#1st of July though huzzah

[oculusxcaro]

Khare never used to be quite so dim-witted. Her slower thought process and ability to learn has been heavily impacted as a result of her mutation but she's still canny enough to gauge a situation or look of a person and go "Yeah, that is somebody I probably shouldn't piss off."

[psiscans]

I've been following you guys for about a year and I've been wondering... How did PSI Scans come to be? What made the you decide to start the group? Do you still have all the members you started out with?... Etc. I'd just like to know more about the history behind your group, if you're ok with talking about it.

Thank you so much for asking!

We've just passed the two year mark from when this group was first created- so here's a timeline of PSI Scans history under the break:

Late October, 2015: eyfey received an anonymous message saying:

"A small (and by small i mean BIG) part of me wants you to translate saiki kusuo cause nobody's donating for it on spinyback to get translated (no i don't have the money to donate either) but that be dependent on whether YOU want to do it"

SpinyBackTeam was the group scanlating Saiki at the time, but it had been months since their last release, and no one was sure when the next release was coming out, if ever.

eyfey said they'd be on board to do translations if someone else would handle redrawing/typesetting.

October 27th, 2015Shortly after that message, seirui and milaza contacted eyfey, and the three of them formed a team and began working on chapters.

Sadly neither seirui or milaza stayed around past the first couple releases- leaving eyfey as the only founding member who's still currently working on the scanlations. Without seirui and milaza though, this group never would've been created and we never would've made it to where we are today

Late November, 2015At some point as we were working on the chapters, Spinyback re-did their website and ended up removing Saiki completely. We thought they had dropped the series for sure at this point, so we kept working at our slow slow pace.

December 9th, 2015Before we could make our first release, SpinyBack released a new chapter out of the blue! We has 4 chapters translated at this point and weren't sure whether or not to continue with the scanlation or just give up and let SpinyBack handle it... We decided to wait and see if they would start updating more regularly.

December 24th, 2015 Just for fun, eyfey solo'd chapter 33 for a special christmas release. (SpinyBack still hadn't released any new chapters since the one at the beginning of the month)

December 29th, 2015Spannersq joined the team to help with cleaning! (and did basically all the cleans for - Spannersq is still on the team today!)

SpinyBack still hadn't released any new chapters, so we decided to just go ahead and do it ourselves. (I still regret not messaging SpinyBack about it though. It didn't occur to me at the time, but it hindsight it was pretty rude to just start on a project someone else was already working on... we just desperately wanted people to be able to read more of this amazing manga.)

December 31st, 2015This was the day Spannersq came up with the name PSI Scans for our group! With a name we were finally ready to release some chapters!

Janurary 5th, 2016Our first official release! After 3 months of uncertainty, we finally released chapter 31~ ...in pretty poor quality. At this time, we were using low quality magazine scans as our raws and no one on the team really had any experience with cleaning or redraws.

Luckily! Shortly after our release, Otafreek joined us: bringing high-res raws and informative typesetting/cleaning guides, causing the quality of our scans to skyrocket. Otafreek also had raws for volume 0, so we were able to go back and translate those chapters as well.

...and that's not all! We also got another new member that day: Snazzyhelmet! Who joined as a translator!

Otafreek only stuck around for a chapter or so, but Snazzyhelmet has been doing translations ever since and is still one of our current active translators!

January 15th, 2016We released the first chapter of volume 0: our first high quality chapter!

March 26th, 2016No new chapters yet... eyfey and snazzyhelmet had been keeping up with translations (we were already done with vol0 and about 6 chapters into vol4) but unfortunately life had gotten busy for both Spannersq and Otafreek. Spannersq ended up taking a break for about a month, and Otafreek retired completely. In their absense eyfey took over typesetting, purchasing/scanning raws, and cleaning/redrawing.

March 28th, 2016We released the 2nd chapter of vol0! This was also the end of month long gaps between releases.

May 2nd, 2016The Saiki anime was announced! Spannersq was back cleaning at full speed and we'd been keeping up a steady release speed (about one chapter per week)

May 7th, 2016Le joined the team as our new typsetter, and took care of typesetting for most of the chapters in volume 4 + the first half of vol5 before retiring~

May 15th, 2016As we were getting close to the end of vol4, we decided to go back and re-do the first couple chapters of vol4 before starting on vol5 - it meant a few more weeks without "new" chapters, but this way we could have decent quality versions of all our releases.

