Legalizing Marijuana Impact

Hello, We have found a few articles with a popular search engine. Here are some articles containing IMPLAN impact analysis: http://mjbizdaily.com/Dr_Hogan_Report_March_19_2013.pdf http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2015/06/11/marijuana_report.html http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/agreement-to-create-a-state-of-the-art-medical-marijuana-manufacturing-facility-and-dispensary-in-kodaks-eastman-business-park-announced-in-rochester-ny-300099562.html http://marijuanahealthwellness.com/?p=2994 Because marijuana sales are still Federally illegal, no information is collected, therefore IMPLAN does not have a specific Marijuana sector. Even though we do not have a specific Sector for Marijuana, you can create your own Sector and customize the Model for your analysis. Please let us know if this interests you and we can provide further information for modeling this in IMPLAN. Best regards, IMPLAN Group Staff

Thank you, so much. This information is greatly valuable and of considerable interest to me. So if the sector doesn't exist, how does one customize the Model for analysis?

Hello, Here is some info on how to model the different aspects of Marijuana production. In terms of cultivating Marijuana, you can do an Industry Spending Pattern of Sector 6 (Greenhouse, nursery and floriculture products) and change the Inputs to what you know it takes to grow the plants. You will also need to then do a Labor Income Change, as this would not be included in your Industry Spending Pattern. If you have data for modifying Sector 6's spending pattern to more closely match marijuana growing, you can certainly do that...but this is not necessary if you don't have any additional data. The spending patterns will be close to other greenhouse agriculture, so if you don't have detailed production data you can just use an Industry Change for Sector 6, noting that no federal taxes are paid since it is still an illicit industry. Here is an article that further discusses an advanced type of modeling called Analysis By Parts: http://implan.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&layout=edit&id=359 In terms of looking at the Retail impacts, you can do the same as described above, you can use Sector 401 (Health and Personal Care Stores), 402 (Gasoline Stores) or 405 (General Merchandise Stores), Sector 400 (Grocery/liquor Stores), to model your impact. Doing this as an Industry Spending Pattern will allow you to customize the inputs to tailor this to your specific study. This is if you know this information, if not then you can do a regular Industry Change and make some notes in your report. However since the Retail Sectors don't make purchases of the items they sell, but rather the spending pattern reflects what it takes to operate the store sans merchandise, there is little reason to change these spending patterns in most circumstances. You will also want to choose Gross Retail Sales and again no federal taxes If you do not want to make any changes to the Sectors you could Margin the producing Sector and then move/split the retail portion to the Retailer(s) that you think will be selling the product. This would give a complete impact including an estimate of the growing value of the marijuana. I am assuming that there is also likely no wholesaler and possibly limited transport (since it would be internal to the state for legal purposes). You may want to adjust or zero these coefficients. Here is an article on margining: http://www.implan.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=203&Itemid=1797 Please let us know if you have any further questions.