Summer blowout sale

Now that the government is in the biz …

CALL IT Reason No. 2,134 why recreational marijuana should never be legalized in the Natural State: It’ll become a government operation.

It’s often useful to look to the West, young man, to our fellow Americans who have gone loco for the loco weed. They are good examples. Good examples to beware.

There’s Colorado with its drivingunder-the-influence problems. According to the papers, there’s an oversupply problem and technical glitches in the Great Northwest. And now California has a buzz kill going as government comes a-creepin’ into the marijuana business.

Right now, it seems businesses selling all things marijuana, from joints to brownies, are having something of a fire sale. They have all this dope on the shelves that hasn’t been regulated by the state government yet. And you know how government likes to regulate. So in the coming weeks, the California bureau in charge of dope is going to implement new regs on how potent the recreational dope can be, the amount of heavy metals found in the stuff, whether it was grown with or without pesticides, etc. They’re from the government and they’re here to help.

So the (legal) dope dealers have to clear the old stuff off the shelves. And in a hurry. Folks are walking out of stores with a lot more marijuana than they could’ve bought a month ago. It’s like a fireworks stand on the 6th of July.

If there’s a bit of comic relief in the unfunny story of legalized marijuana, it may be the way the store owners have begun to talk in corporate-speak. They don’t call the stuff what it is: dope. They call it “the product.” Oh, it’s a familiar term, the product. There are a lot of corporate newspaper editors and other suits who call the newspaper The Product, and make the rest of us want to jump out of the nearest window. And, as in any business, it can’t come as a surprise when the dope business follows the rest of the corporate world into jargon. Next, the papers will be quoting owners of marijuana stores wanting to dialogue about customer-centric matrix structures to leverage synergies.

But until they leverage those synergies, the California dope stores have to get rid of the stuff on the shelves, and get ready for government regulation as the new month arrives. Beginning tomorrow, the government will need you to fill out Form D-04S-11 . . . in triplicate.

“You can smell it,” said one CEO of a dope farm last week—and we don’t doubt him. “There’s a certain desperation from stores that bought too much and they have to dump it. There’s going to be a big shortage of clean product come July 1.”

And any marijuana still on the shelves that hasn’t been government approved? As of Sunday, it’ll have to be destroyed.

THE OWNERS and proprietors of these marijuana establishments—farmers and sellers—are already starting to get annoyed at the government’s restrictions, calling them “draconian,” proving that those owners and proprietors can adopt not only corporate buzzwords, but political ones, too.

“The new regulations have us twisting,” said Robert Martin, CEO of CW Analytical Laboratories in Oakland. “We feel like we’re trying to do yoga on two mats.”

Also, there’s the problem that government creates with officially approved testing sites. The lag time in the supply chain. Bottlenecking. Restocking. Licensing. Nobody knows the trouble the dope business has seen.

And that’s only the business side of things. The first 2,133 reasons not to legalize recreational marijuana have to do with health, mental and physical.

Those who want Arkansas to follow the lead of our neighbors to the West have already made public their desire to get recreational marijuana on the ballot soonest. But we keep seeing stories in the public prints that make us think . . . .

Let’s not.