This was also the day a Meho7 very generously donated raws for vol 7-8~

May 20th, 2016Misterquire joined as a redrawer - providing us with beautiful beautiful redraws for many months, but eventually retiring ;v;

July 4th, 2016The anime was released! This doesn't really have anything to do with the manga scanlation, but hype was up and the number of Saiki fans was increasing! (the anime managed to overtake us pretty fast though, and soon it was releasing episodes of stuff we hadn't translated yet TvT )

June 8th-9th, 2016Sroa joined as our 2nd designated redrawer, and a day later LAR joined as a cleaner! (Sroa was a huge help with redraws for the next couple months until they retired, and LAR is still an active cleaner today!)

July 16th, 2016Teleport-teapot joined as our 3rd redrawer! They brought us beautiful, fast redraws for months until they eventually retired~

July 18th, 2016Nashi joined and took over typesetting for Le and has been creating beautiful typesets for us ever since~(Nashi is currently one of our two active typesetters.)

July 20th, 2016Kamo joined as a 3rd translator- working hard until January, when they had to take a 10 month hiatus for computer problems, but that hiatus has just ended and now Kamo is back as one of our current active translators!

August 3rd, 2016Six joined as a translator, stuck around for a handful of chapters, and disappeared as mysteriously as they came~

August 19th, 2016On this day: Sisselwolfgang and maou-shoujo joined the team as beautiful beautiful beautiful redrawers. This truly was a golden age of redrawing for PSI Scans TvT

Sisselwolfgang worked for a good long time before eventually needing to take a break from scanlation, but Maou-shoujo is still consistently creating godlike redraws with us today!

October 31st, 2016Dollyl joined the team as a second typesetter, bringing gorgeous speedy typesets to us all~ Dollyl is still typesetting today alongside Nashi as one of our 2 current active typesetters!

At this point, we'd also passed the one year mark for the group! In that first year, we'd made it all the way to chapter 65- meaning we finished about 45 chapters total, if you include vol0 + the one shots~

To compare that with the previous groups working on Saiki: DarkMurmur = 11 chapters per year (2 years to finish the first 22 chapters)SpinyBackTeam = 12 chapters per year (technically they only did 8 chapters, but their pace averaged out to about one chapter per month)

So we were working at a pretty good speed- especially considering that we didn't actually release anything for the first couple months, haha.

November 22nd-23rd, 2016Miyo-sai joined the team as a translator, and Toumikasa joined as a cleaner!

Miyo-sai stuck around and translated a handful of chapters before moving on in life, but Toumikasa is still working as one of our active cleaners today!

Dec 15, 2016Ichi joined the team as a redrawer! They did a number of redraws over the next couple months before going on indefinite hiatus~

January 1st 2017,We decided to make the switch from ouph to offu starting in vol 9- since the author released a chapter with it spelled out as OFFU in English. So long ouph~ You will be missed~

April 1st + 11th, 2017Ykun and Jeddle joined as a translators! Both of them are still translating with us today!

May 10th, 2017Rupali joined as a redrawer- by this point maou-shoujo was the only other active redrawer.

Rupali is still with the group today, but is on a sort of semi-hiatus while they're busy.

May 22nd, 2017sefway3 joined as a redrawer! They're one of our few current active redrawers!

June 16th, 2017We finally reached the last chapter that was featured in the anime ;v; (almost a year after the anime first aired)

July 22nd, 2017peaceful-waldeinsamkeit joined the team as a redrawer! Hooray!

September 4th, 2017vulpi111 joined as a cleaner! Hurrah!

September 10th, 2017femalecorpse joined as a redrawer! Huzzah!

Peaceful-waldeinsamkeit, vulpi111, and femalecorpse are all still active members of the team today~

And that brings us to where we are today! We've just passed the two year mark of when the group was founded, and we've just released our 142nd chapter (including oneshots + omake chapters).

It's also worth mentioning, there are many many more members not on this list that have joined and left our team over the years: Some only doing one or two chapters before moving on, some who have joined recently but haven't started working yet, and some who joined and then left without ever finishing their first chapter... 

