THE DREAM OF SOME for selling legal marijuana in Stockton appears to have gone up in smoke.
The city has canceled its 2025 Commercial Cannabis Business Lottery due to lack of interest. Only four applications were received for the random drawing. Of those, only one was deemed eligible to participate.
The one application won by default, the city said in a social media post. The winner was not revealed.
Municipal law allows a total of four new cannabis-related businesses to open every year. Two are for retail storefronts, more commonly called a dispensary, and the other two are for what is considered a microbusiness.
Potential weed merchants had plenty of time to apply — from May 5 to June 5. The scant interest may reflect the larger difficulties facing legal dispensaries around the state.
Legal weed sellers face intense competition from illegal sellers and others that have moved into the market. Because cannabis is still illegal at the federal level, marijuana businesses have trouble getting business loans and handling other banking issues, the Los Angeles Times reported.
And NPR found that big Chinese interests have tried to move into the trade. They have been attracted in part out of a belief that law enforcement is more likely to skip cracking down on them while it focuses on deadly drugs like fentanyl.
This story originally appeared in Stocktonia.
