It’s surprisingly boring, legalising weed. In Colorado, where recreational doobie has been utterly without censure for, ooh, about a week and a half now, the Department of Revenue (Marijuana Enforcement Division) has published Permanent Rules Related to the Colorado Retail Marijuana Code, which is 136 pages long and no fun at all.
Were I actually in Colorado, I suppose I could always spark something up to help me get to the end. ‘The statutory authority for this rule is found at subsections 12-43.4-202(2)(b), 12-43.4-202(3)(b)(II), 12-43.4-202(3)(b)(III), and 12-43.3-301(1), C.R.S,’ it drones, at the top of the final page. If you like, imagine that read out by a posh girl in a breathy voice over a drum beat, like they used to do in the Orb.
Right now, an ounce of marijuana costs you about $400, provided you are openly going to smoke it for fun. If you have some medical reason for needing it (and hundreds of thousands of Americans maintain they do), the cost is slashed by half. If you want to sell, you’ve got to control every aspect of your own supply chain (a bit like Morrisons does, I believe, with meat) and if you buy, you can’t cross state lines.
Nobody really knows how well any of this is going to work yet. Possibly vendors will make a killing. Possibly most of them will go bust as competition forces prices to plummet. Perhaps counter-intuitively, for the experiment to really work, it’s the latter that really needs to happen.
This is the year of the hash revolution. Uruguay may have set the ball rolling last year, when it utterly legalised the cultivation, sale and consumption of cannabis and marijuana in one fell swoop, but US has picked the ball up and is running with it.
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