 I'm going to be talking about entering a new age for cannabis, and the main thing is that things have changed quite a lot, and especially now we have a ballot measure for the November ballot that could change things again in a pretty spectacular way for us. So it's quite an interesting time for people to get onto this. Thank you to Root. Thanks for the library for this opportunity. And that's my wife, Mickey Norris, back in the back there. So look, how do we get here? That's kind of a good question. I'll jump back a little further like this. We first had the prohibition of cannabis started in California in 1913, our first state law against it. It was 1937 that the first federal law came along, and basically we stayed under the Marijuana Tax Act federally until 1969 when Dr. Timothy Leary took a case to the Supreme Court and won it, which got the Marijuana Tax Act overturned as a violation of the first, excuse me, the Fifth Amendment, because what the law said was you had to buy a tax stamp in order to have marijuana, and you had to bring your marijuana to show them to buy your tax stamp. So in order to buy your tax stamp, you had to be walking in there with some marijuana, which was illegal. And so Leary fought them on that. And so he got it overturned in 1970, the federal government changed to the Control Substance Act, which sets up five different categories of substances, including marijuana that's in the Schedule 1, the most dangerous list of substances. The reason for that was actually because there was a federal study that was done by the Schaefer Commission appointed by Richard Nixon. They were supposed to tell the federal government where marijuana should be on those schedule of drugs. And when they came back after two years and said that it really shouldn't be in the schedule of drugs at all, that an ounce of marijuana should be legal for all adults to have and the federal government should not be prohibiting it. Richard Nixon decided that he did not want that to happen, the reason being because he was targeting two groups in society, blacks and hippies. The hippies were the anti-war movement, the blacks were the civil right movement. And so he thought by keeping marijuana in schedule one, it gave him a way of arresting a lot of people that otherwise would become political adversaries of his. And so when that happened Calif, well basically, when they came back with their report, what he did is a week after they announced that marijuana should be legal in their opinion, he did a press conference where he called marijuana public enemy number one and he had a pattern of doing press conferences every week denouncing marijuana for the rest of that year in order to make sure that he drowned out completely the actual scientific findings on it. And so the way that reflected in California was we had proposition 19 on the ballot here which did not pass. People thought it was going to get around 10 or 15% support and actually got almost 30% support. So when that happened the state legislature jumped into it and they did a comprehensive reform of the marijuana laws in 1976. The thing that you have to understand though is that since 1976 they have only done one change to the marijuana laws other than the medical marijuana laws of it. And that is during when proposition 19, the second one was on the ballot in 2010, Governor Schwarzenegger reduced marijuana possession of an ounce from being a misdemeanor with $100 fine to being a ticket, and a fraction with a $100 fine, thank you. And so that was timed specifically to happen two weeks before the election and it had its desired effect which was that we were like ahead in the polls but then once he did that a lot of young people in particular decided not to vote because they thought the law had already been changed. And so it took us down below we got 46.5% in support of it that year. And so but basically since 1976 they haven't changed the marijuana law accepting the obvious exception being proposition 215, the medical marijuana laws and there have been two changes made to that subsequent to that. I'm going to jump back though a little bit right now. I'm looking at back in the 1980s. This was the height of the Reagan drug war. In the late 70s a lot of people thought marijuana was going to be legalized anyway because there was almost a 50% support for legalized marijuana in polls at that point. And so Jimmy Carter was the president and as we all know the incident that they ran pretty much toppled his presidency. And so when he was replaced by Ronald Reagan whose wife got into a lot of trouble because he was spending a lot of money frivolously on things, redecorating the White House. And so in order to get the attention away from that they wanted her to do something else. So she spoke about drugs and she made this famous statement, well just say no if someone offers you drugs. And then that became the basis of zero tolerance, the just say no campaign, the dare campaign, property forfeiture, mandatory minimum laws, conspiracy laws, et cetera, et cetera. So the federal government basically wiped out the Bill of Rights when it said when it comes to marijuana you don't have rights anymore. And as you may have heard this past week there was another court that said that if you have medical marijuana you are not allowed to have a gun. If you're on the terrorist fly list you are allowed to have a gun, don't fly which. But if you have a marijuana doctor's recommendation you are not allowed to. So this hasn't changed as much as we would wish in some ways federally speaking. But anyway, a lot did change though and what really happened was that at the end of the 80s there was a pushback against Reagan and I was in that. I formed the business alliance for commerce in hemp and the family council on drug awareness and we put out a lot of information about the many uses of hemp and the medical marijuana. We talked about the human rights and the civil rights aspect of legalization of marijuana and so with this project about three years in I wrote my first book which is Hemp Lifeline to the Future. I also designed an editor book called The Emperor Wears No Clothes. If anybody has heard of that by Jack Herrer, a pretty