money, but just trying to keep it alive,” says co-owner Marc Weinstein, who notes that Amoeba earns roughly half the revenue it did in 2008 and is down to 35 employees from 90. “The reason we worked on getting this permit for five years is because we really believe this is the mix that can help the store make it in the long run.” He adds that pot’s profit margin is greater than recorded music’s and “something Amazon can’t kill you on.”

Still, there are challenges, like stipulations as to what can be sold and where. Says Colorado’s Freedman: “You’re only allowed to sell marijuana products and some amount of paraphernalia, but very little else in recreational and medical establishments here.”

When asked what makes him think he can run a successful dispensary in what is still a budding crossover market, Amoeba’s Weinstein cites his 26 years running one of the country’s most successful independent music-retail chains. “Our model is to have as many products as possible, know about them in depth and be able to offer people selection,” he says. “We’re just interested in having a killer retail store.”

For Madell, whose Other Music was in business for 21 years, the possible marriage of music and marijuana comes too late. “For many customers, myself included, this would be a dream combination,” he says. “I can’t really say if Other Music would have gone this route if we had the opportunity-- too many hypotheticals here-- but I will say 100 percent that I will frequent the first New York City shop that realizes the dream.”

UPDATE: Is Stone Stoned?

One of the manipulators behind the Trumpanzee curtain has been the always controversial Roger Stone. Today he wrote a commentary on how he sees Trump and the marijuana question, claiming el President-elect Señor Trumpanzee opposes legalization but is good with medical marijuana and has tended to agree, from time to time, that states should make up their own minds on legalization. As with most of what Trump says, his stands on marijuana change depending on the audience and varies drastically... and incoherently. Stone urged Trump to take a hands-off approach and to ignore anti-pot fanatic Jeff Sessions. He wrote that one of the many controversial decisions Trump is getting ready to make "is whether to continue the federal stand-down by the us Justice department in which DOJ does not enforce federal marijuana laws where they contradict state laws legalizing the legal use and sale of marijuana in the 37 states where it is currently legal in some form."

Canceling the order by Obama attorney general Eric Holder to stand down on Marijuana would cause a major dislocation in multiple states that are currently budgeting millions in state revenue from the taxation of marijuana and un-employing hundreds of thousands of people currently working in an industry legalized by the states. I would urge President-Elect Trump to view this as a business man; U.S. government cannot turn back the clock on federal marijuana law enforcement.

...A great many pro-marijuana organizations, publications, and Internet outlets put their support behind Donald Trump based on his positive statements about Medical Marijuana. People who have marijuana rights as their primary political issue turned to Trump, many against long time party affiliation, in hopes of greater freedom and less abuse at the hands of Federal Agencies.

If, after winning the election, Donald Trump listens to the likes of Chris Christie and Jeff Sessions he risks alienating his base and his newly won supporters in a very tangible way. Both Sessions and Christie come from ‘Old World’ War on Drugs thinking.

Criminalized Marijuana has directly lead to the persecution of countless individuals, the vast majority of whom are poor and minorities. That this was the desired result of the designers of the system of criminalization cannot be reasonable doubted.

“Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit. This is the fine point on which all legal professions throughout history have based their jobs security.”- Frank Herbert.

We cannot leave it to ‘Law Enforcement’ types to decide what is to be allowed and what is to be prohibited. The People must decide for themselves, and they have decided. Overwhelmingly so. They have decided they want legalized marijuana.

“If the people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.”- Thomas Jefferson.

Drain the Swamp.  Limit Federal Power. Reel-in out-of-control Alphabet Soup agencies. Return respect for law.  These are all things Donald Trump made as major issues for his campaign platform.

“The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.”- Albert Einstein.

A precipitous move by the Trump administration to change the equation on legal marijuana in the states could in fact bring action by congress where a coalition of liberal Democrats and libertarian Republicans are moving towards legislation to legalize the plant.