Dispensary Owners Caught On Tape Bragging They Don’t Pay Their Vendors: Industry Vet Says Black Market Has More Integrity Than Legal
“Integrity has no need of rules.” Albert Camus, French philosopher (1913-1960)
Today, unfortunately, it seems that we have more rules and less integrity. At least this seems to be the case for one section of the California cannabis industry. Recently, a video went viral of dispensary owners in a meeting talking about how much money they saved by not paying their “mom-and-pop” vendors.
“You know what’s so cool,” one owner asked. “How much money we’ve saved by not paying the vendors that have gone out of business…I’m talking about these mom-and-pop brands that come and go.”
There surely must be other cases. To learn more about what’s going on in the California cannabis space, Benzinga reached out to the founders of Stone Road, which has a farm in Northern California and operations across five states. Stone Road has been stiffed for tens of thousands of dollars.
“The reason that all these mom-and-pop shops went out of business was because you had retailers like this holding invoices for 100+ days thus forcing small businesses into bankruptcy,” said Lex Corwin, Stone Road’s CEO and co-founder.
Corwin recently opened up on social media about the struggles his company had. He suggested that the black market actually operates with more integrity than legal companies. He explained that legal retailers can take up to 200 days to pay what they owe, whereas people operating on the illicit market pay on the spot.
Beating A Dead Horse
He told Benzinga that it feels like “beating a dead horse because all I do is talk about this nowadays but quite simply, some retailer’s unwillingness to pay is the single greatest impediment to a healthy industry.”
How did …