Marijuana may be legal in Washington, but things can change fast — especially with a new administration coming in the door.
President-elect Donald Trump said on the campaign trail that individual states should decide the issue. Then he nominated an attorney general who called legalizing pot a “tragic mistake.”
Should people in Washington who own pot shops or who have invested heavily in the marijuana industry be concerned?
Bruce White, who owns White Rabbit Cannabis along Highway 99 in Lynnwood, doesn’t think so, but then he said Trump is “untested and unpredictable.”
“I would be quite surprised if the new administration actually went after the marijuana business as it’s going right now, but who knows?” White said.
If the feds were to put a stop to the sales, it would be devastating for him and his wife. “Oh, it would wipe us out. We’ve invested a good portion of our life savings into this. It would be catastrophic. We have 19 employees here.”
Another pot shop owner says he’s “vaguely concerned” about the new administration.
Gene Kulinovsky owns two pots shops in Snohomish County — Kushman’s at 15804 Highway 99 in Lynnwood and the just opening Kushman’s at 11110 Mukilteo Speedway, Suite 102, in Mukilteo.
He thinks there would be too much outcry for the feds to stop legal pot sales, noting that 70 million on the West Coast have voted to make it legal.
“I don’t see the administration going against this many people,” Kulinovsky said.
Recreational use is now legal in eight states and medicinal use for pot is legal in 28 states and the District of Columbia.
But Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, has long been critical of pot. As a U.S. attorney in Alabama in the 1980s, Sessions joked that he thought the Ku Klux Klan were OK until he found out some were pot smokers. Last year, Sessions said during a Senate hearing that “good people don’t smoke marijuana.” He went on to say, “We need grown-ups in charge in Washington to say marijuana is not the kind of thing that ought to be legalized.”
For now, a 2013 memo from then-Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole continues to guide federal prosecutors on marijuana enforcement. Simple possession is considered a low priority left up to state and local enforcement.
Federal officials are encouraged to focus instead on priorities such as ensuring that marijuana sales aren’t supporting gang activity and that the drug isn’t getting transported across state lines to places where it remains illegal. Sessions hasn’t said laid out what, if anything, he would do differently with pot.
As the nation’s top law enforcement officers, Sessions could direct the Drug Enforcement Administration to raid pot shops and growers.
The Justice Department could also file lawsuits on the grounds that state laws regulating pot are unconstitutional because they are pre-empted by federal law.
So far, the Liquor and Cannabis Board hasn’t heard from any pot shop owners concerned about their businesses, said Brian Smith, the state agency’s communication director. Instead, it’s only been a few reporters with questions.
The state has issued 467 licenses for pot businesses. Pot buyers spent $972 million for legal marijuana in the state’s last fiscal year from July 2015 to June 2016. Of that, the state collected $185 million in excise taxes. White was one of the first licensees, part of the lottery for the initial release of retail pot licenses.
His father-in-law had purchased a slice of property at 15928 Highway 99 S about 50 years ago and had never done anything with the property.
White and his wife had been in construction when they applied for the retail license. After they received it, they brought an 840-square-foot modular building onto the land, which met all the zoning requirements for the new businesses.
The White Rabbit has been open about a year and a half. He’s served everyone from 90 year olds interested in smoking pot to people from the Deep South who marvel it being legal.
“It’s been excellent,” White said. “It’s surpassed my expectations. We get a complete cross-section of humanity coming in here.”
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