important book from the most of the 90s at least into the 2000s. So after we started getting campaigns going here my wife and I moved over to Europe where we designed and curated the Hash marijuana and hemp museum in Holland and got a lot of information translated into other languages and disseminated through the museum which is sponsored by Sency Seed Bank which meant that people who came to Holland to buy marijuana seeds, a lot of them saw our exhibits and took home literature with them and so that was a big breakaway. We got translated around the world and the United Nations is still dealing with what the results of that are. But in 1996 I say medical marijuana breaks out. What that really means is that here in California there was a group of us working on a hemp initiative called the California Hemp Initiative which called for the restoration of industrial hemp medical marijuana adult rights cannabis and it regulated in tax industry. And so the polls started showing that medical marijuana was the most popular aspect of those four planks especially in the California area primarily related to people using marijuana to treat AIDS conditions and symptoms or to work in the cancer fields. And so there was a big interest that came out at that point and what we kind of felt was that basically people were afraid of marijuana but they were more afraid of them or somebody they know and love getting AIDS or cancer and so we were able to leverage that to get Proposition 215 on the ballot and passed. The initiative really did not do a whole lot. It said that a patient or a caregiver with their physician's recommendation or approval can either cultivate and possess marijuana for themselves or for the person that they're caregiving and they have a defense in court. A lot of people think Prop. 215 did a lot of stuff but that was really the result of attorneys who went to court and we used that to leverage. I began working as a marijuana expert witness and so we would go into court and fight over and over again using federal research and so forth to show that medical marijuana was not just something that you could have one marijuana cigarette and that's all a patient would need or that you could have one plant and that's all a patient would need that there's a lot more to it than that. And so I was actually working in my second book, Hemp for Health, which talks about medical marijuana but also about the nutritional value of hemp seed which has 80 essential proteins and three essential fatty acids for people to use. And I took time off. My wife and I coordinated the petition drive for the volunteers on Proposition 215, got along the ballot and it passed with 56% support which led to my next career as a marijuana expert witness because I worked in Holland growing marijuana legally and so when it comes to going into court you can't go into court and say, I'm breaking the law, you have to believe what I say. You go into court and you say, this is the basis of my information. I was professionally trained in Europe. I've read all these research papers. I've taken the same training as doctors, the same training as attorneys, etc. And so I used that to get a lot of mileage out of that, I should say. And then it wasn't until 2003, seven years later that the legislature finally decided to do anything about it. And they created a state ID card program which is voluntary. And they also created a safe harbor of eight ounces of marijuana and six mature or 12 immature plants per patient. And then they created a collective defense, meaning that patients could grow for one another and they would have a defense for a lot of different things, including transportation of marijuana, sales of marijuana, cultivation of marijuana, giving away marijuana. And their property would be protected from property seizure and confiscation. So that was a very important bill and what the courts later ruled in two cases that I testified in, there was actually three cases that were combined into a Supreme Court case called the People v. Kelly. They decided that the voters in Prop 215 did not say how much marijuana a patient could have. So therefore it's up to the juries and the people to decide what is the reasonable amount for any given patient. And so this is how come we spend so much time in court fighting about this, because what is reasonable? What are these plants going to put out? How are you using it, etc., etc., all become issues. And so I wrote my, it's early about by fifth or sixth book at that point, cannabis yields and dosage, which took the federal research on marijuana, medical use, and cultivation, and it combined it into a kind of a formula that said that about 100 square feet of growing space outdoors usually puts out about three pounds of marijuana bud, and that the patients in the federal program get over six pounds, but our marijuana is a little stronger than theirs. And a lot of people don't need as much as the patients in the federal program. So three pounds is a pretty reasonable amount. So therefore 100 square feet and six, three pounds of marijuana is a reasonable quantity for people to have. We got several counties to adopt that. Sonoma County, Medus, no, not Medus, Humboldt County, Santa Cruz, and Del Norte all adopted it. But then when the legislature passed SB 420 and they said six and 12 plants, people just kind of reverted to that. So we've been fighting along under that since then with this legal defense that was created by the legislature. In 2010, we got Proposition 19 on the ballot. This we tried to legalize adult use of marijuana and cultivation and to permanently fix the SB 420 defense into the California constitution by the will of the voters. But unfortunately the voters did not will to pass it. And so as a result, SB 420 was left in a not protected state, which is going to become important when I get a little ahead here. But what we did with that campaign though is we really started the dialogue going about legalizing marijuana. And so within two years, the states of Colorado and Washington had both voted to legalize marijuana for adult use and to regulate sales. And we saw what happened there in the difference between the two. In Colorado, they had