Up in Smoke: Is the legal-cannabis industry on the verge of collapsing?
Huge swaths of California are pot deserts, with no dispensaries within reasonable driving distance
Wednesday, December 15, 2021
When legalization proponents sold voters on Prop. 64 in 2016, one of their chief arguments in favor of the measure was that legal weed would yield a cash bonanza for state and local governments throughout California. And indeed, they seem to have been right. But now, many of those very same people argue that those taxes need to be reduced or eliminated altogether. And indeed, they seem to be right about that, too. Nobody could know precisely what would happen, though plenty of people were certain that they did know, or at least sounded like they did. Most people thought the legal market would overtake the illicit market. The market for illicit pot in California is still much larger than the legal market—approaching three times the size, by some estimates.
