I was in one of those too-upscale-for-their-product dispensaries in Salem last week, and after purchasing some extremely overpriced pre-rolls, I was handed two pieces of paper: a "Cannabis Is For Everyone" sticker and a flyer that read, "Marijuana Can Harm Children." What an excellent and/or terrible way to market your weed—whoever decided to package those two trash-bound pieces of literature together was either an evil genius or a complete moron. If you think about it, however, you really have to be both, if you want to be an effective weed dealer. So, with that, I give to you the following list of tips on how to sell weed in the current year
Compared to two years ago, the "I’m gonna sell weed now that it’s legal to possess" crowd has experienced a Bitcoin-level drop in income, and along with having their hopes and dreams of being the "only dispensary in (insert town with a few dozen dispensaries here)" shattered, many would-be weight-pushers are sitting on literal pounds of pot. So, the question remains, how does one move units in an over-saturated market? Twenty years ago, good weed was more expensive—on the black market, at that— than it is today, even with tax included and purchased from the top shelf. Thankfully, by being the right combination of stupid and clever, there are several ways you can raise prices without fucking up your market demand.
The first—and most obvious—is Idaho. That’s right—the great strip of land that separates Oregon farmers from Utah Mormons is full of cops and klan members, which means that you can still get a hefty price for a pound of the loud shit. I’m not kidding, either—while looking for weed in Boise, I had to meet up with a black Republican, who drove a BMW and met me in a parking garage—like something straight out of Grand Theft Auto. For $20, I received a half gram of the most mediocre cannabis I’ve smoked since high school. Yes, you’re going to be facing some serious time if you get popped selling weed there, but since Idaho is, like eastern Oregon, mostly farm country, just smuggle your bricks hidden in manure or some other, foul-smelling, literal shit that farm people keep in their trucks. Think local and act local.
This is a humor column, not intended to be taken seriously, blah blah blah. Okay, with that said—kids these days will pay a serious premium for weed, especially vape pens and stuff they can sneak into school. Think about it—back in our day, pooling together money, giving it to a bum and having him buy a bottle of shitty vodka was much, much more acceptable than buying "drugs," i.e. pot. Well, today, weed is on par with booze, in terms of how long the average teenager will get grounded for having it. Plus, I’m no legal expert, but I’m pretty sure that contributing to the delinquency of a minor is a far smaller crime than, say, selling heroin to teenagers, as long as you’re not in the library or some other federal building. The premium you add to pot sold to kids has a much higher margin than the premium dispensaries can add for adults. Plus, you’re almost guaranteed to double or triple your customer base, as soon as the word gets out that you’re the guy hanging around the record store with medibles and dabs. Speaking of heroin...
Look, I know that dishonesty is a bad thing, but you could be saving someone’s life here. Either that, or we will all learn how to shoot up THC. Regardless, I call this a win-win. There is an opiate epidemic in our country and one way to solve it, would be to turn the teenage girls, who are taking that first step of Oxycotin on the path to Heroinland, into productive members of whatever art community their high school offers. This is a last resort for you, the broke-ass weed dealer, but it could be a life-changing first step in the life of a young junkie. They say that pot is a gateway drug, but if your customer is already three veins shy of having to break the needle off and do butt stuff to get high, that gateway is more of an exit.
The misspelling above is intentional, but you cryptocurrency investors reading this already know that. The theory is, that if you had bought Bitcoin at the top of the 2014 market, your investment would have dropped to virtually nothing by the end of the year. However, if you had refused to sell, "hodl" style, and kept your Bitcoins for the following four years, your investment would be at least six times the initial rate that you put in—even at current, yearly lows. Therefore, it’s only safe to assume that something— whether a drought or a change in the laws—will end up having a serious impact on the supply and/or price of weed at some point in the future, but only time will tell. Perhaps one of those "Portland drivers on YouTube" winter seasons is approaching us. Maybe the dispensary down the street will catch fire in some weird, unpredictable fashion that only the insurance company will be able to solve. Better yet, what if Bigfoot is real, and he’s intentionally smoking up all the pot in Humboldt, before the fires reach Northern Cali? There’s no way of telling when your stashed-away stash will end up being worth a pile of cash. In fact, that rhymed too well for it not to be true.