very strongly written legislation and their program rolled out and it went well. In the case of Washington, they let the legislature decide how to make things work. The legislature called in a guy who said it before it had started, he said, this will never work, but hire me to set it up. And they picked him out of all the candidates who were looking for the job. And they created a program that wiped out the medical marijuana program, created what's called a per se amount of marijuana in your bloodstream to be automatically considered to be impaired driving without any other scientific basis at all, except they just pulled a number out of, I will say out of thin air. Some people think they pulled it from someplace else. But in any case, we saw what went wrong there and neither of them allowed any place where people could use their cannabis. So people can fly into Colorado, they can buy marijuana, but they can't smoke in their hotel. They can't smoke on the street, they can't smoke in their car, and there's no place else where they can smoke it. So we watched what happened there. And in 2013, something really important happened though, which was that Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who was considered from the being the Surgeon General of the United States, but he worked for CNN instead, he came out and said that, not only was he in favor of medical marijuana, but he thought marijuana should be legalized and he's apologized to the American people for having been lied to and believed the federal DEA when they told him marijuana was a dangerous drug because he found out it was not a dangerous drug. And in fact, that it helps infants who are suffering from a very intense seizure to get past that. And there's some compounds in cannabis CBD in particular that does not have a psychoactive effect. And so when he came out, that really made a big difference because whereas people such as myself have been telling people a long time, you can't believe the government, they're lying about it. When he came out and said, hey, I did believe the government and now I know they're lying about it and I'm sorry about that. It gave people who had been against marijuana an opportunity to say, you know, I agree with Sanjay Gupta and to turn around. And so that became very meaningful for us, what he did there. So where are we right now? Well, in the course of all this political organizing, we used to have rallies in front of the federal building and we'd be demanding that marijuana be legalized. We would go in front of the state capital and demand that marijuana be legalized. We would march up and down. In fact, San Francisco every year we had to march around the town hall here and so forth and demanded it. And we made some headway, but basically because of the medical marijuana issue, we started to separate out into another group that was more likely to be seen at a medical marijuana conference than to be out on the street protesting. And in fact, some people said, look, I'm a patient. I don't care about other people going to prison. Sick people like me should not get marijuana. I should be allowed to have marijuana, I should say. And then at the same time, people who were providing the marijuana, because of that protection for selling it, started creating businesses. And so then there were businesses conferences about marijuana and then there were activist conferences for training people, but the three groups were starting to split up in these different categories of people. And of course at the time we got about a million people in California who were believed and it could be more than that because there's no record keeping here in California, but at least a million California patients have medical marijuana rights because of their doctors. And so this whole situation of California having all this medical stuff and the other states that were starting to legalize non-medical use, plus there were, at this point, I think there were roughly 19 states or so that had legalized medical marijuana. The federal government got involved and they wrote the coal memorandum. We said basically that even though it's illegal under federal law, if states vote to make marijuana legal that the federal government was gonna watch out for eight different things and basically was gonna let the states, as long as they don't have interstate traffic, sales to minors, drug cartels getting involved, things like that. They had a list of categories of things that the federal government was going to let the states do their own thing in a way they kind of had to because we had two Supreme Court rulings by that point that said that the state, the federal government can't tell states how to make their own marijuana laws. But this was acknowledging it and it was really important because it really slowed down the amount of DEA activity in the country. And then here in California just last year they created these new medical marijuana regulations which are known as the Medical Cannabis Regulation and Safety Act. And in this, they did a bunch of different things but two things that are really important to the people in this room is that they created a license, a state and a local license combination for people who want to be in the business of selling marijuana, medical marijuana that is to say that if you get both of those that you no longer have to worry about California police arresting you. Let me give you one example. In San Diego, the city of San Diego kept legalizing medical marijuana dispensaries and licensing them and then the county which did not like medical marijuana would send in the cops to arrest them. So you would get your city license, pay all your fees, get your permit, open up shop the next day the county would be rounding people up and taking you off the jail and stealing all your stuff. And so what the legislature said in this is that we're not gonna have that anymore. If you have a state and a local license the counties can't come in and go after you, you are licensed. However, the other thing that it was as if you don't have a state and like a local license you no longer have a legal defense in court for providing marijuana to other patients. And so that means you