In addition, many of those local jurisdictions are selective about the type of cannabis business they allow, such as testing labs only. Others permit medical marijuana companies but not recreational businesses. In short, getting into the California market isn’t as simple as walking into San Francisco or Los Angeles and filing paperwork to start a marijuana store or grow. The state remains a patchwork of regulations and rules, with most local jurisdictions choosing to implement their own regulatory schemes on top of state rules.

Part of the transition into a state-regulated system also means that tens of thousands of legacy operators who fueled California’s gray medical marijuana market for two decades have been shut out of the legal industry, either by local license caps or by city and county ordinances that ban their business models.

Many of those pioneers are small companies, often one-person operations, that don’t have the money to relocate to a city or county that will grant them permits to continue doing business in the legal marijuana sector. This has led to enormous market contraction, while simultaneously opening business opportunities for newcomers to the industry down the road.

Wow! So much for being on the money. When our SP+GTM algorithm published its findings, which declared that the "stink" and other issues will make growing marijuana an issue in most parts of the state, we received a boat load of negative noise from the peanut gallery. What now GREEN COW?