There’s a strange cannabis market in my state where we have the third largest number of users statewide, but less than 30 companies handling all of those patients from one end of the state to the other.
When you impose a vertical integration market on cannabis that insists on seed to sale, the barriers for entry as an entrepreneur are almost unmanageably high.
It forces people to take money from venture capitalists to get the ball rolling in the first place. And at that point, how can you criticize them for doing what’s absolutely necessary to survive in this kind of cannabis market? That’s the barrier of entry unfortunately, which makes it next to impossible for a single person to start a small business in this cannabis market and hope to succeed at the same time. Once you’ve met the minimum requirements to be a functioning cannabis company in this state, that doesn’t mean you’ll have what it takes to compete with the existing marijuana producers, or the ones that arrive in the future. For this reason, some cannabis dispensaries go out of their way to present standards to their customers that set them above the level of their peers in the wider statewide cannabis market. My favorite cannabis dispensary for instance is extremely clean and even has product displays inside of cases for customers to look at visually before making a final purchase. When the state government bars the cannabis dispensary from opening containers for customers to inspect, this is the inevitable result. They had to get creative with the current rules in place.