Article Mention: Massachusetts Medical Marijuana Customers Are Buying Cheap, Good Weed — In Maine

Photo credit Shira Schoenberg, from the full article (linked below).

I recently spoke with Shira Schoenberg, a reporter with MassLive.com, about the increasing trend of Massachusetts medical marijuana patients traveling to nearby Maine to purchase their medicine. This is driven partly by substantial price differences, and partly by the recent ban on vaporizer cartridges in Massachusetts (while Maine did not adopt such a ban). While transporting marijuana across state lines is a federal crime, so is selling or possessing marijuana in the first place, so many patients are deciding that it’s worth the slightly increased risk.

As a current Maine resident & former Massachusetts resident, and with my career in the state-regulated cannabis industry, this is a really interesting story to me. It drives home many points that I think are undervalued in politics: that people are usually rational actors who seek out the best value when making purchases, that taxes and regulations increase costs (which are passed on to consumers), that bans often have adverse consequences, and that policies only matter to the extent that they are enforced.

Read the excerpt with my comments below, and read the full article here: https://www.masslive.com/news/2019/12/massachusetts-medical-marijuana-customers-are-buying-cheap-good-weed-in-maine.html

KITTERY, Maine — Ingrid Martinez is terminally ill and undergoing chemotherapy. Medical marijuana helps her alleviate her nausea and pain. Martinez, 50, a Lowell resident who worked in medical coding before she got sick, travels to Maine every three weeks or so to buy marijuana.

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Sam Tracy, government relations director at multistate cannabis company 4Front Ventures, estimates that prices are around half in Maine of what they are in Massachusetts. Tracy lives in Maine, and 4Front Ventures does business in Massachusetts.

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Tracy, of 4Front Ventures, said Maine marijuana is cheaper partially because the market is more mature, and growers have had 20 years to develop expertise legally.

It is also much easier to open a business in Maine. The license fee for a Maine caregiver who wants to grow up to 30 mature plants and 60 immature plants, the maximum allowed, is $1,200. The fee to open a medical marijuana dispensary in Massachusetts is $30,000 plus a $1,500 application fee. Maine does not have testing or packaging requirements for medical marijuana caregivers, the way Massachusetts does.

“A lot of those more public health-focused regulations that Massachusetts had in terms of testing requirements and things like that are just not really present in Maine,” Tracy said.

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