can't sell it means you can't even give it away. You don't have a right to transport it anymore. All you have is a right to grow for yourself or a caregiver, same as Prop 215 gave us or five, a caregiver can now have five patients which Prop 215 only said one. But basically, if you don't have your license by 2018 you don't have a defense in court anymore and if they arrest you for selling or sharing marijuana that's it, you're just guilty. So to me that's a very bad thing. It restores felonies that otherwise we would have had a defense to. And now subsequent to that last year 17 different initiatives were filed. One of them made the ballot. That is Prop 64 and it would legalize and regulate the non-medical use while protecting medical marijuana. I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about that once we get there. So then why do we need a guy for newbies? Well the first thing is that when we go to these events we've noticed that there was a point 10 years ago where most of the events we went to we knew most of the people there. Only people in the room in fact as I recall. But over the past 10 years more and more we go to events and we don't know very many of the people at all. They're young and old but they're not, they haven't been around so they don't know this history and the experience of what we've gone through to get to this point. And that especially shows up when people are growing marijuana for dispensaries. It used to be that people who grew marijuana for dispensaries are very concerned about it has to be organic. We have to take care of the environment. We're like making sure it's cheap for the patients. Then it turned into well I can make money doing this. I can make more money if I cut down those trees and even more money if I siphon some water out from over here and by the way I've got bugs. So I'm gonna spray some poison onto this stuff and then take it to the dispensary. So there was this big change in attitude. They called it the green rudge where people felt like getting in the business of making marijuana was their activism and they didn't care about the other parts of it. And so not that everybody was like that. Now a lot of people are still very understanding but this other group had moved in. And so the other thing is that the public is learning more about cannabis but they're not learning a very consistent idea of it. I mean they hear about the CBD extracts for babies and they hear about the guy who was smoking some marijuana and fell asleep or something, you know their neighbor and things. So people hear different stories but they don't really understand the plant. So that's the first thing we need to do. The another thing is that people who don't have experience with marijuana need to learn how to use it responsibly. And one of the things I see that in, I'll just say the two things. One is edibles. People who are marijuana naive they get into eating these edibles. They overdose, it's not toxic but it certainly is a miserable experience. You know when we have people freaking out and stuff. The other thing is that the what we call dabbing has come on which is that we used to be people would take some marijuana flowers and they'd break them up and roll them into a cigarette and smoke it. Nobody got cancer, it wasn't really all that strong. Some people it was pretty strong but you know, it wasn't gonna knock you out. If you took one breath and it was too strong you would just stop. But now they come up with this stuff that's called dabbing could be four to 10 times as potent as the flower, the cannabis plant. And so a lot of people are starting out with it and I've seen people take a hit and just fall over. I've heard of people falling over and hitting their heads and things like that. And so cannabis has changed in the way people are using it and people who are getting involved with it for the first time they might be thinking it's like that Mexican marijuana from the 60s and then if they do a dab they'll find that's quite different. So we wanna make sure that people understand how to use it responsibly. Another thing is that people want to get into the goal the green rush as they say but they don't know where they fit in. And so this helps people figure out what's going on, what their skills are, how it all fits together. The next thing is that the can of businesses themselves once you've got it together and you create a business how do you keep that business going? What kind of obstacles do you face? A lot of people jump in there and have lost millions and millions of dollars with really good ideas but they didn't know how it all fit together. They didn't know how to navigate the local licensing system, et cetera. So we went to explain to them that the situation is changing but you can actually have a successful business if you do it right. And the last thing is to remind people that marijuana nowadays it's not just about money there's a whole cultural consciousness that came with cannabis back in the 60s and the 70s and the 80s and the 90s that we can't really afford to lose that now. And that is that when you're using this natural plant that you reconnecting with nature that we wanna treat the plant well we wanna treat each other well. We wanna make sure that the price isn't so much that people are driven to the illicit market once it's regulated and things like that and that people are good to one another. In fact, we should call it the kind bud because well it was the kind, I mean it was strong but also because it was kind to people it's not toxic and it's beneficial. So hence my book, The Newbies Guy and I actually just realized I should have had a copy right here for that but you can see it in the back there. I'll show you the cover before I'm done anyway. But so the book covers different things. The first thing it talks about is the actual plant itself, the botany and so forth the history of humanity and the use of cannabis and actually we have multiple histories. We talk about the scientific history, the ancient history, the history of selling marijuana, the history of the business side of marijuana and the regulatory process, et cetera. So all these different histories are woven into it. And the