By Greg James
For a little more than a year, we’ve been publishing Marijuana Venture as a strictly-business, highly-focused monthly magazine for the rapidly-changing and exciting world of the legal marijuana industry.
In that time, we’ve gone from being an eight-page, black-and-white newsletter that only covered Washington State to a 116-page glossy magazine that’s spreading all across the county. While the majority of our readers are located in Washington, Colorado and Oregon, we’ve steadily been adding readers in Alaska, New Mexico, Arizona, Montana and California.
This month we expand beyond the Rockies into the Midwest, and welcome Illinois and its state-regulated marijuana businesses as monthly recipients of the best publication in the industry.
I often get asked why we’re different from the dozens of other marijuana/cannabis publications. I have a couple answers to that. First and foremost, we are not outspoken advocates of marijuana use.
While we support the legalization of cannabis, and feel its use by adults should simply be an issue of freedom (“If one person can choose to have a glass of wine, why can’t someone else have a toke of pot?”), we leave advocacy and stories related to consumption for others who are better informed than us on that subject.
Second, we are a business magazine for the licensed, regulated professional business community. As such, we do not target the unregulated medical community or anyone else that falls into the gray and black markets of untaxed, unregulated cannabis.
I believe all businesses should operate on a level playing field, and those that do so without paying their fair share of the tax burden are simply operating in a way that takes advantage of those of us who do. Call me old-fashioned if you like, but I really do believe that the American system of capitalism is a good one, and that we all thrive when we all pay our fair share.
On another note, you’ll see some interesting new advertisers this month that expand the magazine beyond that of a traditional pot culture publication. We have an ad for a winery, one for a float tank experience (which is very cool — I tried it), a company that sells armored security vehicles, and another for a high-tech instrument that growers, processors or retailers can use to accurately test their own marijuana.
As I mentioned above, our focus is business, and will stay that way. However, once in a while we see or hear of something that is newsworthy even if it’s not strictly a business story. I think the story in our April issue on the Buddy Boy Farms strain that tested at 41% THC fits into that category.
When I first about heard it, I said “no way.” However, when I talked to Steve Walser at Buddy Boy Farms, and then looked at the test results from the lab, I started to believe. At first glance, it seems like an unbelievable number — 41% THC! — and maybe it is. But then again, it might simply be something analogous to the phenomenon of 7- and 8-foot-tall humans. While rare, it we know it does occur from time to time.
2 comments
Good article, and I pretty much agree with the level playing field philosophy.
I suspect, however, that much like alcohol, marijuana will pass through this transition from gray area to mainstream business and elements of the “outlaw” past will survive. We still have moonshiners, after all, and many big cities have plenty of bootleggers selling alcoholic beverages out of car trunks in darkened paring lots at 3AM.
Initially there are still a lot of home growers that sell to dealers who’ve been selling to the same group of loyal customers for years, then market forces will eventually shrink them down over time to a percentage similar to the current number of alcohol bootleggers.
As long as the vast majority of us in the business are playing by the rules and paying our fair share, I think the outlaw element won’t be anywhere near as much of a problem in the future as they are now. It’s time for the industry to grow up and it’s happening all around us, the transition is happening faster now than ever before.
I look forward to it, in fact my business, which is built on mainstream business banking, credit cards, government approved reporting and tracking, and other MJ industry specific services, depends on a level playing field with well established rules and regulations.
Our customers want to avoid tax and/or IRS problems and if our products and services don’t help them run their businesses in full compliance with the law and regulatory standards, we’re in the wrong business.
Want to know how to market our great grow location farm, can we advertise in your mag??
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