Steve Robinson

You couldn't design it better if you were trying to reward the least ethical players, because what we're rewarding now is cannabis arbitrage.

So if you're setting up a business in the United States, the best possible way to do it is to cultivate it in a state like Maine, where the stakes of getting caught if you're growing way over the legal limits are very low.

If you get caught growing 5,000 plants and you don't have a license or your license is for 35 plants, you might get $500 bail, slap on the wrist.

If you're a Chinese illegal alien, you might get deported back to China, but probably not.

You can just post your bail and disappear back into New York, but there's gonna be no penalty for it.

You grow it illegally in a state where it's legal to cultivate it in some ways,

bring it to a tobacco shop, and sell it illegally as hemp.

And you benefit from not paying fees, not paying taxes, but you also have access to the existing payment rails.

Like, you know, you can use Visa, you can use your traditional bank account, you can use Square, you can use the traditional payment rails.

And the money's clean once it goes through the tobacco shop.

It's not drug cash money.

It's clean, and that's the most profitable way to do it.

That's the system that we've created and rewarded.

And the people who are willing to break federal law by crossing state lines, by growing over the limits, by selling a product as something other than what it is, are the people who don't necessarily have the best business ethics.

And because they're willing to take advantage of this system the way it is now, they're making billions of dollars.

Not one person individually making that much money, but the people who are engaged in this enterprise are making huge amounts of money.

So if you were to have at least a national framework that established rules for the road for doing this kind of thing, you could

take away the advantage that the least ethical players have when it comes to exploiting this arbitrage.

The system currently forces the cultivation demand into states like Maine, Oklahoma, and California to feed the appetite for the entire country.

So Maine is growing way more cannabis than can ever be consumed by Mainers.