California Dreaming Road Trip

[William]

Jules and Myrtle are on their way to California for a couple of weeks. This will be a great opportunity to network and learn from some of the worlds leading activists. Stay tuned for updates and pics.

[Myrtle Clarke]

Hi from Los Angeles!
We left Joburg on the 8th and it was an epic 22 hours of flying to get here. We settled into our Air BnB and then got a message from an old friend in Los Vegas who we hadn’t seen in 10 years. He has many connections in the Nevada weed business and convinced us to get onto another plane on Saturday and fly to Vegas. We spent a day on “the strip”, gawking at all the freaks and lurid displays of bad taste. On Monday we were treated to visits to 2 grow ops – Solaris & Cultivation Labs. We also met a woman who has been very active in the roll out of the various rules & regulations for growing weed in Nevada. The rules are totally off the wall strict and you will never survive there unless you have millions of dollars to spend on compliance.
The facilities are very impressive with everything automated up until the trim stage, which seems to be done by hand everywhere. The Solaris facility cost 35million dollars to set up!!! There is no way that countries in Africa could afford that level of compliance so there is a LOT of work to do to get where we want to be.
We also visited “Planet 13”, which bills itself as the biggest weed shop in the world. They have display cabinets that they rent out for 10 000 dollars a month. There are about 30 companies displaying there wares. There are dedicated Bud Tenders to help you out. Luckily we were with our loacl frined so we got a 20& discount but still ended up paying $54 for an eight of an ounce of weed – About R900 for 3g. The majority of what you pay is tax – adds up to about 45% that goes to the government. the Americans are bevok about tax!!!
I have posted some pics in the media folder at the top of this page.
Next stop Jungle Boys in LA!!! Onward….

[William]

The numbers and tax seem unbelievable. Doesn’t feel like the solution for SA.

[sean.alexander.za]

Agreed. Further taxes complicates things.

South Africans are already regarded as amongst the 10 most taxed nations in the world. I came across some study done several months which suggested as such. I think you need to tell government that simply formalising it would formalise all the current trade. The current taxes are more than enough to get you a very large piece of a potentially very large pie, as long as you allow the pie to be baked, so to speak (Apologies for the analogy).

In truth, too difficult to tax the informal economy. If you tax the formal economy and not the informal economy, and the informal economy grows/succeeds then formal guys start turning on the informal (black market) guys and it divides a community. You see such in Canada at the moment.

Edit: You actually also see the above in different forms in South Africa but it amounts to the same thing. Police crack down on informal traders is usually for the benefit of members of society who are better off financially. What you want is the gogos who get together to grow a few plants in their back yards in Alex get to go with a bag and hawk the weed along with oranges, chips, pap/chicken etc. being traded without being harrased as there is simply no point.

Formal businesses don’t need more taxes. In practice, if there is ANY kind of regulation for cannabis re: testing (pesticides or potency, doesn’t matter what) the state will argue that testing or monitoring of testing costs money which requires funding and you shouldn’t dip into the current budget, yada-yada-yada, so you need to fund our testing enforcement, licensing enforcement (I know we hate licenses, I’m using it as an example) and thus you need to fund this via fees for “registration”,”licensing”, “testing” and or a tax. Just different terms for fundmentally the same thing, funding which creates more government jobs (at the expense of potential private sector jobs). So, that is the concern with taxes in their many forms.

Just make the pie argument. It is the economically more sound argument. Wealth is not fixed, make more, more to go around, more wealth. Formalise and grow the current economy and take a small slice of an ever larger pie.

[Author]

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