Legal marijuana in California as a business was supposed to be a no-brainer. How could it not be profitable in a liberal state pushing 40 million residents where some of the best weed in the world has been grown for decades? But nearly three years after Proposition 64, the law legalizing the adult use of the drug, was passed, California cannabis producers are not seeing the windfalls predicted. They tell Sharyn Alfonsi that regulations and a robust black market are cutting into legal pot profits. Alfonsi reports from Northern California's "Emerald Triangle" on the next edition of 60 Minutes, Sunday, October 27, at 7:30 p.m. ET and 7 p.m. PT on CBS.
"The regulated market has been a fraction of what everybody expected it to be," says Mikey Steinmetz. So far, he hasn't seen the profits promised to investors who put up $175 million to seed his pot processing center, a sprawling warehouse where he shows Alfonsi tens of thousands of pounds of cannabis being processed for sale to retailers. And those retailers are a big part of the problem – there aren't enough of them. "There's less retailers in California than there are in the State of Oregon," he tells Alfonsi. California has nearly 10 times the population of Oregon.
The California law gives local governments the right to regulate the pot shops so towns can prohibit them. A whopping 80% of the state's towns and cities have turned legal pot shops down.
Quite simple, actually, but today's techniques and plants are much improved. A lot is grown indoors in controlled conditions nowadays.
