Sessions could legal weed's greatest boon It was interesting to hear Will say in his talk that Sessions was in one way helping the company by scaring the big boys like Procter and Gamble out of the market to allow GLH to gobble up as much market share as possible in the meantime. In the same way I believe Sessions is giving us investors a golden moment to accumulate U.S. weed stocks before the big investors come flooding in. Cannabis investors are like Zell in The Marathon Man asking, "Is it safe?" Well I think it is safe and part of that comes from the tone struck by Sessions himself.
Funny how it was never mentioned here but Sessions sent a letter this Monday to Oregon Gov. Kate Brown in response to the letter she and three other governors sent him in April essentially asking the administration not to fck with legalization in their states. I think the letter was taken poorly by the market and may have played a role in GLH's bad week. But I read it as very encouraging.
Sessions' response highlighted problems cited in a state police report on marijuana enforcement in Oregon. The findings in the report are indeed pretty chilling ... to us GLH investors. It found that only 30 percent of marijuana market was in fact legal, meaning 70 percent was still confined to the black market. And it found that there was "pervasive illicit cannabis cultivation in the state." The size of the black market in Oregon has been estimated to have a street value of between $4.7 billion and $9.4 billion(!).
Citing these findings and more, Sessions asked the governor to advise him of Oregon's efforts "to ensure that all marijuana activity is compliant with state marijuana laws."
He's not asking Oregon to justify legalization or aiming his complaints at any perceived negative effects of legalization. Instead he's clearly concerned with the black market, which goes along with his past comments about violence in the unregulated cannabis market. So it looks like Sessions is going to crack down on cannabis not in the legal market (a ludicrous idea that wouldn't be tolerated by the states and would be political suicide for boss Trump) but in the black market. And that will only help legal companies who have to compete against illegal growers and is actually a just enforcement action -- these guys are cheating the state (and legal businesses) out of big money with product that has no quality controls.
So I'm all for a crackdown on the black market in legal states (though don't kid yourself that the feds have resources to do even that). And all signs indicate that's the direction Sessions is going to satisfy his bloodlust for weed. Read the letters here for yourself:
https://www.thecannabist.co/2017/08/07/jeff-sessions-letter-oregon-marijuana-governor-kate-brown/85524/