ANYONE who thinks it would be easy to get rich selling marijuana in a state where it’s legal should spend an hour with Ravi Respeto, manager of the Farmacy, an upscale dispensary here that offers Strawberry Haze, Hawaiian Skunk and other strains of Cannabis sativa at up to $16 a gram.
The illicit drug market seems to me to be an excellent place to think about the nature of markets and competition (e.g., how much does it dampen demand? How do suppliers emerge and compete? What is the effect of a major bust on industry-wide prices and profits?). And, as we all know, many of those folks make very tall dollars.
But what what would if those drugs were suddenly legal? As the above quotation, taken from a New York Times article on medical marijuana in Colorado, suggests, competition has a funny way of making it hard to make money. So, I suspect that liberalization of drug laws will make for a fascinating route to explore market processes, including the role of innovation and entrepreneurship in these markets. There is also a an excellent piece from The New Yorker on “how medical marijuana is transforming the pot industry” in California.
We’ll be on the lookout for how this all shakes out.
