Tag: black market

NHS hippy crack heists: Hospitals are warned thieves are now stealing nitrous oxide ‘laughing’ gas to order – after law change made the canisters illegal

Nitrous oxide suppliers have warned the NHS to review their security after a spike in incidents of thefts since the gas was banned and reclassified as a class C drug.

BOC, the UK’s leading supplier of medicinal gasses, sent a letter to NHS staff revealing they have ‘received a number of reports of thefts related to medical nitrous oxide cylinders in recent weeks’.

The firm warned: ‘In light of the recent reclassification of nitrous oxide under the Misuse of Drugs Act, we feel it is important to draw your attention to the possibility that legitimate users of medical nitrous oxide may become a target of further thefts.’

In the letter, which MailOnline has seen, the supplier urged NHS hospitals and their customers to review their medical gas cylinder security to deter any potential misuse or theft.

It comes after a new law introduced in November classified nitrous oxide as a Class C drug and made it illegal to possess it for the purpose of getting high.

But youngsters were undeterred and vowed to carry on using it, with their demand now fueling cannister thefts from NHS hospitals across the country.

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E.U. Regulations Created a Port Wine Black Market

People have been making wine in the verdant hills of northern Portugal’s Douro Valley for nearly 2,000 years. Nowadays, the region is home to more than 19,000 grape farmers and 1,000 companies tending terraced vineyards that tower above the Douro River below.

Hundreds of these vineyards are small, often family-owned, properties called quintas, many of which produce port: a syrupy, sweet fortified wine. As a European Union–protected designation of origin product (similar to French Champagne or Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano), the production, labeling, and sale of port are heavily regulated—sometimes to the detriment of the small-scale operators keeping the cultural practice alive.

When I visited the Douro Valley this fall, one quinta owner shared that she couldn’t officially sell port because of burdensome government regulations. All port sellers are required to keep at least 75,000 liters in reserve at all times, she explained—a standard that large producers can meet, but one that might bankrupt a small quinta like hers. In effect, she could only participate in this important cultural heritage as a black market seller.

Francisco Montenegro, owner of the Douro Valley–based Aneto Wines, notes that would-be port sellers have to grapple with several regulations that make it difficult for them to enter the market. On top of the 75,000-liter stock minimum, port producers are allowed to sell or market only one-third of their output, “thus forcing the producer to let [two-thirds] of their wines age.” They have to register under a specific tax status “as they work with spirits,” which requires them to “pay more customs taxes.” Government regulations also mandate that producers “wait at least 3 or 4 years if they want to bottle a normal tawny” port, Montenegro says.

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Delaware Treasurer Promotes New Marijuana Banking Bill To Provide State-Level Protections

Delaware’s treasurer is promoting new legislation that would provide state-level protections to banks that provide services to licensed marijuana businesses.

The bill was filed by Rep. Ed Osienski (D) and Sen. Trey Paradee (D) in partnership with state Treasurer Colleen Davis (D). It comes amid mounting pressure on Congress to enact federal cannabis banking reform.

The Delaware measure is designed to clarify that banks, credit unions, armored car services and accounting services providers are not subject to state-level prosecution simply for working with cannabis businesses.

“This Act aims to facilitate the operation of cannabis-related businesses by helping to ensure that such businesses have access to necessary financial and accounting services,” the bill synopsis says.

Davis, the treasurer, said in a press release last week that “H.B. 355 will provide state-level legal protection, and a clear legal framework for banks, payment processors, and other financial service providers to follow.”

“It can also ease concerns about federal enforcement and regulatory compliance among these businesses—since it allows them to demonstrate to federal agencies that they’re following a clear legal framework, ultimately leading to a safer and more transparent marijuana industry,” she said.

A press release from Davis’s office also says that, in addition to providing the basic protections, the bill would effectively boost the economy, enhance safety and promote competition.

“Across the country, we’ve witnessed dispensaries and banks alike struggling with legal uncertainty surrounding financial and accounting services for cannabis businesses,” Osienski, the House sponsor, said. “This uncertainty not only undermines the operations of state-compliant dispensaries but also hinders their access to basic business functions such as access to banking, acquiring loans, or paying taxes.”

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Political Stupidity and Bureaucratic Bungling Created New York’s Pot Legalization ‘Disaster’

As of last June, more than two years after New York legalized recreational marijuana, just 12 state-licensed dispensaries had opened for business, falling far short of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s prediction that more than 100 would be operating by that summer. Six months later, Hochul was bragging that “nearly 40 adult-use dispensaries will have opened in 2023.” The current count is 87. Those stores, The New York Times notes, “are far outnumbered by more than 2,000 rogue head shops, the target of complaints that they siphon customers, sell to children and attract criminals.”