Scanlating is hard work and it takes up a lot of time, plus most people who work on manga like this are also trying to balance school and/or jobs, so it takes a very dedicated person to be able to start scanlating and then stick with it. But even those who only finished one or two chapters before needing to retire were a huge help to getting us to where we are today! (but if I listed all of them this list would be way too long, so we're sticking to just the people who stuck around a little longer for now~)

But yeah! That's the history of this group!There's still a little over 100 chapters left to go, and more coming out every week, so it looks like we've still got at least another year at this rate before we catch up (though that could be much much sooner if we got more redrawers and translators...) But in any case, we'll keep doing our best to work hard until the day all of Saiki Kusuo has been translated into English!

Thank you all for reading!

[rueur]

Morning Pages No. 63

Wednesday 26th August - 11:57am

There’s three minutes left of the morning, and I consider that to be a victory! Also, just have to add that I’m weirdly excited that tomorrow is going to be my 23rd and a half birthday AND #64 in the morning pages, which is the square root of 8, and the answer to the equation 16 x 4 =. I’m not a maths-oriented person, so I forgot what a square root number is. It’s like the opposite of a prime number, but it’s mathematically gorgeous. Evan found us an exercise bike on Marketplace for $250! And it looks insanely nice. It’s in a superb condition, it’s exactly what we were looking for, and it’s WELL within our price range. What a freaking steal, and I also just have to add: what immensely good karma. I feel like we’re deserving of this, and it also definitely feels like such a positive sign that this was a great idea on our part. I’m feeling infinitely more keen to get rid of the futon and streamline the room we’re both currently in into being a lot more health-conscious and thus, a far better room suited to entertainment. The futon is also keeping me from doing Ringfit on a regular basis, so we’ll see once we get the bike how much easier it’ll be for me to work out at home and get myself to a more tolerable level of fit. 

I’m keen to play Breath of the Wild again today because it’s been a couple of days since we last played and Evan ordered another copy from [REDACTED] this morning, so we’ll just be waiting for that to arrive today. I also want to do a bit more work on the site, because my meeting with Julie will be a week from today and I need to get it to a level that I’ll be happy to present it at, even though I know Julie will want to make some adjustments. I feel like her main gripes will be with the colour scheme, which is perfectly fine with me. That should be more than easy to adjust. And the fonts...the fonts are doing my head in. I’m still not sure how to add extra font packs. And to also connect this Squarespace website up with cPanel and VentraIP, but again, that’s not a high priority issue. We’ll need to get the website to a place where we both feel it’s good enough to publish before we even think about moving it over to VentraIP. 

I’m always thinking about work. And because it’s lockdown, I’ve been thinking about when orders we’ve placed will be arriving. We’ve been ordering a fair amount of stuff, and I’m not sure if it’s out of boredom or necessity. Perhaps both? We want to break up the monotony of the day, but doing that with retail therapy seems a little reckless. We have the internet, gas, and electricity bills due and water is also most definitely on its way. And RENT, because it’s the end of the month. September 1st is going to be a Tuesday, so we’ll need to pay before my next payday, which is a touch depressing. But also I suppose it’ll be nice to know that I can retain 100% of the pay that I’ll be receiving next week! That is unless I make an online purchase. 

It’s 12:06pm. I like the idea that it takes me about ten minutes to write out a page of stream of consciousness, so three pages should take around a half an hour. That’s ideal, but usually what happens is I get distracted from this process by Evan or by the animals or just generally by things that I need to do (base biological urges), OR I forgot a word, like what just happened when I was typing out ‘base biological urges’ as a gentle code for having to take a dump. So graceless, always. That’s my style, eh?

Sarah wants to have another phone call at some point today, and I think it’s mostly to chat about the way the group has been heading. People have been leaving and apparently she received her first bit of negative feedback. I’d be curious to hear what it is. I’m curious to know why Nichole left. I know she wasn’t really keeping up with the days so I suppose it makes sense? But Amy’s also not overtly keeping up with the days, which is genuinely surprising to me. I feel like Amy would be all over some well-intentioned mindfulness challenges. Sam just sent me a message that contained a painful pun. We were joking about the ethereal science that is the healing properties of cats. So cat purrs can actually heal human beings because the vibration or the frequency of the vibration has been known to promote feelings of peace in human beings. It relaxes our minds and bodies and heals our cells. 

