The Dayton Daily News sent two reporters, Laura Bischoff and Jim Otte, to Seattle, Wash., to see how the state’s pot law is working. Although there are differences, Washington’s law is similar in some respects to what is being proposed in the November ballot issue for Ohio. Watch NewsCenter 7 Monday and Thursday at 5 p.m. for special reports.
By the Numbers: Washington Recreational Weed
Licensed by the state: 161 growers, 492 grower/processors, 56 processors, 196 retailers
First year sales: $259.8 million statewide
First year tax revenues: $65.9 million
MARIJUANA IN OTHER STATES
• Alaska: voters approved legalization in November 2014 and it took effect Feb. 24, 2015; marijuana business licenses are expected to be issued by May 2016; home grow is limited to six plants, including three mature; adults can purchase up to one ounce and any amount produced through personal cultivation; the product is taxed $50 per ounce at wholesale.
• Colorado: voters approved legalization in November 2012 and existing medical marijuana businesses started applying for recreational licenses in October 2013 while newcomers started applying in July 2014; the first recreational retail shops opened Jan. 1, 2014; adults are allowed to purchase one ounce and possess as much as they grow at home; home grow is limited to six plants, including three mature; there are no limits on the number of licenses; marijuana businesses pay regular sales taxes, plus an additional 15 percent excise and 10 percent special sales taxes.
• Oregon: voters approved legalization in November 2014 and it took effect July 1, 2015; businesses are expected to open in January 2016; home grow is limited to four plants; adults can have up to eight ounces at home, one ounce in public, 16 ounces of marijuana-infused solids and 72 ounces of pot-infused liquids; the product is taxed per ounce — $35 on marijuana flowers, $10 on leaves, $5 per immature plant and the state has authority to impose a sales tax.
* Washington: voters approved legalization in November 2012 and the first retail shops opened in July 2014; no home grow allowed; adults can purchase up to one ounce of pot, a pound of pot-infused solids and 72 ounces of marijuana infused liquids; statewide, total cultivation is capped at 2 million square feet and retail shops are limited to 334; and the product is taxed at 25 percent at each level of sale.
MARIJUANA: OHIO DECIDES TOWN HALL EVENT
The Dayton Daily News, WHIO Radio, Newscenter 7 and the Dayton Area League of Women Voters is hosting a town hall discussion on the marijuana issue facing Ohio voters on Wednesday, Sept. 23. Here’s how to go and join the discussion:
Where: Sinclair Community College, Building 12, Smith Auditorium, 444 W. Third Street, Dayton.
Time: 7-8:30 p.m.; Wednesday, Sept. 23
Listen live: If you can't make it to the event, you can listen live on AM1290 and News 95.7 WHIO. The event will also stream live online at WHIO.com
Live call-in show: Join us after the forum on WHIO Radio for a call-in show starting at 8:30. Call in at (937) 457-1290
Learn more: Get answers to frequently asked questions, read past stories on the marijuana ballot issue and more at DaytonDailyNews.com/ohiomarijuana
SPECIAL EDITION OF WHIO REPORTS TODAY
WHIO Reports host Jim Otte and Columbus Bureau reporter Laura Bischoff will talk to experts on the marijuana issue during a special edition of WHIO Reports airing on Channel 7 today at 11:30 a.m.
Coming Monday
More on the money and big backers behind efforts to legalize marijuana in Ohio.
Business at Uncle Ike’s Pot Shop is buzzing as nine “budtenders” help customers pick out weed, candies, bongs and more while another dozen people stand in line and flip through “menus.”
“I can help the next guest down here,” an employee shouts out.
Open for just under a year, Uncle Ike’s already has 30 employees, a taco food truck in the parking lot, a glass and goods satellite shop and $1.5 million in monthly sales, according to Kenji Hobbs, the night manager.
“It’s like Black Friday in here every day on a weekend but without the trampling and yelling,” he said.
While Ohioans will vote Nov. 3 on whether to legalize marijuana for medical and recreational purposes, the state of Washington said yes to legal recreational weed in November 2012 and opened its first retail stores in July 2014.
To say there is a market is an understatement. The state has licensed 161 growers, 492 processor/growers, 56 processors and 196 retailers. In the first fiscal year, the recreational pot industry sold $259.8 million worth of products off the shelf and paid $64.95 million in taxes to the state.
The blossoming industry hasn’t been complete shock to Washington, which is a politically liberal state that has had legal medical marijuana for 17 years. Lawmakers just moved to put medical dispensaries under the same regulations as recreational license holders. And legal weed isn’t popular statewide — some jurisdictions in sparsely populated, more politically conservative areas of Washington banned marijuana businesses, which has sparked litigation over whether locals have the power to prohibit a business sanctioned by the state.