New York’s rollout of marijuana legalization has been a “disaster,” as Hochul conceded in January. “Every other storefront” is an unlicensed pot shop, she told The Buffalo News. “It’s insane.”

That disaster has frustrated would-be retailers, left farmers in the lurch, played havoc with tax revenue projections, and made a joke out of any expectation that New York, by learning from the experience of states that legalized marijuana earlier, would do a better job of displacing the black market. The insanity that Hochul perceives is a product of bad decisions by politicians who should have known better and obstruction by regulators who sacrificed efficiency on the altar of diversity.

Unlike states such as New Jersey, where voters approved legalization in 2020, and Maryland, where a similar ballot initiative passed two years later, New York did not initially allow existing medical dispensaries to start serving the recreational market. Its slow and complicated licensing process, which was skewed by an “equity” program that prioritized approval of applicants with marijuana-related criminal records or their relatives, is maddeningly hard to navigate.

Those preferences invited lawsuits by people who were excluded, which further delayed approval of licenses. Guidance and financial help for people struggling to jump through the state’s hoops never materialized. And as in other states, high taxes and burdensome regulations have made it hard for licensed businesses to compete with unauthorized dealers.

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Pirate Streaming Sites Cost Hollywood $30 Billion Annually

“[P]iracy involving illegal streaming services as well as file-sharing costs the US economy about $30 billion in lost revenue a year and some 250,000 jobs,” reports the far-left Bloomberg.

That estimate comes from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center. “The global impact,” the report adds, “is about $71 billion annually.”

“Ever since taking on Netflix Inc. at its own game, old Hollywood has struggled to turn a profit in streaming, with the likes of Disney+, Peacock and Paramount+ losing billions of dollars each year[.]” This has Wall Street living with the fear that streaming services will never match the massive income generated by cable TV. And that’s because they won’t.

“But the age of streaming has been a boon for some unintended winners,” Bloomberg found. Primarily “pirates that use software to rip a film or television show in seconds from legitimate online video platforms and host the titles on their own[.]” These “illegitimate services … rake in about $2 billion annually from ads and subscriptions.”

Because these pirate sites don’t share the burden of the costs associated with producing the movies and TV shows they stream for their subscribers, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) believes their profit margins reach as high as 90 percent.

The MPA says there are about 130 illicit streaming sites earning five to ten dollars a month from each of two million subscribers.

“Some of these pirate websites have gotten more daily visits than some of the top 10 legitimate sites,” Karyn Temple, the MPA’s general counsel, told Bloomberg. “That really shows how prolific they are.”

Within two years, starting with 2022, the cumulative losses will climb to $113 billion.

The article gives some of the two million illicit subscribers the benefit of the doubt. The pirate sites are sophisticated enough to look legitimate, so people might not know it’s illegal. Still, there is a full-court legal press to put a stop to this. Millions of unvetted illegal aliens flooding over the border? Hollywood doesn’t care. But don’t you dare not pay full price for Squid Game.

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New York Governor Proposes Repealing Marijuana Potency Tax To Reduce Costs And Combat Illicit Market

The governor of New York is calling for the elimination of a THC potency tax as part of her executive budget, aiming to reduce costs for consumers in a way that could make the regulated market more competitive against illicit operators.

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s (D) budget proposal for the 2025 fiscal year would repeal the potency tax and replace it with a wholesale excise tax of 9 percent in a way that “simplifies, streamlines, and reduces the tax collection obligations and burden for cultivators, processors, and distributors.”

Cannabis would also still be subject to the existing 9 percent state retail excise tax and four percent local retail excise tax. The changes are estimated to effectively drive down the total tax rate on marijuana from an average 38 percent to 22 percent.

For vertically-integrated medical cannabis operators and microbusinesses, the new wholesale excise tax would accrue on the final retail sale to consumers and be imposed on 75 percent of the final retail sales price, the governor’s proposal says.

The briefing book for the budget says the tax changes would “promote and support the expansion of the legal adult-use cannabis market” and also result in a “net positive impact” of $6.5 million for localities.

But by reducing costs for consumers and businesses, the tax policy reform could also help the administration and regulators address one of their top priorities: driving out the illicit market.

While licensing of legal marijuana businesses has rolled out slowly amid litigation, New York has been dealing with a proliferation of hundreds of unregulated cannabis shops with prices that are generally lower because the operators don’t concern themselves with excise taxes and abiding by other regulations that increase costs.