EDDIE DROPPED OFF OUR GAME! IT WAS SO GOOD TO SEE HIM and it was also just a real treat, man. He was sick last week so up until this lovely afternoon, I hadn’t seen him for like two weeks. So now Evan is playing the game AGAIN finally! Oh my fucking lord I have waited so long for him to pick up this game, he’s an idiot. And I am speaking all this out loud as I type because he’s in the room and he can hear me and I love terrorising him. AND HE DOESN’T GIVE A FLYING FUCK BECAUSE HE ON HIS PHONE THA DUMB. What a stupid smug grin. What a cute face. Aww.

He’s distracting me from this chore. No, this is all a part of my morning pages for today. You can’t say this isn’t properly a part of it, it’s STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS, fool. Do you know what stream of consciousness entails? It’s literally typing/writing as you think. So anything that I’m thinking, belongs in these pages. Get out of the room. I have to finish this first and you are distracting myself from my own mind, you dumb bass. Yes, I meant to type out ‘dumb bass’, because I want to imply that you are a mute fish. I am so distracted from this task, it is infuriating. Also, please be at least a little bit impressed by my touch-typing abilities. Aww. He just said he’s always impressed by everything I do. How sweet. Man, this is going to be so chaotic to read a year or so from now! All I need to remember, future self, is that Evan was in the same room as I in 847 flying high (but he was sober this morn), playing Breath of the Wild for the second time, standing up and leaning against the wall because Kelley Starrett says that we should consider sitting to be a cancer. And that for each hour of sitting you need to do however many minutes of physical activity. 

Fuck, I just remembered that I told the boy that I would make pancakes for breakfast this morning, and I haven’t done that yet. And also it isn’t the morning anymore. Whoops. I am so happy that I got to see Eddie today though. I’m also just glad that he’s okay, I was worried that he had the ‘rona. Can you put the switch on the TV? I want to see you play. That’s the whole point of getting both games. Give me a second. Okay, he grabbed the remote. This isn’t actually promoting mindfulness too much, because of all the activity around me. But look. I’ve maintained this practice pretty damn well for the past week. I’ve written around 2000 words each day for ten or so days straight now. That’s pretty neat. I’m happy with this. I also kind of hope that I can make time to take Lonzo out again today, hopefully well before 5:30pm, so I can talk to Sarah without feeling too fatigued.

I’m fighting the urge to end this third page here. I just want to go on with my day! And I don’t know how many epiphanies I’ll be having in these pages today. I mean, I wrote my last three pages so dang recently, this entry just feels quite arbitrary. But I suppose that’s my own fault. I shouldn’t have done yesterday’s pages at 10pm last night, that’s just basic. Morning pages 101: do them in the morning. Otherwise they’re not as fresh, and your next entries are going to be incredibly close together. I honestly just feel like Saturday has thrown me off so much. I can’t believe it’s Wednesday and I’m still trying to play catch-up because being at work on Saturday and typing out that day’s entry over hours and hours was just...bleh. I have no words other than ‘bleh’. I’m tapped out. 

The soundtrack for this game is actually so soothing. I don’t mind how minimalistic it is. In fact, the minimalistic soundscape kind of just enhances the game’s natural atmosphere and built environment! Evan just found a boomerang! Those are quite rare. Not a lizal boomerang, like an actual boomerang. I feel like I shouldn’t be watching him play or even listening or even in the same room as I finish these pages off. It seems like a major distraction. You found the Duelling Peaks stable! He’s trying to climb a shrine. Lord help me. Oooh. That must’ve been painful. Sorry, Link. Ma man a dumb bass. 

