{"id":7043067,"date":"2026-08-21T07:25:18","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T07:25:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/angel-investor\/cannabis-use-is-up-gotham-gal\/"},"modified":"2026-08-21T07:25:18","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T07:25:18","slug":"cannabis-use-is-up-gotham-gal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7043067","title":{"rendered":"\u00a0Cannabis Use Is Up – Gotham Gal"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Over the last decade, cannabis use has gone up by more than 40% across the globe. On its face, that sounds like a straightforward story: as legalization slowly opened the door, state by state, city by city, and country by country, people were walking in to give it a try.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t buy that. People didn\u2019t just start smoking weed. Nobody woke up the morning cannabis became legal in their state and decided, for the first time in their life, to try it. The numbers we see out of the gate in brand-new legal markets \u2014 state by state, country by country \u2014 are high from day one because the demand was never new. People have been using cannabis for decades, underground, illegally. What changed wasn\u2019t appetite. What changed was who got punished for it.<\/p>\n

That is the part of this story that doesn\u2019t get said enough. Black and brown people have been arrested for cannabis, while countless white people have used the exact same substances with a fraction of the consequences. In NYC, 90% of low-level weed arrests have been Black and brown people. They are almost 4 times more likely to be arrested for cannabis than white people. Legalization didn\u2019t create demand. It just made visible\u2014and taxable\u2014something that was already everywhere. <\/p>\n

In New York, there\u2019s still a lot of talk about giving back to the communities most harmed by cannabis prohibition, about building new programs to make things right. But that opportunity was largely lost four years ago, when the state started handing out licenses without ensuring the expectations attached to them were actually met. The intention was right. The execution wasn\u2019t. The powers that be have found out you can\u2019t go backward. Expecting all the licensees to provide social give-back to renew their licenses when that wasn\u2019t part of the original documentation doesn\u2019t work now. We have been doing that at Gotham<\/a>, but it was part of our plan, not the state\u2019s. <\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what\u2019s actually killing legal cannabis businesses across the country is that states legalized the product without seriously confronting the illicit market that was already saturating it. The supply chain overlaps completely. Illegal weed is cheaper \u2014 of course it is; it isn\u2019t paying taxes, isn\u2019t paying for licensing, isn\u2019t funding the regulatory apparatus states built around legal sales. And yet there\u2019s no real public effort to change that dynamic. Where are the campaigns telling people not to buy illegal weed? Where\u2019s the oversight and enforcement against illegal shops that are undercutting every legal operator trying to do this the right way? There are also hemp products that can be sold anywhere and have zero oversight, directly taking money from the state dispensaries\u2019 pockets, and that means less taxes for the state. States have done shockingly little.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the conversation gets buried under nonsense from both directions \u2014 the \u201cpublic health crisis\u201d framing on one side, and the almost religious \u201ccannabis will save us all\u201d enthusiasm on the other. Neither is honest. What actually needs attention is much less dramatic and much harder to fix: an industry undermined by poor oversight and a string of poor decisions made by the people responsible for regulating it. And the unions certainly should not be the regulators of law. <\/p>\n

Watching how badly this has been handled makes you wonder what else is being managed this way. Legal cannabis could have been a real correction \u2014 economically and in terms of justice. Instead, it\u2019s a case study in how much damage gets done when regulation shows up without follow-through and specific social give-back legislation.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the last decade, cannabis use has gone up by more than 40% across the globe. On its face, that sounds like a straightforward story: as legalization slowly opened the door, state by state, city by city, and country by country, people were walking in to give it a try. I don\u2019t buy that. People […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7043069,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12034],"tags":[13459,13786,13785],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-7043067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-angel-investor","tag-cannabis","tag-gal","tag-gotham"],"yoast_head":"\n\u00a0Cannabis Use Is Up - Gotham Gal - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7043067\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"\u00a0Cannabis Use Is Up - Gotham Gal - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Over the last decade, cannabis use has gone up by more than 40% across the globe. 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