Ohio’s weed plan resembles Washington’s in some key areas: tight regulation by state authorities, adults only, no public use, limits on personal possession amounts and a 1,000-foot buffer between weed operations and places frequented by kids.
But there are big differences as well. Ohio Issue 3 calls for legalizing medical and recreational marijuana at the same time and authorizing 10 investor groups that are financing the campaign to grow most of the legal pot statewide. Ohio adults would be allowed to homegrow up to four flowering plants – something that Washington still prohibits.
‘Ten growers?’
Although the monopoly issue has hovered like a black cloud over Ohio’s ballot issue, it sounds appealing to Rick Garza, director of the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board.
“Ten growers? I’m so jealous,” he said. “If you’re a regulator like we are, how much easier would it be to regulate 10 growers versus 1,000?”
Garza and his staff of 330 oversee both liquor and marijuana statewide. Although retail sales have only been underway for 15 months, they average $2.3 million a day, he said.
Washington produced more than 73,000 pounds of legal recreational weed in the first fiscal year — enough for more than 60 million joints — and almost $65 million in tax revenues. ResponsibleOhio, the campaign pushing Issue 3, estimates the 10 growing groups will eventually produce 538,000 pounds and generate $554 million in tax revenues per year.
Seattle area residents in the legal weed business scratch their heads when they hear that Ohio’s plan would allow just 10 commercial growers.
Andrew Seitz, operations manager at Dutch Brothers Farms, said entrepreneurs will be blocked out from cultivation and “your state is going to lag behind in creativity and quality — things like that.”
Marijuana is akin to wine in that consumers want quality and variety, said Seitz, 42, a former mortgage broker who sunk his life savings into a small indoor growing operation.
Washington’s recreational marijuana industry is a highly-regulated, heavily-taxed, decentralized system. It is populated by upstart entrepreneurs, crafty artisans and sharp business operators.
Jill Lane, master grower at Sky High Gardens, which is Seattle’s largest grower, was working as a banker when she started providing consulting services to medical marijuana businesses.
She quickly determined that her clients knew pot but lacked business acumen. “Most of the growers I encountered were flighty and not business oriented. They were artist types,” she said. “It was just operated like the wild west.”
Lane, 35, applied her business skills to build Sky High Gardens as a purveyor of top-shelf quality bud — first for the medical market and now for the recreational users. The business has 25 full-time employees, $2.2 million in projected annual sales and just under 5,000 square feet of cultivation tucked inside a three-story, non-descript industrial building sandwiched between a highway overpass and the Seattle harbor.
Sky High Gardens welcomes tourists from around the globe with the hopes of changing the stereotype. “It’s not a bunch of ex-hippies in tie-dye shirts getting stoned all day,” Lane said. “I’d say that weed grow is very scientific and it takes a sharp brain.”
Baked into Washington’s Initiative 502 is a mandate for independent analysis of the impact of legal marijuana. But researchers reported on Sept. 1 that it’s too soon to tell what the outcomes are on education, public health, traffic safety, crime and other aspects.
The Seattle Times reported that fatal crashes involving drivers who tested positive for THC, marijuana’s psychoactive chemical, climbed 56 percent between 2013 to 2014. But missing from the reports is whether the THC was active or inactive in their systems. And keep in mind, the retail stores didn’t start opening until July 2014.
The newspaper also reported that the number of low-level pot possession cases in state courts dropped from 5,531 in 2012 to 120 in 2013.
The Washington State Institute for Public Policy said there isn’t enough data yet to draw cause-and-effect conclusions. “Effects of the law will not be detectable until several years after implementation, and it may take longer for any effects to stabilize,” the researchers said.
‘Do no harm’
Washington’s journey to legal recreational weed began a decade ago when the ACLU hired Alison Holcomb to work on marijuana and social justice issues and voters elected Pete Holmes as the Seattle city attorney. His first day on the job, in January 2010, Holmes immediately dropped all the pending misdemeanor marijuana possession tickets.
Holmes advocated for Initiative 502 on the 2012 ballot with the belief that marijuana prohibition had led to unnecessary mass incarcerations, which disproportionately hit African Americans and poor people, and unnecessary government interference into what adults do in the privacy of their own homes.
“Nothing is worse, first of all, than wrong-headed government policy,” Holmes said. “I’m a firm believer in do no harm. And when a government policy is costing you dearly in coin — not to mention human resources and the toll that it takes — and failing to accomplish all of your laudable objectives about access by youth, impaired driving and instead you end up granting effectively a monopoly to the illegal enterprises, that is just the definition of insanity.”
Holmes said Initiative 502 sparked an “enlightened discourse”about the impact of the war on drugs, how America has five percent of the global population but 25 percent of the incarcerations and how a different approach would work.
