Nevada Governor Wants State of Emergency to Get More Weed

Much like my college apartment, Nevada considers running out of marijuana to be a state of emergency. Only two weeks after dispensaries in Nevada began selling legal cannabis, their stocks are running low and they’re left with no way to restock. Now the state is considering declaring a state of emergency in order to allow more distributors to acquire wholesale licenses.

The problem here is that the marijuana industry is wrapped up in all sorts of bureaucratic nonsense meant to protect entrenched moneyed interests. In what can only be described as an attempt to undermine the very concept of democracy itself, Nevada voters approved a ballot initiative giving existing alcohol wholesalers the exclusive right to distribute marijuana for 18 months.

Given a complete monopoly on wholesale marijuana distribution in the state, alcohol wholesalers turned out to be completely incompetent. Not one of applications from these wholesalers to distribute weed was approved because of zoning issues or improperly filled out applications.

So why a state of emergency? Well, the taxes on marijuana sales are meant to go to the Nevada school system. If dispensaries can’t restock their inventory, the public schools could lose millions of dollars in tax revenue. And if that happens, we could have a whole new generation of children who can’t fill out an application to distribute weed properly.

A state of emergency would allow the state to issue distribution licenses to people who can manage to fill out the application properly, which in turn will allow residents and tourists to get high enough to forget that state is having massive problems selling weed, an activity underachieving high school students have been managing just fine for decades.