The Cannabis Investing Podcast · Seeking Alpha

An unvarnished look at New York + California cannabis markets

·58 min·3 clips

to meet you

The opening is blunt. California is the warning case, with the guest arguing that official optimism does not square with what operators are living through. The counterfactual stings. If California looked more like Michigan, the guest says the national cannabis industry would be larger than forty billion dollars. Then New York walks into the frame looking a little too familiar. Stakeholders warned decision makers to learn from West Coast mistakes, but the rollout still seems headed down a risky road. Taxes do most of the damage here. On adult use, New York combines a potency-based distribution tax with a nine percent retail excise tax and a four percent local tax. Maybe that works in a spreadsheet. The guest calls the potency setup complicated and unworkable, even inside the limited conditional rollout already underway. The governor's budget proposal would repeal and replace the potency piece while keeping a distribution tax at nine percent. That may make the mechanism cleaner for most participants, but the tax level still sounds too high for affordability. Vertical operators have their own added mess. The worry is consumer conversion. If regulated products stay expensive and hard to access, legacy channels keep looking pretty practical. California is the caution sign, and New York is close enough to make investors wince.

As heard by us

A clear policy critique of how taxes and access keep legal cannabis from competing on price and convenience.

The piece makes a plain argument: California and New York show what happens when legal cannabis is built on paper but taxed and regulated so heavily that it cannot really compete on price or convenience.

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Why you'd press play

You want a blunt comparison of California, New York, and Michigan cannabis policy failures.

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