other thing it talks about is how inside of the human body we have cannabinoids ourselves that we produce that interact with the plant cannabinoids. And the ones inside a person are called endocannabinoids and the ones on the outside are called phytocannabinoids. It's totally amazing though because within the past 20 years this whole system was discovered and it's like as if we didn't know we had a digestive system before or a nervous system or a cardiopulmonary system this actual system modulates your other body system and we didn't even know about it until just recently. So it's like we've just discovered something new about humans that we didn't even know until within the past 20 years. The other thing that people wanna know is where do they get it? Well, one of the things you have to do is grow it maybe or get it from somebody who does. And so we want people to know how to breed cannabis to be what they want, how to grow and harvest it well without, we were down at Costa Rica. These guys grew great marijuana but they couldn't process it. You'd get this wadded up chunk of kind of like mold and a glob or something like that. And so the plants look great but by the time they were done and given it to people it was really no good. So we want people to understand that you can't let your material get moldy. You can't let it get contaminated. You have to take care of it and things like that. So that's covered in the book. The other thing is that it explains what you need to think about before you get into the business. And that means what you can do, what the markets are like, what the kind of obstacles you're gonna hit. And one of the things people have to bear in mind is that if everybody else is doing something that's probably not a good product for you because that means you're gonna have a lot of competition. So the better thing is to find out what you're interested in and figure out how you're gonna get in the door before other people because this right now is an opportunity to do that. It's a whole multi-billion dollar industry which is just starting to take shape before our eyes right now. The other thing is how can a business are different from other businesses because on the one hand, there's a lot of it's the same. You're gonna need a bookkeeper. You're gonna need an accountant. You're gonna need a attorney. You're gonna need your employees. You're gonna need a facility. But on the other hand, like for example for cannabis, one of the issues is what do you do about the smell? If you have a popcorn factory, the neighbors say, hey, I love the smell of that popcorn, it makes me hungry. If you have a marijuana shop, people say, hey, that pot smell makes me sick or something. Even though it doesn't, that there's this prejudice against it. So you have to be prepared to how do you not run into those problems with your neighbors? How do you navigate around the changing laws, et cetera? And the other thing we wanna make sure everybody knows about is industrial hemp because here we have the world's premier industrial, natural resource, renewable, sustainable. It can help to heal the planet. We can use it to make 50,000 different commercial products that don't have any drug aspect to them at all. It was the biggest crop in the United States. You see how to grow it and use it to pay your taxes at one point. It was driven out of existence by cotton and slavery essentially because when they invented the cotton gin, the slave trade, it went up by 500% and the number of hemp farms dropped because they used cotton fiber instead of hemp fiber. And so the opportunity to bring back this plant, actually you can use it to kill weeds without using pesticides. It produces more oxygen than it consumes. It creates what we call carbon sink. It pulls toxins out of the environment, the soil, et cetera. So we want people to understand why this is so important to us. And not only is it for the things that people have traditionally used it for, food, clothing, housing, paper, and things like fabrication by plastics, but it's turning out that it's really valuable for things like 3D printing because of the fiber as such that it makes a stronger 3D printing cellulose compound to use for that. And then the next thing we would do is look past prohibition towards what the future holds to give people a glimpse of what we think might happen. And I say we because I wrote this with Jeremy Dahl, my co-author. So then that brings us to where we are now in another sense, though, which is that currently Proposition 64 is on the ballot right now. As I mentioned, there were 17 ballot measures. Curious thing about this is that since 2010 when we got Prop 19 on the ballot, people have been saying to me, you know, if we just write the right initiative, some billionaire is going to come along and give us all this money and we're going to get on the ballot and it's going to be great. So then last year there were 17 initiatives and not only did no billionaire come along at that point, but in fact, the people who were circulating the initiatives were mostly spending more energy calling each other names because they didn't like each other's initiative rather than actually working together to get anything on the ballot. So at the end of 2015, it looked like there was not going to be a marijuana legalization measure on the California ballot. There was no money, no signatures and 17 competing initiatives at the end of the year. And then suddenly out of the blue comes the billionaire. It really was just a billionaire though. Weed maps, has anybody heard of weed maps? Yeah, great. So the thing with weed maps is that they're a company that advertises other marijuana shops. It gives you a way of finding places to sell marijuana. So they were very interested in creating more businesses here in California. And so they got assistance from Peter Lewis's family. Peter Lewis was a funded Prop 215 as well. George Soros's foundation was not particularly interested in supporting it because they think that it's time for other people to pay for these initiatives. They've been paying for them ever since Prop 215 passed 20 years. And a guy named Sean Parker, who was a co-founder of Facebook. So they all put money