In a political landscape where cannabis legality often feels like a tug-of-war between progress and regression, a new poll by NuggMD shines a stark light on what might happen if federal enforcement started pushing legal dispensaries out of business: most consumers would simply go back to the black market.
Prompted by recent headlines that a federal prosecutor had threatened the owners of a fully legal D.C.-area dispensary, NuggMD surveyed nearly 500 frequent cannabis users between May 1 and May 11. The findings are telling: 63% of respondents said they would turn to unregulated sources if their local legal shop closed. Just 30% said they'd be willing to travel to a legal source, and a scant 7% said they'd stop using cannabis altogether.
Andrew Graham, NuggMD's head of communications: "To me, this data shows that any policy action that restricts or impedes access will re-criminalize cannabis use at a massive scale," he said. "And thus is the hypocrisy of prohibition."
It's a potent, if not ironic, dynamic: enforcement that ostensibly aims to curb criminal activity may instead push consumers back into the very system it seeks to dismantle. As Graham put it, "Forcing ordinary, tax-paying consumers into the black market for cannabis is the best way I can think of to stimulate the criminal enterprises that prohibitionists claim to want to stop."
The poll has a margin of error of ±4.5%, but the message is clear regardless. Convenience matters. Access matters. And in a country where cannabis legality is a patchwork of contradictions, threatening regulated businesses doesn't make cannabis go away, it just changes where it's bought and who profits from it.
"It's almost as if the prohibitionists secretly want the black markets to thrive," Graham said. "It's easier to sell more enforcement if you make up more crime to point at."
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