Combined sales of legal recreational and medical marijuana in the United States is projected to reach more than $8 billion in 2018. That's according to a new report by Marijuana Business Daily citing data from the Marijuana Business Factbook, which forecasts that the 2018 retail marijuana industry could see an estimated $7.4 to $8.2 billion in sales.
The projection is based on sales estimates from the state-legal medical and recreational marijuana markets that already exist, as well as 4-5 additional states that are expected to legalize recreational marijuana and 2-3 states expected to legalize medical marijuana by 2018.
Currently, there are 20 states with legal medical marijuana. Colorado and Washington have both legalized recreational marijuana and about a dozen other states are expected to legalize marijuana in some form in the coming years.
“This total is conservative –- the reality of retail sales could be larger,” Chris Walsh, editor of CannaBusiness Media, the publisher of both the Factbook and Marijuana Business Daily, said in a statement. “Nor does it include wholesale cannabis sales, or the billions of dollars in ancillary cannabusiness revenues such as growing equipment, real estate, legal fees, testing labs, paraphernalia, etc.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/12/14/the-new-politics-of-pot-the-2014-candidates-who-want-to-legalize-it.htmlForget decriminalization or medical marijuana. Bolstered by state ballot victories, top-tier contenders in 2014 are seeking full legalization, the drug’s highest-profile advocacy ever.
After a round of victories at the ballot box, the spliff is trying its make case at the statehouse””and on the stump.
Advocates for marijuana legalization say the 2014 elections represent the first time that serious, top-tier candidates for major state and federal offices are advocating for full legalization of the drug. In Pennsylvania and Maryland, top contenders for the Democratic nomination for governor are calling for legalization, as is the likely Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Maine. And earlier this week, a legalization bill was introduced in the Legislature in New York, making the state the sixth with an active bill under consideration. Legalization bills failed in six other states in 2013.
“It shows there has been a big shift in mainstream politics. You are a seeing a lot of movement in the Democratic Party especially,” said Erik Altieri, the communications director of the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws and the manager of NORML PAC, which donated to three candidates last year and has already endorsed John Hanger, the Democratic candidate for governor of Pennsylvania who has made legalization a key part of his platform. “For Democrats in primaries, it has become an issue that sets you apart and gets you votes because there is overwhelming support for legalization. Soon enough politicians are going to be stumbling over themselves not only to support this but to say who supports it more.”
To be clear, these pols don’t just support medical marijuana, which is legal in 20 states plus Washington, D.C., and which polls show more than 80 percent of Americans support. Nor do they advocate only for the decriminalization of marijuana, which would change the law so that possessing a small amount of marijuana merits a fine and a ticket instead of jail and a felony conviction. Instead these candidates are calling for full legalization, introducing a tax and regulatory regime that they say would make the drug safer and bolster state budgets.
http://www.vox.com/2014/4/21/5636750/scared-of-legal-pot-hold-on-lets-talk-about-tobacco
There are enough opiates prescribed in this country (USA) for every single adult to get 75 pills every year.
Tobacco remains the leading preventable cause of death in this country. It still kills more than a thousand Americans everyday.
That's why American women are so unstable. They all seem to be taking this, that or the other.
Yeh the amount of drug ads on tv over here is insane. So many people are taking pretty much permanent prescription drugs, yet they say that coke or mdma is bad
Mia Mia parents Cheri and David O'Connell fear their daughter 'will die' if the supply of medical cannabis she relies on to control her severe epilepsy is stopped.
The couple's daughter Tara, 8, has Dravet Syndrome and suffered more than 100 life-threatening seizures a day before she started taking medical cannabis in 2012.
She has not had a seizure since.
But the man who supplies the cannabis to the family, Tony Bower of Mulaways Medical Cannabis, has been arrested and will face a NSW court on drug trafficking charges on May 28.
Ms O'Connell said the family had enough supplies to last them for a few months but if Mr Bower was jailed for longer the family would find themselves in a dire situation.
She said that before using the cannabis, Tara was suffering up to 200 seizures a day.
In 2012 Tara was resuscitated eight times and doctors warned that she may not live long past her seventh birthday, and shortly after this the O'Connells starting treating Tara with medical cannabis, as a last resort.
The results were outstanding.