into this and they hired a firm to look at all the initiatives, to look at the coal memo, to come up with an initiative that would meet the likelihood of passing based on polls, would meet the federal standard to keep us from getting raided by the federal government, would solve some of the problems that we saw happening in other states, like I mentioned earlier. And so they put together what's called the Adult Use of Marijuana Act. And it got put on the ballot. And earlier this year, we got turned into signatures. Gavin Newsom, by the way, our lieutenant governor did a tour around the state where he had a speaking tour where we had people giving input of what they thought an initiative should say. At the same time, California Normal and some other groups put together a speaking tour around with activists saying what they wanted. So all this kind of got mishmashed together into this initiative. And so what it does basically is it has a legalization aspect. It has reduction of penalties. It protects medical marijuana. It creates commercial licensing. And it has production and excise tax. And so let's talk about that means. It means that, and now hopefully you will have a copy of this. I actually was gonna do a slide, but I realized I thought I would just let the count of people having this because you should take one of these with you. This chart on my right hand here shows you what the current laws are and what they will remain to be if the initiative does not pass and what the laws will turn into if it does pass. And so even if you can't see it, if you can just see green is legal and you know currently there's nothing legal. With this, there's a lot of legal. There's only a few things that are in fractions here. Once the initiative, we're gonna get a lot of things converted back to infractions including felonies and misdemeanors and serious stuff. And then all the other felonies are turned into either a misdemeanor or a wobbler. And what a wobbler means is that the DA can, or the judge can charge you based upon the severity of your offense. So say if you grow more plants than the law allows. If you're growing a few more plants, they can say well this won't even charge you or whatever. Or maybe it's a misdemeanor. If on the other hand you're really growing a lot of plants and they're seeing that this marijuana's getting into the schools and stuff, then they can charge you with a felony. But only if you've done it three times or only if you do some environmental damage or something along that line. And then the one thing that stays the same here is that the penalties for selling to someone who's under the age of 18 or under the age of 14 remains a very serious felony under this new initiative. However, it legalizes one ounce of bud, eight grams of concentrate, a garden of up to six plants. And that could be indoor, outdoor, or in a greenhouse. You have to be 21 years old for it. The penalty changes and reductions are all retroactive, meaning that if there's someone who's currently charged with an offense and it turns into a legal activity or a lower offense that their charges are gonna be rewritten to show what it is. If there's someone in prison or jail, they will be released from jail. And their records will be expunged for people who have priors. And that's actually very broad because say, for example, with this new penalty, 11, 358, it's gonna say if you have under six plants, it's legal, if you have over six plants, then it's going to be a misdemeanor. Currently, that's a felony. And so with this, so if you had it, say you got busted five years ago for cultivation and you go to the judge and you say, look, it's legal now, the judge just is supposed to take your word that what you did, well, you would have done the legal thing if you could have, but that wasn't legal at the time, so you didn't. Now, the exception would be that if you have grown, say, a couple thousand plants and then the prosecutor comes and says, wait a minute, this guy would grow more way more than six plants, well, then it would be reduced to a misdemeanor instead of being wiped off your record completely. It would just be reduced to a misdemeanor. But the benefit of the doubt goes to the person who is charged, who has the record, and not to the law enforcement. And the other thing is that it makes sure there's no jail time for anyone under the age of 18. And for people between the ages of 18 and 20, it eliminates a felony and a misdemeanor and just turns those into infractions. Otherwise, in California, you're considered adult at age 18. So that's kind of the way that goes. And so the next thing it does is it protects Proposition 215. And to explain that briefly, in order to change Proposition 215, it would have had to say it changed Proposition 215, but it doesn't. The only time it mentions Proposition 215 is the nine times where it either says, this does not change it or else where it's, and by the way, it refers to it either as the Compassionate Use Act or as Health and Safety Code 11362.5. One of the problems is it's like, our laws are like a Russian novel, you know, where there might be 10 characters, but they got 40 names amongst them. And so people get confused because they don't know which law is which when we talk about it. But this one is CUA, Compassionate Use Act 11362.5 and Prop 215 all mean the same thing. And so it's mentioned nine times, either it protects it as it is or else it adds extra protections such as benefits for parents. They can't take your children for having medical marijuana around anymore, which currently we have a number of cases all over the state where they're trying to take people's kids and things. Also more privacy. Also, whereas local governments right now can ban home grows for medical marijuana patients, but the initiative here is going to make it so that local governments cannot ban home grows indoors or in greenhouses. So patients who currently may be not allowed to grow, they will be able to grow after the initiative passes. And there's some other things too. We're gonna take questions so you may have some questions about some of this stuff. The next thing it does is it legalizes commercial cultivation. So yeah, it's gonna be