Homeless in Arizona

Ray Stern So, Mickey, you can get pot for $50-100 an ounce, but it's your lack of access to cheap, high-quality weed that you're concerned with? Interesting. Don't worry, Mickey -- it's called supply and demand. If Prop 205 passes, the supply will go way up, and the price will come down. It's a law of economics and all the talk about "phoney baloney" legalization won't change that. Who cares what RAD or Safer 2018's proposals will do if they won't get on the ballot and won't pass?

Mickey Jones Ray Stern - As long as there is a cartel of 85 to a maximum of 160 legal marijuana dealers the law of supply and demand says that the price of marijuana will stay outrageously high.

Billy Hayes video taped the July 2014 Phoenix NORML meeting in which Andrew Myers spoke. Andrew Myers is from MPP and ran the team of people that wrote Prop 203, which is Arizona's Medical Marijuana Act.

At that meeting Andrew Myers said that when the laws of supply and demand kick in the price of medical marijuana should drop to the dirt cheap price of $200 and ounce.

Of course that is with the existing cartel of less then 100 medical marijuana dispensaries.

Since the cartel of recreational marijuana dealers will be the same group of businessmen that own the cartel of medical marijuana stores, I suspect the prices of $200 an ounce will stay the same.

And as long as the price of marijuana is $200 an ounce the cartels and the crime that comes with the cartels is going to continue to exi

Mickey Jones Ray Stern - One thing I forgot to mention was that the laws of supply and demand are already in effect with the medical marijuana dispensaries.

There are a measly 85 to 90 medical marijuana dispensaries and that severely limits the supply of legal marijuana. This limited supply allows the dispensaries to charge their rip off prices of $300 an ounce.

If the MPP initiative passes, we have two scenarios that can happen.

In both scenarios the demand for legal recreational marijuana will increase dramatically.

In scenarios #1 as required by law ONLY the 85 or so medical marijuana dispensaries will be granted licenses to sell recreational marijuana. That will not increase the supply at all since the same folks that have the medical marijuana cartel will also have the recreational marijuana cartel.

In this scenarios because the demand has gone up and the supply has not increased, we could actually see the dispensaries raising their prices. Will we see recreational and medical marijuana selling for the rip off price of $400 an ounce in Arizona? I don't know.

I believe that Jason Medar of the AZfrm group thinks this is the most like scenario to happen.

In scenarios #2 the new Department of Marijuana could issued all 160 licenses for recreational marijuana stores.

This will only add about 75 new recreational marijuana stores to the current 85 or so medical marijuana stores. So the number of stores that sell marijuana will almost double.

This will give us about 85 stores that sell medical marijuana, and 160 stores that sell recreational marijuana.

So in this case the number of business that sell marijuana will about double in size. And the number of people that are allowed to use marijuana will increase from the current 80,000 to 100,000 medical marijuana patients to maybe 3 million adults in Arizona.

So in this case the supply will about double.

On the other hand the number of people that could use marijuana will increase by a factor 30 from around 100,000 medical marijuana patients to the 3,000,000 adults in the state of Arizona.

If we guesstimate that only one third of the 3 million adults who COULD use marijuana will actually use it, then the demand will increase by a factor of 15, or 1,500 percent.

So what we have is the supply increasing by a factor of 2, while the demand increasing by a factor of 15.

With that in mind the prices the marijuana stores could actually rise, because the demand has increased by a factor of 7 and a half times that the supply has increased by.

Personally I suspect the marijuana prices will stay the same and hover around $300 an ounce.

Or as you said the prices could decrease. But I doubt if they will decrease because of the huge increase in demand compared to a small increase in supply.