Ooh these pages have just completely gone to shit. But I’m still going to finish them. I’m at around 1600 words, well just over. That means that I have about 400 to go. I’m about or over 75% of the way through! Huzzah! Ew. I don’t even like saying that sarcastically. But it makes me think of ‘Dungeons and Dragons’, and I think I’d like to play that at least once. Maybe some time after lockdown ends I can go to a game with Malith. Gale does them, so that may be a great opportunity to hang out with that gang again. I also want to do pub trivia again! I can’t believe how many innocuous events and happenings this lockdown has had me missing. It’s absurd that there was ever a time where I had the opportunity to do all these activities whenever I liked, and I just never took them, or at the very least seldom took them. But if I’m going to be completely honest with myself, I still see myself being somewhat of a recluse even after lockdown ends. I will indulge in all the newfound freedom once we do find it again, as all Melbournians will, but I won’t be going crazy. I won’t be going out every weekend. If the world opens up again, then that will mean the responsibilities of the world will be opening up again too, which is a contributing factor to my wanting to stay home and be on my own. That, and there’s always Lonzo. I don’t want to leave HIM on his own, because he never wants that, and he never gets to have a say.

This shrine looks difficult. I want to be attentive, but it looks as though I have about 100 words left, which is nothing. I’ll need to start my website for uni soon, I haven’t even thought about that at all. I’d like to pen an online essay, that’s a new experience. And Wordpress should be easy enough to master. I mean, I’ve done it before, for one. Squarespace is just so clean, though! Definitely will be using this to start up BROKEN media. I’m looking forward to that. 

I’m on the fourth page now, but only at 1970 words. I feel like I’m cheating if I don’t at least get to 2000. I used a lot of paragraphs for this entry, because I mean I had a lot of distractions. 2003 words. I’m going to sign off here then. 2012. 2013. 2014. I need to stop. 2020!

[gossipnetwork-blog]

Pot in 2018: What to Expect

New Post has been published on http://gossip.network/pot-in-2018-what-to-expect/

Pot in 2018: What to Expect

When it comes to cannabis, 2017 was a much better year than anyone was expecting. Back in January, stoners and pot moguls alike were super paranoid about incoming Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his plans to shut down legal weed businesses from coast to coast. After a decade of steady progress on marijuana legalization – with about 90 percent of the country now supporting medical use and eight states having legalized recreational use – was the entire movement going to come crashing down?

A year later, almost no one believes there will be a federal crackdown on the entire cannabis industry. State-legal pot markets seem poised to match or exceed the value of black market pot by 2020. Sessions has admitted that marijuana is not as dangerous as heroin, and his tension with Trump is common knowledge. With the biggest state in the country about to begin recreational sales, and more and more politicians enviously eyeing the tax revenue coming out of places like Colorado and Oregon, legal pot is clearly here to stay. So what kinds of developments can we expect in the weed world for 2018?

The first legal marijuana lounges Let’s start with some great news: there are totally going to be legal marijuana lounges in the United States before the end of 2018! The biggest question is which city will get one open first: Las Vegas, West Hollywood, Boston or Denver. Considering nothing in Massachusetts is quite final yet, the smart money is on Denver, which actually passed a ballot initiative allowing licensed consumption spaces for marijuana back in 2016 but has had a fair amount of trouble implementing the law. You won’t be allowed to smoke, you have to bring your own cannabis, and you have to sign a document saying you won’t drive yourself home, but there’s a good chance the country’s first legal weed lounge will be in the capital of Colorado. Right now the front-runners for who might open first are a café called The Coffee Joint and a vape bar with an arcade called… wait for it… Vape and Play.

If you’re looking a pot hotspot where you can actually, you know, smoke pot, you might want to hold out for Vegas. “I think we’ll have an ordinance voted on and approved by late March or early April,” says former Nevada legalization campaign manager and current weed lobbyist Scot Rutledge. “I don’t know that they’ll be open by 4/20, but they should be open by the one year anniversary of recreational sales” – meaning by July. Sadly, the first Vegas pot lounges won’t be on the Strip, which is technically not in the city of Las Vegas, but they’ll be a short Lyft ride away and you’ll be able to smoke. Huzzah!

A few hours to the west, several cities in California have expressed interest in allowing cannabis social spaces, including West Hollywood, Palm Springs, San Francisco and Oakland. Advocate and aspiring lounge owner Jackie Subeck says the first ones will likely open their doors in West Hollywood this fall – including some spots where you will be allowed to buy pot on site and then smoke or vape it, just like a bar. “There’s also going to be standalone lounges where you can’t smoke or vape but you can buy infused products, like a bakery, or a spa with cannabis treatments,” Subeck says.

