USA TODAY: … What’s striking is how conventional many of the business people’s backgrounds — and their plans — increasingly are. Instead of backing marijuana dispensaries, investors such as Privateer and San Francisco-based ArcView Group are rushing to find consulting firms, software companies and insurance agencies to serve the new market. Even Privateer’s strategy of merging small companies to form a big one is familiar: In traditional buyout shops, it’s called a “roll-up.”…
It’s hard to say exactly how many people are trying to make pot a business like any other. About 2,000 legal dispensaries are open around the United States, estimates Kris Krane, managing director of Phoenix-based consulting firm 4Front Advisors. Privateer and Dayton’s group are the biggest publicly announced clusters of investors. There are even a handful of public companies: The most valuable, San Diego-based Medical Marijuana, is worth about $200 million…
The people at the most legal risk, Kennedy and Blue reason, are marijuana dispensary owners, because the federal government could raid the stores and confiscate the investment. That stance may represent an abundance of caution: President Obama, whose memoir paints him as a regular pot smoker in his high school days, said in December that prosecutors have “bigger fish to fry” than recreational pot users… (more)
EDITOR: The dispensaries can be fabulously profitable. Some are privately owned. A few are cooperatives. Los Angeles and surrounding communities have struggled to control proliferation.
The sooner the sale of marijuana is taxed, regulated and controlled as we do cigarettes and alcoholic beverages, the better off will be the governments, the industry and its customers. Marijuana is innocuous as compared to nicotine or alcohol; a drug with the potency of coffee, tea or Coca Cola.