Child Neurology doctor Lindsay Smith wrote of Tara’s improvement that it was “nothing short of miraculous”.
Since taking the cannabis Tara hasn't suffered one seizure and her parents have been given their lives back.
A Futile War on Drugs that Wastes Money and Wrecks Lives
By George Soros
The war on drugs has been a $1tn failure. For more than four decades, governments around the world have pumped huge sums of money into ineffective and repressive anti-drug efforts. These have come at the expense of programs that actually work such as needle exchanges and substitution therapy. This is not just a waste of money, it is counterproductive.
The London School of Economics has just completed perhaps the most thorough account of the war on drugs done to date. The conclusion, backed by five Nobel Prize-winning economists: it has done more harm than good.
Drug prohibition has created an immense black market, valued by some at $300bn. It shifts the burden of “drug control” on to producer and transit countries such as Afghanistan and Mexico. This approach also fails to grapple with a basic truth: drug markets are highly adaptive. Repress the business in one country and it springs up elsewhere.
Consider Colombia. When its law enforcement agencies made progress cracking down on the country’s cocaine trade, much of the criminal business and the violence that goes with it moved to Mexico. The LSE report estimates that after 2007, Colombia’s interdiction policies accounted for more than 20 per cent of the rise in Mexico’s murder rate.
Bogotá had a lot of mayhem to export. The explosion of the illegal drug market between 1994 and 2008 “explains roughly 25 per cent of the current homicide rate in Colombia. That translate into about 3,800 more homicides per year on average that are associated with illegal drug markets and the war on drugs”, according to the report. This type of violence takes a massive economic toll; corporations relocate, foreign investment dries up, industries decline and citizens flee in search of a better life.
The costs are not limited to producer countries; consumer nations suffer as well.
This is especially so in the US, which has less than 5 per cent of the world’s people but almost 25 per cent of the planet’s incarcerated population. Most are drug and other non-violent offenders for whom drug treatment and other alternatives to incarceration would probably prove cheaper and more effective in reducing recidivism and protecting society. Worldwide, 40 per cent of the 9m people who are incarcerated are behind bars for drug-related offences – and that figure is only likely to rise, as arrests of drug offenders in Asia, Latin America and West Africa are increasing steadily.
Despite the epic scale of human wreckage, services that could save lives and cut down on the costs to society go underfunded, or not funded at all.
For years, my Open Society Foundations have supported harm-reduction programs such as needle exchanges – a proved, cost-effective way to prevent HIV transmission. One country found that for every $1 invested in needle exchange, $27 is returned in cost savings. That is no small matter, considering the billions of dollars spent treating HIV. We have seen similar returns on investment with supervised drug injection rooms and medication-assisted treatment of opiate addiction. Yet despite these benefits, the US Congress continues to block federal funding for needle exchanges. Several governments around the globe fight to prevent any mention of harm reduction in international forums, lest it clash with the predominant drug war ideology.
Yet change is still possible. In 2016 the UN General Assembly will review the current state of the drug- control system. For too long the UN has worked to enforce a “one-size-fits-all” model around the world, based on a belief that prohibitionist policies alone would solve the global drug problem.
The LSE report, to be released on Wednesday, recommends that governments give top priority to proved public health policies, moving to minimize harm in illicit markets, and mandating “rigorously monitored policy and regulatory experimentation”. I heartily concur.
Governments the world over need to weigh the costs and benefits of their current policies, and be willing to redirect resources towards programs that work. This will save lives – and save money along the way. We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fix a broken global framework for coping with the drug crisis. The costs of doing nothing are too great to bear.
A Yale study published Tuesday in the Journal of Adolescent Health found that people who used alcohol or tobacco in their youth are almost twice as likely to abuse prescription opiate drugs than those who only used marijuana.
Researchers were careful to specify that any youth substance abuse, including just marijuana use, makes people more than twice as likely to abuse prescription opiate drugs in young adulthood. However, the study’s authors noted that clinical data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health revealed that of the 12 percent of young adults who said they’d abused prescription opiates, “prevalence of previous substance use was 57% for alcohol, 56% for cigarettes, and 34% for marijuana.”
The Centers for Disease Control said in January that prescription opiate overdoses kill more Americans every year than cocaine and heroin overdoses combined.
