From shock and horror to sexual depravity to decades of medical evidence showing the horrors of marijuana use, Ye Olde Weed hath done much to revive state economies. Twenty-three states are now involved in legalization moves of one kind or another.
With which wholesome and uplifting news, the suits are moving in, talking about commodity values like it was a futures market. This is the new Gold Rush, the gosh factor straight from America’s Mount Senile, aka the financial markets.
The hypocrisy is superb and entirely in character with the facile nature of America’s Least Sincere in media and business. Not only is the Ol’ Sinsemilla delivering on market prophecies, (about time something did) it’s doing something to help all those upstanding citizens who were against it right up until it became a cash cow.
It’s the end of Prohibition all over again. You’ll see no mention of the decades and billions of dollars it cost to fight and lose the war against the terrible awful nasty ghastly pernicious weed which is now making legal billions. You won’t hear a word about the corruption, the bankrolling of organised crime, or the sheer amount of wasted time. Nothing at all will be said about those excruciating teenage confrontations with parents for three generations on the subject of grass smoking.
Yep, Mary Jane done got all growed up and is now able to participate in meetings of incredibly intelligent, perceptive, people about market territory land grabs like any normal adult. This is where two dimensional thinking becomes three dimensional, with cash registers and managers, so it must be good.
It’s called taking credit for the obvious. Huge demand has always existed, and it’s only just recently that the Groundhogs of Spreadsheet Land have noticed that tens of millions of people wanting a product might be worth money. They’re that smart. The principles of capitalism have been called a lot of things, but they have never, ever, been called quick on the uptake.
All of this could have been done 50 years ago. Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War were legal, but grass wasn’t? Society had a choice between sex, fun, and grass and guns, wars and politics. No-brainer, right? Nothing like Puritanism to keep the world insane, is there?
The stampede to legal sanity and business profitability seems to have drowned out the endless “findings” of recycled information about the terrible effects of marijuana, too. Most of these things were first published decades ago, and are simply rehashed by media. Publication of a good or even vaguely informed word about marijuana has never been allowed in mainstream media at all, and apparently still isn’t.
You can be a raging coke-addled business-person nutcase hero in a film, a super cool fool smoking actual or implied crack or whatever in a video, but no weed, unless you’re a reggae star. Can’t you just see the ads of the future; the smart young suburbanites gathered around the weed bowl, with flirty looks and 50s dresses…. And the new Schrodinger’s Cat Bong that turns in to a lamp in memory of the funny old days of prohibition.
The clean cut finance advisor and his/her clean cut furniture and clean cut spreadsheet will advise you to invest in Okeefenokee Gold futures to put something away for the future. Even the GOP is split between prohibitionists and “federal marijuana” platforms, according to Forbes. Guess who’s leading.
The only problem, and it will be temporary, is a federal law prohibiting businesses from opening bank accounts. There are so many ways around this that it will be ironed out and forgotten, but it’ll be interesting to see how many ways they find to screw it up, too. The news rolls on, with “projected sales” (doesn’t that phrase just ooze charm?) of $21 billion in 2020…
The glaring fact is that societies always make the wrong choices for the worst reasons, then spend years undoing the damage. Then they pat themselves on the head for their progressive thinking. Maybe someone will learn from this, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