Confusion and a “bloodbath” in California Even though California will finally begin allowing the sale of recreational marijuana on January 1st, 2018, a lot of people are very nervous about how that is going to go. The state has had a largely unsupervised medical cannabis program in place since 1996 and now is trying to impose a strict regulatory regime on an enormous population of entrepreneurs and criminals, many of whom have never followed rules before.

Dispensaries have cropped up across California, but new regulations could mean the end for many of them. Jim Wilson/The new York Times/Redux

“Look at what happened here for the last 20 years. It was anarchy,” says Lord Jones founder and CEO Rob Rosenheck, whose posh weed-infused chocolates and lotions have become a celebrity favorite. “I think it will be a sloppy, chaotic, rough-and-tumble transition that will take 12 to 24 months to work itself out.”

Multiple people who I spoke with used the term “bloodbath” to describe the number of weed businesses they believe will fail.

“You can’t afford to suck,” says Jeremy Plumb, director of production science at the marijuana growing company Prūf Cultivar and the co-founder of Farma, one of Portland, Oregon’s most successful dispensaries. “There will be a massive oversupply in California, and the only people that will survive are either the ones that are super affluent and able to take every blow, or the ones that are really doing something with care and an unbelievable depth of skill.”

Of course, there is another option for California weed businesses that can’t cut it in the legal market: stay underground and ship their products out of state.

“The key word in 2018 is enforcement,” says Jason Pinsky, the cannabis producer on Viceland’s Bong Appetit and the chief cannabis advisor at marijuana delivery app Eaze. “In California, 90 percent of the brands that are out there are either going to disappear, or they’re going to operate illegally. It’s almost like the California weed industry is like an avalanche: to some degree, it’s unstoppable. You’re going to need to hire a lot more people in the policing business if you want to make it so all of these companies are going to stop doing business.”

The end of “indica” and “sativa” Pot snobs have been complaining about how meaningless the terms “indica” and “sativa” are for years, but I’m starting to think that 2018 will finally be the year when this concept hits the public. According to stoner lore, indica weed produces a sedating “body” high and comes from a plant with shorter, fatter leaves, while sativa weed creates a more uplifting “mind” high and comes from a plant with longer, thinner leaves.

But Plumb, the Portland dispensary co-founder, has been growing cannabis for decades, and finds these terms “absolutely offensive to any intelligent soul. There is no scientific basis where we can parse indica and sativa. You cannot connect morphology, a broad or narrow leaf, to the experience of a chemical phenotype. That’s just a fucking massive disconnect.”

So what, pray tell, will replace this false classification? How will we describe marijuana strains in the future? Most likely we will begin focusing more on the entire chemical mix of what’s in our weed – what’s known as the cannabinoid and terpene profile. THC is the most famous cannabinoid, as it’s the one that gets you high, but there are several other relevant compounds that can affect how a pot product makes you feel, including the physically relaxing CBD, the sleep-inducing myrcene and the lavender-smelling linalool.

“If you think about weed as a vehicle, THC would be the gas pedal, and the terpenes are your steering wheel,” says Pinsky, who has overseen quite a bit of public education regarding the variety of compounds found in cannabis on Bong Appetit.

Instead of indica and sativa, we’ll have a wealth of terms to describe marijuana. Ethan Miller/Getty Images

A few of the people I spoke with suggested that in 2018, more weed businesses will talk about the effects of various compound formulations in tinctures and vape pens, even if the indica/sativa distinction remains part of how dispensaries sell actual pot for another couple of years. Already, well-informed budtenders at high-end pot shops are helping customers make smarter choices that have nothing to do with the false dichotomy of body high versus mind high.

“The tiniest bit of education results in consumers being able to access these distinctive chemotypes, which open the door to novel effects,” Plumb says.

Canada takes over the world In these times of tumult and prohibition, our kindly neighbors to the north are looking more and more savvy. While the federal government in the United States continues to insist that marijuana has absolutely no medical benefit, making commerce exceedingly difficult for anyone working with state-legal weed, Canada began the process of making pot available to all adults as soon as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took office in 2015. Now, with millions of marijuana dollars flowing through Canadian stock exchanges and recreational sales set to begin in 2018, the Canadian cannabis industry seems poised to dominate the globe.