Treating young children with medical marijuana isn’t common, but it’s happening, and increasingly often. Several US states that have legalized the drug to some degree also allow it as an alterative treatment for kids and even toddlers with epilepsy””namely, as you may have guessed, Oregon, Colorado, and California. Now Illinois may be next on the list.
An Illinois House committee recently approved a measure for the use of medical marijuana to treat children with epilepsy, The full House will now vote on the bill, which comes on the heels of similar legislation in the works in Wisconsin, Florida, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania.
The endocannabinoid system in the brain is what registers the psychoactive effects of pot on the brain, and is also the system that regulates the level of activity in the brain’s neurotransmitters, which are responsible for various psychological processes. In patients with epilepsy, these neurotransmitters are “firing all the time,” Goldstein said. Cannabidol, or CBD””one of 60 active cannabinoids in the cannabis plant””can help.
“By taking these canabanoids from the plant, you are triggering that endocanabinoid system and telling it to turn down the volume,” said Goldstein.
Goldstein said she’s seen great success with CBD oil””about 70-75 percent of her patients saw a reduction in seizures, according to her early data. She pointed to a 2013 National Institute of Health study published in the journal Epilepsy & Behavior that found similar results: 16 of the 19 children treated with CBD had decreased symptoms of epilepsy, and in two cases the epilepsy disappeared completely.
Colorado’s marijuana legalization is quickly turning the state into one of the most prosperous places in the country. Not only has Colorado projected marijuana sales to be a billion dollar industry, but in January of 2014 alone, the state pulled in over $3.5 million in tax revenue from legal pot sales. If that trend continues, the state will enjoy an additional $40 million in tax revenue in the first year of legalization. But that’s not all – you know those dismal unemployment figures plaguing the nation? Not in states where pot is legal. Colorado is reporting 10,000 new jobs, all from the legalization of both recreational and medical marijuana.
'Rather than going down the process of creating a complex apparatus for supplying cannabis, we simply exempt those who've been certified by the department of health from prosecution' - Kaye
The NSW Greens MLC, John Kaye has launched a bill to protect people with a terminal illness who use cannabis from criminal prosecution.
It coincides with a campaign by the Haslam family in Tamworth to decriminalise cannabis for medicinal purposes.
Dan Haslam was diagnosed with bowel cancer a couple of year ago and during the course of his treatment he has found that cannabis provides some relief to his nausea and pain.
The family has started a petition and is calling on the state government to adopt the recommendations from an Upper House Inquiry on changing the law around medical cannabis.
John Kaye says the Bill establishes a scheme for the registration of patients authorised to use cannabis to relieve a serious medical condition and carers authorised to assist registered patients.
"The way the bill works is your treating physician recommends you to the department of health, and the department of health keeps a register of the medicinal cannabis patients, the idea being that rather than going down the process of creating a complex apparatus for supplying cannabis, we simply exempt those who've been certified by the department of health from prosecution." He says.
All the naysayers who were against marijuana legalization are eating crow about now. Colorado’s weed sales just keep trending up, and with the sales of legal weed, they are improving their schools and reducing overall crime rates.
Not counting medicinal weed sales, Colorado sold nearly $19 million in their recreational weed market in the month of March, and $1.9 million of that goes straight into government coffers and towards building schools. At this pace, according to PolicyMic, Colorado will make $30 million this year in pot taxes alone.
The conversation Australia needs to have
https://au.news.yahoo.com/sunday-night/blogs/a/24241563/the-conversation-australia-needs-to-have/
On Sunday Night - Channel 7 tonight.
What I have been saying for the last few months, if not longer.
Australia is so slow to adopt medical marijuana laws while people suffer.
Unfortunately the argument by a lot of Australian politicians is still that if you allow the young to try the 'soft" drug marijuana that it will lead to them getting addicted to the harder ones like heroine or coke.
Pretty much every study debunks that myth, but it just wont die.
Hopefully as the USA states that have legalised Mary Jane continue to provide very positive stats there will be enough agitation within the community to force our inept leaders to take some action.
On Sunday Night - Channel 7 tonight.
What I have been saying for the last few months, if not longer.
Australia is so slow to adopt medical marijuana laws while people suffer.
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?