By Allen St. Pierre

There is not a good word in English if you’re paranoid, but right to be so.

For the past 50 years or so, the hundreds of thousands of folks in the cannabis business have had the most logical and basic of paranoia: Get busted by the fuzz or get ripped off by fellow criminals.

Relatively, that’s it.

And, the calculus for the penalty is fairly binary: the more product you got popped with by law enforcement, the worse the penalties, including incarceration, possibly for decades.

However, as cannabis commerce morphs from illegal contraband to Main Street storefronts, arguably, those in the cannabusiness space today have many more sources for paranoia and bellyaches than their criminal forbearers.

The list here is long:

• Formation of capital;
• Investor relations;
• Application for license;
• Regulations adherence;
• Banking services and finance;
• Bar codes and smart tags;
• Quality control (i.e., proper use of pesticides and fertilizers, etc. …);
• Tax compliance;
• Inventory control (what used to be called getting “ripped off’);
• Community relations;
• Government relations;
• Payroll and benefits compliance;
• Labeling and packaging;
• Advertising;
• Insurance;
• Unionized workers;
• Consumer complaints (i.e., the Better Business Bureau);
• Product liability (i.e., tort lawsuits);
• Social media (i.e., Yelp, WeedMaps, Leafly, etc …); and,
• Media communications.

Without too much surprise to the forward-looking, these non-criminal sources of paranoia are similar in nature and scope to that of other purveyors of what can be fairly described as “problematic adult commerce” (along with, for example, the alcohol, tobacco, gun and gambling industries).

From NORML’s anti-prohibitionist and pro-consumer viewpoint, oh to have such problems, as compared to the violence and vicissitudes of Cannabis Prohibition.

There are some in the cannabusiness space today, and probably a few in the future, who will long for the day when their illegal and untaxed cannabis regularly fetched $6,000 per pound (back in the day, as well portrayed on an episode of Larry David’s HBO show Curb Your Enthusiasm, where Larry was looking to buy some cannabis from a street dealer for his father’s glaucoma, and after failing to negotiate a lower price, the dealer turns to him and declared that “the weed sells itself.”

Yes, the primary source of their paranoia was getting busted by the “man.”

Allen St. Pierre is executive director of NORML in Washington, D.C., norml.org