legal to sell marijuana, but you're gonna need those two licenses I mentioned before, the same as if for medical, you're gonna need a similar thing for the non-medical. But to keep the two systems completely separate and it also legalizes hemp farming and you don't need a local license for hemp farming, but you would need a local license if you start a little marijuana business. Then the next thing it does is it says production and excise taxes and it disperses the funds. The production tax is roughly 34 cents per gram. The growing market price of marijuana is somewhere between $10 and $15 a gram. So just by how much tax that is, it's not really that much. And if you're growing for leaf or for shake, the things people use for making edibles and things, at that point it's like 10 cents a gram tax on that. So they are taxed but it's not that high. Then the excise tax is what's gonna be charged at the retail level. Now that's 15%, that sounds like a lot. And it kind of is a lot but what you have to understand is that other states, they have like up to 75% excise tax. In the state of Washington right now, 50% of the cost of buying marijuana from the store is the taxes. In Colorado it's 37% or something like that. And so with this we're talking about 15%, less than half as much as the other states are charging right now on that. And also the legislature or the agency in charge is supposed to be monitoring whether or not how it affects the black market. They want to stop people from buying from the neighborhood dealer and go to a store and buy the marijuana. And because they wanted the taxes. But so the idea is that they're gonna monitor this and if they find that the taxes are so high at the store that people are still going to the neighborhood dealer, then they're required to lower the tax to make sure. If on the other hand they find the taxes so that the price of marijuana is so cheap that people are selling marijuana to teenagers, well then this was to push the price up with the tax in order to make it so that it's too expensive for teenagers. I understand that's one of the things with that, which is that it takes into account social justice issues like for example it allows for non-profits that could produce and sell low cost marijuana to communities that don't have money. It also reduces the price of getting a state ID card for patients that also exempt them from state sales tax. It also says that if you can't afford to get a state ID card that you can get one free under the Indigent Program. So it makes it easier for people on all these different levels. And then the last thing is that I mentioned in a way that it monitors the progress. And the whole idea is that if they find that marijuana is getting, if the system is working and people are starting to buy from the stores and they're not finding it in the hands of teenagers which is what they're finding in other states right now Oregon, Colorado, Washington. I can't say about Alaska yet, I haven't heard any numbers. But if that happens they can keep it the same or adjust it but it also allows for certain kind of changes from the legislature. But those changes, they can't make marijuana illegal again. They can't make the penalties stronger again. They can reduce the penalties and they can change regulations to make it more practical for people. And by the way, the other thing with those policies about regulations is that it says that they're not allowed to be unreasonable or impracticable. Meaning that they can't say, yeah, you can sell marijuana but it's impossible to do it here because it's too expensive to follow our rules. The rules have to allow you to do it if they're gonna let you do it. They can ban sales though. Commercial activity can be banned by a local government but personal cultivation, possession, sharing, that's all cannot be. And so let's move on to the next some points of special interest. It's got a lot of very strong safeguards against advertising and marketing to minors. This is very much designed to keep marijuana out of the hands of kids. And in fact of the matter is when people read it, it says some unpleasant things about marijuana, things that I wouldn't say about marijuana. But what they're trying to do is to really discourage young people from using it. What we've seen in other states is that when medical marijuana is legalized or adult use is legalized that teenage use goes down. And so that's very much the goal here. The other thing is that it's going to, they're not supposed to advertise to people who are going across state lines. So at the airport for example, they probably couldn't put up a sign there. Definitely on a freeway going to another state. Not allowed to have signs that advertising marijuana stores going out of the state. Now I don't know about going into the state. That might be a little different. We'll see how it goes. Anyway, as I mentioned legalizes indoor, outdoor and greenhouse gardens for personal cultivation. But local governments can ban commerce and outdoor grows. They can't ban indoor grows. They can't ban greenhouse grows. A lot of people think that the initiative says you can't grow outdoors, but that's simply not true. Under the initiative you can grow outdoors. But if the local government says you have to go in a greenhouse, you can get in trouble for that ordinance violation, but you would not be in trouble with the state. The state's not going to come after you. You're not going to find yourself in criminal court over that. The next thing is it does, which is extremely important, is it sets the edible dosage of 10 milligrams THC per serving. And it has to be very clearly marked and scored so that people can break those up. I don't know if you guys have gone to any dispensaries around here, but you might buy a bar that's got like 20 or 30 doses of a chocolate bar, but 20 or 30 doses of marijuana. Now how are you going to break that thing up? Or, and half the time people aren't even looking at it, they just think, oh, one candy bar equals one dose and they eat it, and now they've got 30 times as much as they're supposed to have in their system. And they sleep very well, and they may give up marijuana because it's quite unpleasant. But