Cannabis Commerce in the USAarts 1-10 of 11 You want to uncover how much MPMTR (maximum pot-ential marijuana taxation revenue) is possible in a legal, regulated society. Basic searches turn up a few sentences here and there, and maybe a couple of 10-second sound bites on youtube, if you're lucky. The detective work begins. You search for economists' white papers, download them, and pore through them. You can tell they're writing to an audience of their peers. You start getting the wild idea these reports are missing the human touch, and that you may actually be able to provide it – providing you're willing to be as compulsive as academics composing long, fact-filled reports. It's an insane thought. You commit to it anyway. You think you're being compulsive enough . . . but then, just when you're about to release your results, you begin wondering how you, someone who bypassed Economics 101 for obscure liberal arts courses like Love And The Secular Spirit, have identified potential taxation streams unmentioned anywhere. You'll have to go the horse's mouth, and actually talk with the nation's top pot economists. You want to make sure you haven't missed their points, or misinterpreted what they're saying – or not saying. You take one economist, one poteconomist, and one phenom. You interview them collectively for over three hours. You personally transcribe their long interviews, bitching every second of the ordeal, because you thought it would be easy to find a virtual assistant from “a third-world country†to perform this task for you. When it's finally over, you realize that because you painstakingly transcribed economists' statements, sentence by sentence, over the course of about thirty hours, you understand what the heck they were talking about. You find you're able, within limits, to process the same data – and come up with different conclusions. Then you get another crazy idea. You may be able to show other people interested in marijuana taxation how to predict MPMTR, too - using the words of the economists themselves. What do you have when you're done? Cannabis Commerce in the USA, presented here for your consideration. Comments invited. –Lory Kohn, May 2010 Go to the link in the title and read the 10 parts but be sure to take some snacks and drinks,it is long.
Hello legalization advocates on 5 continents! This is my first post at Grasscity. I'm the author of Cannabis Commerce in the USA. Oltex's excerpt offers a preview of the report. He's also correct that it's long. It was originally going to be an article, but it turned into almost a book, as I got deeper and deeper into "the revenue issue" (how much marijuana tax there could be in a legal, regulated landscape, and why knowing that number greatly aids the cause of total legalization). I'm writing to let everyone know I have broken the long report down into each of its parts - it's a lot more digestible that way. You can find them here: Articles | Cannabis Commerce Well, the first five parts anyway. Rest coming day by day. These also have one level of editing more than the full report. CC in the USA is something like Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - it works as a whole, or you can enjoy a song at a time. Chance are you might want to start with a song at a time - so pick a part, or even pick a subhead within a part, and pretend you're reading a blog. You can dive in anywhere to get the general idea. I don't want to hype it too much here since there's no shortage of high-quality hype on the website (cannabis-commerce.com). What's left of my ego these days wants me to tell you that the report has all the information economists put into unreadable white papers, but you don't need a PhD to read it. Plus, it adds vision, soul, and imagination to what has previously been a boring, staid subject. I may have even included a few yuks here and there to entertain the "medicated." Yes, that's right - I'm actually known to enjoy the subject myself, unlike most of the economists who surface for sound bites every now and then. So if you want to try on a report about marijuana taxation that's written by a human who travels in pot circles, as opposed to an academic writing for other academics . . . all we are saying . . . is give Cannabis Commerce in the USA a chance!