Legalizing pot didn’t eliminate street dealers, study says

The head of Nevada’s Cannabis Compliance Board says he agrees with a Canadian university study that legalization of recreational marijuana use didn’t eliminate the illegal dealers.

And Tyler Klimas says the study in the Journal of Studies of Alcohol and Drugs is correct that the primary driver is price. Legal marijuana is more expensive.

An illegal dealer, he said, “doesn’t have to go through the kind of testing and compliance the legal market has to go through.”

Study author Professor David Hammond at the University of Waterloo in Ontario said his investigators found that more than a more than a third of buyers in Canada, which has legalized recreational pot, cited higher prices for their decision to buy from a street dealer. The number in the United States, the study says, was lower but still significant at about 27 percent.

But Klimas said more people might look to legal dispensaries if they realized how many contaminants are in a lot of the street pot including mold and heavy metals. The stringent standards legal pot growers have to go through in Nevada, he said, ensure that the product is clean and safe.

The taxes Nevada imposes on marijuana are the driver behind the higher prices. There’s a 15 percent levy on the product coming out of the farms and a 10 percent excise tax when the product is sold at a dispensary. On top of that, the buyer has to pay whatever sales tax the county or city imposes, over 7 percent in every county and over 8 percent in Clark and Washoe counties. That pushes the total tax above 30 percent. Illegal dealers, obviously, don’t pay those taxes. [Read More @ Nevada Appeal]