Who Is Big Weed?
Who Is?
iHeartRadio + NowThis
4.1 • 803 Ratings
🗓️ 20 April 2021
⏱️ 47 minutes
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Summary
Americans aren’t in agreement about much these days, but there does appear to be one thing that they overwhelmingly support: legalizing the medical and recreational use of cannabis. Across the country, cannabis is winning at the ballot box and in the statehouse, and whether you partake or not, legalization has major implications for civil rights and civil liberties, for social and racial justice, and, of course, for those who see cannabis as an enormous opportunity to make a lot of money. While federal legalization remains distant, how states legalize could play a significant role in determining the type of cannabis economy that may emerge in America. Will it be a market characterized by equity and competition--a small business success story--or a market dominated by politically influential corporate interests: Big Weed? On this episode of “Who Is?,” Sean Morrow takes a look at legalization and who stands to benefit from it.
- Emily Dufton, a writer and historian. Her first book is “Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America”
- Beau Kilmer, Director of the Drug Policy Research Center and McCauley Chair in Drug Policy Innovation at RAND
- Majority Leader Crystal D. Peoples-Stokes, who represents District 141 in the New York State Assembly
- Shaleen Title, Distinguished Cannabis Policy Practitioner in Residence at the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center of the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What do Snoop Dog, Charles Koch, and George Soros have in common? |
| 0:06.8 | I'll give you a hint. It's green. And it isn't money. They've all come around to the legalization of cannabis. |
| 0:14.9 | Well, I've spent my whole adult life working towards legalization. So I want to see it happen as much as anybody. But we only |
| 0:23.0 | get one chance to get this right. And all of the future generations are depending on us. |
| 0:28.7 | If you think about alcohol prohibition ending in the last century, you can see how the decisions |
| 0:36.9 | that were made had massive snowballing effects on how the |
| 0:42.9 | industry came to be. And so if we're careful, then legalization will look the way we wanted to |
| 0:49.0 | look. And if it doesn't, we'll just have another big tobacco or another big tech and we'll just be |
| 0:54.0 | handing over this |
| 0:55.1 | multi-billion dollar industry to the same corporate players that already handle everything else. |
| 1:01.5 | And I'm not willing to do that. |
| 1:03.6 | Today, 40% of Americans live in a state with legalized cannabis, which means there are a lot of business opportunities. |
| 1:12.6 | And so the friends of Adam Smith are stepping in. |
| 1:18.3 | This is capitalism. I understand capitalism. |
| 1:21.1 | At some point, this whole industry is going to be taken over by big banks, big tobacco, big pharmaceutical, big people in the marijuana business. |
| 1:31.7 | My perspective is I can see that happening, but I need them to be able to buy that from |
| 1:38.5 | somebody who's owned it for five to ten years first, as opposed to letting them get it |
| 1:42.8 | immediately and these folks never get an |
| 1:45.3 | opportunity to create a potential for generational wealth. |
| 1:49.7 | The business of legal cannabis is happening, and how legalization unfolds will determine |
| 1:55.6 | the kind of industry that emerges, the future of weed. What's that future going to look like? |
| 2:02.6 | As those companies get bigger, you know, they're going to have more money not only for advertising, |
... |
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