Holcomb, who is now the ACLU’s director of the campaign for smart justice, authored Initiative 502 and agrees with Holmes that an important by-product has been the public’s willingness to consider an alternative approach.
“I think it was a watershed moment,” she said of its passage. “It gives us an opportunity to see if in fact we can produce better outcomes. It’s the beginning of the conversation, not the end. But it’s taken the conversation in a completely new direction.”
The indoor growing operations in Seattle are largely unnoticeable to passersby. Dutch Brothers Farms is on the second floor of a warehouse behind a hardware and tool rental business. Sky High Gardens doesn’t even have an exterior sign, while inside the pungent aroma of marijuana hangs in the air.
Retail shops face strict limits on advertising and signage and the 1,000-foot buffer rule hems them into locating in industrial areas or on the fringe of neighborhoods.
At Cannabis City, bouncer Joe Iaciofoli is armed with a taser and baton as he carefully checks ID for each customer before they pass through the doors. Inside, 11 cameras record and archive every move made in the 620-square-foot shop. An hour after opening on a Monday morning, Iaciofoli has checked in 25 customers — guys in work boots and jeans, a 20-something woman wearing a sparkly gold party dress, and two Baby Boomer hippies with their long gray hair braided.
Melia Thomas, 26, a part-time nanny, paid $28 for a pre-rolled joint and a gram of marijuana flower that will last her four days. “It has definitely been positive for Washington,” Thomas said. “It brings in a lot of money and taxes and it cuts down on the black market.” Thomas said she appreciates that the products are tested and weighed, unlike when she bought illegal marijuana from her contacts.
James Lathrop, owner of Cannabis City, said customers come for the weed but he predicts that eventually they’ll buy products and pens that will allow them to vape marijuana in public without the signature fragrance of pot alerting people nearby.
In Ohio, opponents are hammering away on the fears that legal marijuana will be harmful to youth.
Washington’s Healthy Youth Survey found marijuana use among eighth graders unchanged in 2014 compared with 2012 but more kids report that adults wouldn’t think it was wrong for them to use marijuana and fewer students think there is a great risk to regularly using marijuana.
Dr. Leslie Walker, chief of the division of adolescent medicine at Seattle Children’s Hospital, said using marijuana as a teen or young adult carries big risks: addiction, difficulty sleeping, memory loss, arrested brain development, paranoia and more.
Walker’s face appears on billboards in Seattle, urging parents to talk to their children about marijuana.
Walker said there are disturbing trends, including children vaping marijuana and holding “dabbing” parties.
Dabbing involves cooking a mixture of butane and marijuana in an oven — risking fires and explosions — to reduce the cannabis to a highly concentrated paste. Users smoke just a pinhead amount of the paste for an all day high.
Her advice to Ohio if it legalizes marijuana? Invest money in prevention and education of parents, slap on high taxes so kids are less likely to buy it and make sure it isn’t packaged to appeal to children. While ResponsibleOhio is using Buddie, a costumed superhero, to advocate for Issue 3, Washington’s recreational weed businesses face strict rules on advertising and packaging to ensure they aren’t pitching to children.
“If you make rules, hold people accountable to the rules that you have and if you have money that is to go to prevention, intervention and treatment…make sure it can’t be taken away,” Walker said.
Holmes, the Seattle city attorney, agreed with Walker. He said the state supreme court issued a contempt order against the Washington legislature for failure to adequately fund public education and there is pressure to dip into the marijuana tax revenue stream. Holmes, though, wants it preserved for industry regulation, drug treatment and evaluation of the legal weed program.
Shifting ground
Fifteen months after the first retail shops opened, the ground is already shifting on Washington’s marijuana laws. This past spring lawmakers passed a bill to merge regulation of the recreational and medical marijuana markets and a change in the tax rates and structures. Also, this week, state regulators and the Suquamish Tribe signed a marijuana agreement that will allow the tribe to operate a retail store under rules governing other retailers, according to the Seattle Times.
Holmes expects that eventually there will be a loosening of the strict ban on public consumption.
Cannabis City’s billboard looming over Fourth Avenue beckons customers to “Come See What All the Buzz is About.” But for tourists who want to try legal weed there are few options for using it while visiting Washington: hotels and rental car companies largely ban smoking pot or any other substance on their properties.
Lane of Sky High Gardens said Washington gets a lot of attention from states such as Ohio that are considering legalizing marijuana. “Overall, I think that Washington is looking pretty responsible,” she said.
For Colin McCrate, who grew up in Beavercreek but moved to Seattle in 2003, the legalization question should be a no-brainer for Ohioans. Lots of people use marijuana responsibly, he said, and shouldn’t have to hide it from law enforcement.
“I think it’s hard to come up with an argument not to legalize marijuana,” he said. “It would be a very healthy change for Ohio.”
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