Understanding the Cannabis Consumer, Part 2 — The Obstacle Course

Mar 8

Vector: Retail Best Practices

The System’s Three True Aims

Prevent minors from obtaining cannabis.
The ID check is the moral cornerstone — and a reasonable one. It protects minors, satisfies public trust, and, in a twist of irony, gives cannabis retailers something every other category envies: perfect demographic data.
Every purchase is tied to age, region, and frequency. Used responsibly, that insight becomes a tool for understanding, not surveillance.
Prevent intrastate diversion.
Each ID is also linked to daily purchase limits — the invisible line that keeps six turkey bags from heading to Texas.
This friction isn’t arbitrary; it’s structural. When budtenders understand and can explain the “why” behind these limits, regulation turns from obstacle to reassurance.
Friction explained is friction softened.
Presume guilt until proven compliant.
In response to the federal ban, a quiet presumption of guilt still hangs over every legitimate cannabis operator.
To participate in the legal economy, retailers must prove their innocence daily — through seed-to-sale tracking, 24-hour surveillance, armored-car banking, and an avalanche of reporting that no other retail category endures.
This framework has created an economic caste system, a kind of regulatory apartheid.
Cannabis businesses operate in the same neighborhoods, pay the same taxes, hire from the same communities — yet are treated as suspect by default.

Banks close their accounts. Landlords double their deposits. Payroll providers like ADP and UltiPro cancel contracts because a general counsel decided the risk was “too high,” in the abstract.

And local governments often add their own layers of punishment disguised as prudence.
In Alameda County, for example, every prospective dispensary employee must be cleared by the Sheriff’s Department before being hired — a process that can delay onboarding by two to four weeks and costs more than $100 per person.
It’s a ritual of mistrust: slow, expensive, and entirely disconnected from the realities of modern retail operations.

What’s dressed as “due diligence” is, in truth, a residue of fear — the same propaganda-era fear that still defines the frame.
Meanwhile, alcohol and pharmaceuticals do exponentially more damage to our communities, a point so obvious it hardly needs evidence.

The message is clear: you are legal, but you are not legitimate.
And consumers feel that energy too — in the tone of signage, the language of warnings, the tension that hums beneath the surface of even the best-run stores.

Together, these three aims — protection, prevention, and presumption — form the architecture of the obstacle course.
Understanding them isn’t cynicism; it’s clarity. And clarity is the first step toward grace.

The Cruel Irony

The cruel irony of all this over-regulation is that the target of enforcement is not the source of the crime. The problem isn’t the consumer or the retailer — it’s the policy.

In California, the effective tax burden on legal cannabis hovers between 30 and 38 percent. The result? The State itself has created the economic conditions for its own black market. The higher the taxes, the greater the incentive to avoid them.

But the underground of today isn’t the outlaw culture of the past. Today’s illicit market is professionalized: companies with packaging machines and marketing budgets, selling legal weed out the front door and illegal weed out the back.

So while compliant retailers drown in paperwork and surveillance, non-compliant operators thrive in the margin the State created. It’s a kind of policy schizophrenia — punishing legitimacy while rewarding those who ignore the rules.

Until taxation aligns with reality, the system will continue to criminalize the very behavior it claims to have legalized.

The Bureaucracy of Permission

Cannabis is still regulated as if it were uranium, even though everyone knows it’s less harmful than alcohol or oxycodone. The rules were built on fear, not evidence — an inheritance from the same propaganda that once painted cannabis as a threat.

For the consumer, this creates a strange emotional equation: what’s legal still feels illicit.
You see it in the way customers whisper strain names, apologize for questions, or clutch their IDs like boarding passes. This isn’t paranoia; it’s conditioning. The system still hasn’t decided whether to welcome or test them.

Finding the Positive

For cannabis retailers, survival requires a kind of optimism that borders on art. The laws may be written in fear, but the day-to-day practice of cannabis retail depends on finding something human inside that fear.

Every operator knows the system doesn’t make sense — and so do most customers. They feel the absurdity: the cameras, the cash-only lines, the excessive packaging, the taxes stacked like toll booths on the way to relaxation.

This shared awareness is not a weakness. It’s an opportunity to connect. When a budtender acknowledges the reality — “Yeah, it’s wild what we have to do for a simple plant.” — it creates instant rapport. The conversation shifts from transaction to camaraderie. Both sides exhale.

Finding the positive doesn’t mean ignoring the madness; it means transforming it. It’s the recognition that even in a system built on mistrust, the act of serving cannabis can still feel revolutionary, generous, and sane.

In the best shops, humor replaces bitterness. Empathy replaces exhaustion. Every small act of grace — a kind word, a moment of patience, a knowing smile — becomes resistance to the noise.
This is how culture is built, one positive exchange at a time.

Why It Matters

This generation of consumers is writing the template for everyone who follows. If today’s experiences feel clinical or transactional, that becomes the norm. But if they feel human — calm, kind, dignified — that becomes the culture.

Cannabis retail is still young enough to decide what kind of hospitality it wants to embody. That’s the opportunity hidden inside the obstacle course.

Next in the Series

In Part 3 — Budtender 2026, we’ll explore what AI will mean for both the Customer and the Budtender.

Mark McMillan