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Showing posts from January, 2018

Why disrupting government pot policy is so much harder than the taxi commission

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This post was also published in VentureBeat. The recent legalization of recreational marijuana in California and other states now totals to 45 states that have legalized some form of marijuana . However, the federal government has never endorsed even medical marijuana. The Obama administration created rules known as the Cole memo where they decided not to enforce federal marijuana laws if states legalized it. Recently, Attorney General Jeff Sessions reversed this course and stated that marijuana laws would be enforced. A raft of startups are operating in this tenuous legal gray area, including Eaze, Baker, and Pax Labs. Much like Uber and Lyft flouted taxi commission regulations, these startups are betting that public sentiment and user traction will overcome the existing legal and regulatory environment. Indeed, all of the state legalization efforts were passed by millennial-driven voter ballot initiatives in both red and blue states rather than by entrenched legislators. The ci