“These Canadian companies have access to money that no one in the U.S. has, and they’re going to kill us,” says Kris Krane, the president and co-founder of cannabis operations and consulting firm 4Front Ventures. “We’re ceding the future of the industry to Canada. They’re going to buy everybody.”

Canada will begin recreational sale of cannabis in 2018. Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press/AP

There is a truly mind-boggling amount of weed money flying around up there. The Wall Street Journal reported in September that about half of the trading activity on the Canadian Securities Exchange involved marijuana businesses. That’s right: half of all of the trading on the entire exchange was related to pot. Meanwhile, down in the U.S., there’s pretty much no chance in hell that a dispensary or grow operation could even get listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

At the same time, Canadian pot companies are starting to acquire pieces of pot companies in other countries, as well as export their product to places like Germany, Brazil and Australia. Then again, not every investor is afraid of Canada.

“Once the U.S. opens up, well, Canadians are nice people, but the U.S. will still dominate,” says Evan Eneman, the managing director of Snoop Dogg’s weed-focused venture capital fund, Casa Verde Capital. “The top line revenue of a licensed producer in Canada is probably still smaller than a single retail location in Los Angeles.”

Economic concerns replace philanthropy For a long time, marijuana legalization has been funded by progressive billionaires hoping to improve our criminal justice system – people like tech mogul Sean Parker, investor George Soros and the late Peter Lewis, who started Progressive Insurance. But heading into the elections 2018, fundraisers and political operatives say that the way we’ve been legalizing is changing. Not only are we running out of states that allow the billionaire-funded ballot initiatives that have been the primary driver of legalization, but the billionaires themselves are starting to move on.

“There’s definitely a shift. The social justice folks who had funded legalization up to now seem to have moved on to other issues,” says David Kaufman, a cannabis consultant who served as director of outreach and statewide partnerships for Proposition 64, the 2016 ballot initiative that legalized recreational use of marijuana in California. “The funders behind Proposition 64 are not necessarily going to be the folks that legalize in any other states.”

In the past few years, the political motivations behind marijuana legalization have become increasingly economic, whether it’s politicians hoping to rake in the tax revenue or businessmen paying to lobby for an industry worth over $40 billion. In 2015, a group of investors – including former 98 Degrees lead singer Nick Lachey – attempted to legalize marijuana in Ohio such that all legal cannabis would need to be grown on property owned by the people who paid for the ballot initiative.

While that initiative failed, it may have signaled the beginning of the end of legalizing weed with the goal of keeping people out of prison. In the past year, several prominent cannabis activists either retired or left the movement. Now, many are saying that legislative change will need to rely more on money from the pot industry itself, which could tip the nature of legalization toward helping the rich get richer, rather than accounting for the injustices of prohibition.

Possible legalization in New Jersey will mean mounting pressure on New York New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is not about that weed life. He somehow still thinks that pot is a gateway drug, and wouldn’t even allow the state’s medical marijuana program to include actual bud. But by the end of 2018, he may be rethinking his position.

Phil Murphy will be the next governor of New Jersey – which will almost certainly mean cannabis legalization in the state. Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images

With recreational marijuana sales set to begin in Massachusetts over the summer and incoming New Jersey governor Phil Murphy poised to legalize pot as quickly as possible, there’s a good chance that hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers will soon be doing a sort of reverse commute – driving or hopping a train out to the suburbs to pick up legal weed. Even Connecticut seems close to legalizing, with some predicting the state will turn in the next two years.

“If Jersey and Connecticut both do it through the legislature, New York is surrounded. New York City is surrounded. You could take a PATH train from Manhattan and be in New Jersey in 15 minutes,” says Krane, the president of 4Front Ventures. “When sales figures start rolling out from dispensaries in Hoboken and Jersey City, elected officials in New York City are going to throw a fit.”

Of course, most insiders say that there is no way New Jersey will begin recreational sales in 2018. The state could expand their existing medical program significantly, but it will likely take another year or two to write and implement a full legalization bill.  

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