Since marijuana farmers have begun selling exclusively to legitimate dispensaries, the underground market for illegal weed has been quashed, putting drug dealers out of business for lack of available stock. One such dealer I talked to in Boulder, who I will call Quark at his request, told me that with the supply of high-quality Colorado hydroponic weed redirected to dispensaries, he has only been able to procure cheap Mexican schwag for the past few months. Since the implications of indirect association with brutal Mexican cartels unsettles him, Quark is currently seeking a regular job so he will have money to pay tuition this year. Though it has negatively impacted his own solvency, Quark has nothing but praise for the new phase in Colorado's marijuana industry. His only concern is that the change in employment status will burden his study time as he nears completion of his advanced degree in astrophysics.

Opponents of legalization/decriminalization of marijuana--medicinal or otherwise--argue that legitimizing the industry will lead to increased usage by young people, though rational analysis and official statistics indicate otherwise. California examined the issue a decade after their 1996 legalization of medicinal marijuana. The state attorney general discovered that over the previous ten years, teen usage had declined dramatically, at a rate much faster than the national trend. As compared to California statistics pre-1996, different teen age groups evidenced 25 to nearly 50% fewer numbers reporting that they'd used marijuana in the previous month.

I would bet that one could find their way to a pot dealer on any college campus in this country by asking the first three people you meet where to procure ganja. Considering the prevalence of the underground market, legitimizing the business has the effect of tightening controls over it, regulating who can legally purchase, sell, or grow it, which puts unscrupulous drug dealers out of business, this reducing the availability of product through any but official channels. The controls that come with legalization effectively reduces its availability, rather than the contrary.

Kathleen acknowledges that the cultivation and sale of marijuana has been a thriving underground industry for decades in her tiny mountain town about 15 miles west of Boulder. "It's always been happening; it's just not been taxed until now," she says. The massive blackmarket is emerging into the light, though the Colorado Department of the Revenue says they have no plans to keep track of how much money the rapidly growing legitimate industry will be feeding into state coffers. The largest dispensary in the state, serving 1400 patients in Colorado Springs, generates $30,000 per month in sales tax revenue for the state. "And now that the legal dispensaries have killed the underground market, it will only get bigger," Kathleen predicts.

For her own ambition, that is most certainly the case. One Brown Mouse currently corners the medicinal marijuana market in Nederland, though half a dozen more dispensaries are preparing to open there in the coming months. Kathleen represents the leading edge of a growing movement of ganjapreneurs, and wants to carve out a substantial market share before the field becomes crowded with ambitious latecomers. Her fine-tuned business acumen, clearly unharmed by decades of casual marijuana use, recognizes the much larger market for her goods lies thirty minutes east in Boulder.