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Minnesota Officials Form Interagency Plan To Rein In Sales Of High-THC Marijuana Being Sold As Legal Hemp

Minnesota’s cannabis regulators say they have a plan to fill a gap in state law that could be letting some hemp retailers sell marijuana flower without consequence.

Charlene Briner, the interim director of the new Office of Cannabis Management, said Thursday that she is working with other agencies to provide a temporary method to inspect and test raw cannabis flower to make sure it does not violate current law.

She said the agency will look into using inspectors from the Office of Medical Cannabis and the Department of Agriculture to exercise the Office of Cannabis Management’s authority to stop the sale of cannabis flower that is illegal marijuana masquerading as legal hemp.

“OCM is evaluating how to leverage existing enforcement capacity at the Office of Medical Cannabis to act on OCM’s behalf and how we can develop capacity to test raw cannabis flower,” Briner said.

“We’ll be sharing more about those plans as we put them in place,” she said.

To be legal to sell now, hemp flower must contain only 0.3 percent delta-9 THC or less. Such hemp plants do not have enough THC to be intoxicating when eaten or smoked. But by processing the hemp for edibles and beverages, the THC content can be enhanced to produce an intoxicating effect.

Some hemp retailers and smoke shops have been selling raw cannabis flower that might or might not exceed those legal limits. Hemp inspectors have not acted against such sales—or even to test the flower—because while the Office of Medical Cannabis regulates hemp sales, the law doesn’t give it any authority over unprocessed flower.

The loophole became public late last year when former Office of Medical Cannabis director Chris Tholkes discussed it on the national podcast Weed Wonks. She said her inspectors have seen sales of raw cannabis flower that the stores claim is legal hemp but that the inspectors suspect is not.

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Colorado Governor’s Office Slams DeSantis’s Marijuana Stance, Pushing Back Against Claim Legalization Led To ‘Bigger’ Illicit Market

If Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) needs some advice on how to promote “economic and personal freedom,” the state of Colorado is “happy” to explain the advantages of marijuana legalization, Gov. Jared Polis’s (D) office said after the Republican presidential candidate doubled down on his opposition to cannabis reform.

On Friday, DeSantis peddled a dubious claim that Colorado’s illicit market is “bigger” today than it was before legalizing adult-use cannabis in 2012, justifying his own personal opposition to the reform.

In response, a spokesperson for the Colorado governor’s office offered to correct the record for the 2024 GOP presidential hopeful in a statement to Marijuana Moment.

“The facts are that Colorado voters approved the legalization of marijuana which is curbing the illicit market, getting dealers off the streets, reducing youth use, funding school construction, supporting jobs and Colorado’s economy,” the governor’s spokesperson said. “Colorado is happy to provide the Florida governor advice on how to increase economic and personal freedom like we have in the free state of Colorado.”

In an interview on the radio station KCPS that aired on Friday, first noted by Florida Politics, DeSantis had challenged the idea that regulating marijuana sales puts illicit operators “out of business,” stating that it’s an “interesting” concept that he says hasn’t played out in Colorado, despite evidence to the contrary.

“There have been states like Colorado who’ve done things like legalized marijuana and the argument was, well, you want to have a black market? It will be above-board, taxed and all that stuff,” DeSantis said during the interview. “Yet Colorado has a bigger black market of marijuana since they’ve legalized it.”

It’s well-understood that enacting legalization doesn’t fully eliminate the illicit market, and states have had varying degrees of success to that end. But research indicates that Colorado has been among the most effective at transitioning people to the legal marketplace.

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Germany’s Top Health Official Defends Marijuana Legalization Bill Against Critics Ahead Of Next Week’s Vote

As German lawmaker prepare to vote on a revised marijuana legalization bill next week, the country’s health minister defended the reform against critics in the legislature, while briefly outlining next steps for a commercial sales pilot program. Meanwhile, one German state is signaling that it will pursue legal action to block the reform from taking effect within its borders.

At a meeting before the Bundestag on Wednesday, Health Minister Karl Lauterbach took a series of questions from members, some of whom oppose legalization and others who expressed interest in expeditiously enacting the reform.

At several points, he pushed back against lawmakers who suggested that legalization would send the wrong message to youth and lead to increased underage consumption, saying their arguments “misrepresented” the legislation, according to a translation.

“The fact remains that child and youth protection is carried out through education, and sales to children and young people remain prohibited,” Lauterbach said. “That is the only change we have made in this area: a tightening.”

“As part of this legalization, we are pushing back the black market,” he said. “The less of the black market there is, the lower the risk that our children will be brought into consumption through the black market.”

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