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WITH WANDA JAMES
Q. Can you tell us some of the parallel businesses, such as packaging and branding, that investors and entrepreneurs want to look into for creative ideas?
A. One of the things that we tell everybody is to bloom where you are planted. Everybody wants to buy a dispensary. However the real money and opportunities of this industry are for people that are doing, for example, if you’re a marketer, then market cannabis. If you build websites then build websites for the cannabis industry. If you are a security agency then do security for cannabis. If you are a promoter that promotes parties, and events and different situations then do that for the cannabis industry. There are many ways of being involved in this industry. This industry is just now starting to peak, so anything that any other industry has, we need! We need people that can design clothes, hats, cards, drivers, distribution experts, package designers. There was a young women that just designed a humidor box, like they do for cigars, she did it for cannabis. There are so many opportunities! So bloom where you are planted, do what you know and just add the word cannabis to the end and voila you’re in business.
Q. What is the main hurdle that is still being faced in the cannabis industry today?
A. The 280E law. The 280E is basically a law that was put into place for all of the cocaine dealers in the 1980’s in Miami. It punishes or can shut down banks that takes money from anybody that makes money off of illicit drugs. Right now since cannabis is a schedule one drug it means we are regulated under the 280E for banking and taxation. Which means that we cannot write off any of our normal expenses and we can’t have a bank account. Those two things alone, are killing us as an industry. So in other words, if my business makes $1,000,000 dollars and my employees (salaries) cost me $400,000 and even though those employees pay taxes on that money and I pay taxes on those employees, at the end of the year I don’t get to write that money off. Which means that I am taxed on the full $1,000,000 of income instead of the $600,000 that I clearly got because I gave $400,000 away in salaries. So between 280E stopping us from having deductions on our taxes and not having banking, it takes away most of the profit that we’d be making in the cannabis industry. That is the number one issue facing cannabis businesses right now.