Once shunned by business people and outlawed by public officials, the marijuana industry is fast gaining respectability — and investors.
At a gathering of marijuana supporters scheduled for Sunday in Detroit, there will be no rappers, no “medicating tent,” no vendors pitching ornate hash pipes at stoners in T-shirts, all standard features at most marijuana events.
Instead, more than 150 attendees will have shelled out $200 apiece to learn how they can break into what the state Senate Budget Office says is destined to be a $700-million industry in Michigan, conference organizer Rick Thompson of Flint said.
Looming dollar signs are changing attitudes toward cannabis, said Thompson, impresario of two similar conferences, in March in Traverse City and December in Lansing. Grabbing attention in state capitals nationwide, including Lansing, are the potential for a torrent of new tax revenue coupled with job growth.
“Take a look at some of the Republicans who are sponsoring legislation now” involving marijuana, “and these are people who were viciously opposed to us just a few years ago,” said Thompson, an online marijuana journalist turned business consultant. (For details on the conference or to register, see www.micbd.com.)
Sunday’s speakers are to include lawyers, consultants, lobbyists and former Fox2 morning anchor Anqunette (Q) Jamison, widely known for treating her multiple sclerosis with medical cannabis, as well as Detroit City Council President Pro Tem George Cushingberry, a longtime advocate of legalizing marijuana to boost Michigan’s employment rolls and tax revenues.
The State of Nevada, which began allowing marijuana sales last week, collected an estimated $1 million in sales tax revenues on marijuana between Saturday and Tuesday, according to an industry estimated cited in USA TODAY.
Asked about critics’ contention that key marijuana activists have a hidden profit motive and that small growers soon will be squeezed out by mega investors, Thompson e-mailed a statement: “It’s impossible to launch a billion-dollar industry in 2017 America without corporate influence. Marijuana law reform activists are guiding the creation of our industry in a way that respects the participants and delivers benefit to the communities they live in.”
“People always ask me, ‘What should I do to get into this industry?’ I say, ‘What do you do now?’ There’s a whole slew of jobs that’s going to surround cannabis,” she said.
“My background was automotive bench-marking and cost-setting, so whatever you used to do, you can apply” to a career in marijuana, said Bruner, a leader of both the metro Detroit and West Michigan chapters of Women Grow, a networking group for marijuana business operators and investors.
There are revealing parallels between where Michigan is today with marijuana and its actions toward alcohol Prohibition in the 1930s, said Roger Rosentreter, a history professor and specialist in Michigan history at Michigan State University.
In 1933, Michigan became the first state to ratify the 21st Amendment, repealing alcohol Prohibition, after which the state had to decide who’d get licenses to produce or sell beer, wine and liquor, Rosentreter said. Marijuana amounts to a new cash crop for farmers, he said.
“We’re a great agricultural state. We could add marijuana to apples and peaches,” Rosentreter said.
Michigan’s top state regulator is to be a big attraction at Sunday’s event at Detroit’s Atheneum Hotel. Shelly Edgerton, director of the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulation — or LARA — said she’d talk about the state’s impending legalization of producing and selling medical marijuana.
Until now, Michigan’s operators of medical-marijuana sales outlets, called dispensaries, marketed the drug only in counties where authorities have turned a blind eye, since there was no state law specifically allowing dispensaries to operate. In some counties, police have raided the outlets and arrested employees.
That’s soon to change. A law passed last year lets LARA start accepting applications for business licenses on Dec. 15, then begin issuing the licenses in 2018 to dispensary operators and to four other sectors of Michigan’s supply chain, as defined by state lawmakers: the growers, transporters, processors and testers of medical marijuana.
To create mounds of licensing rules within the lawmakers’ one-year time frame, “We’re going as fast as we can and as hard as we can,” Edgerton said Thursday.
“We’re looking at all the other states, we’re doing a lot of research and talking to a lot of people,” she said. It won’t be easy, but “I don’t think it’s going to be that much different than (regulating) liquor control or gaming,” Edgerton said. LARA regulates about 1.5 million Michiganders, from doctors and car mechanics to virtually anyone who works for a bar, liquor store or casino.
Edgerton has attended several conferences in Colorado, the first state to fully legalize marijuana, she said.
“You can see all the new economic activity out there, and we want that to come to Michigan,” she said.
credit:freep.com