anyway, so with this, a lot of people think 10 milligrams is not a strong enough dose for them, but you can always eat two. You can get a bar that has five or 10 doses on it. So it's not like that's all you're allowed to take, but when they sell it, they have to let you know what part is 10 milligrams and what part is not. The next thing is that the taxes are directed specifically. They don't just go into the general fund. There's for specific things. Youth programs being one of the most important ones, overseeing the program of course. Scientific research is the next thing. Environmental repairs and law enforcement. And then the other thing on there is that, unless I second to another slide, I'll talk about it right now, is that they have it set up so that there is a 10, starts at 10 million, it goes to $50 million a year fund to help out communities that have been adversely affected by the drug war, which by the way is a lot of California. That would be your inner city communities where they had the crack issues and so forth. It could be the growers up north who all of a sudden are out of work and things like that. It has job training, diversion, specific grants to help people get their lives back together that have been harmed by the drug war. And as we mentioned, if you get out of jail or if you have a prior record, you'll still be able to get into the marijuana businesses so it creates economic opportunities. You're not gonna be squeezed out. Like the medical marijuana law right now that was passed by the legislature, if you have a prior arrest, you're not allowed to get involved in selling medical marijuana. With this, you'll be able to, it also eliminates two different barriers in the medical side. Like right now, if you grow marijuana, you have to sell it to distributor who sells it, takes it to a transporter, who takes it to a processor, who gives it to another transporter, who takes it back to a retailer, wholesaler who then takes it to the distributor, who then sells it to the retailer. And so every time you say the word retailer or transporter, somebody is taking money, who's really not doing anything but driving the marijuana around. And so with this, you won't have that. It also adds a couple of categories. And I'm gonna just, okay, I'm gonna go to that next. Okay, and the other thing that I wanna mention though is that local governments who ban outdoor marijuana gardens or commercial business activity, they don't get the law enforcement funds from this. And it's up to them to prove that they're keeping it illegal and not licensing things, is keeping down the illicit market, which is basically impossible because if you don't have a legal place to get it, people are all gonna be buying it illegally. And so this creates a lot of pressure on them in order to get the money and in order to meet the state standards. They have to show that they're not arresting people but they're also getting rid of the black market. And so then this is something that's really important to a lot of people I know which is that this initiative was really designed for small businesses and I keep hearing people say, oh, this is a big corporate takeover, et cetera. It could not be farther from the truth. What this does is specifically to help small businesses, it allows on-site consumption so that when you have things like the Emerald Cup or the Cannabis Cup where people will get together and smoke marijuana together, they can still do that, they'll just need to get a license to do it. It has very strong anti-monopoly restrictions, no price fixing, no undercutting each other, no big stores underselling things that'll last so that the smaller companies are forced out of business, no redlining so that certain parts of town have to pay more, things like this. It's got a lot of things that protect competition and promote small businesses. The next thing is that people who have prior convictions can get into the business. As I say, a lot of people will call it a rap sheet here in California, we call it a resume. People better use that resume to get a job and get their life back together. The next thing is the progressive fee structure so that the smaller your business is, the less you pay. So there are these different levels of size of industry but if you're the small end of the small, you're gonna pay less than the guy who's on the high end of the small and you're gonna pay less than the guy who's at the next level up from you in your licensing. So it's designed to help people get this going. There's also a small garden size that's licensed and what I think is the most exciting is the micro-businesses. It's kind of like the breweries, micro-breweries and vineries. With one license you could grow marijuana, you can process the marijuana, you can sell it wholesale, you can transport it, you can sell it retail, you can have on-site consumption all in one place. And so for a lot of Northern California, the areas that we now have wineries in, just imagine little butteries or whatever you wanna call it, weederies, everybody has their own word for it. Those will be popping up all over the place. I think, because I think a lot of local governments are gonna see that they're better off with the licensing. A lot of people are afraid that the local governments are gonna run away. There will be some of that, but we're already seeing that since the MCRSA was passed, that a lot of places passed bans immediately afterwards and now they're rescinding those bans all over the state. And so I think we might see something similar here. The last thing is that non-profits can be licensed and you have not only not allowed to make ridiculous requirements, but in addition to that you have right to appeal and there's an appeals board that will check you into that. And so with all that, I just think it's a winning combination. We got a book that talks about how to get into the business. We got an initiative that's gonna let people get into the business. And I'm certainly hoping you guys all decide to support the initiative and to buy a copy of my book. That'd be great too. And so that's kind of it, my formal part of the presentation. And I think we're gonna take questions, right Ruth?