#Jason truly is a dichotomy of “this is hell” and “this is nice”

[insanescriptist]

See look, the thing was, Jason as a kid was absolutely 100% a liar. Not that anyone really ever called him out on it, but you didn't live four years on the street without seeing shit. Choosing masks and marks and praying you'll live through your mistakes. Seeing people who didn't. Who weren't good enough, lucky enough or useful enough. Like with everything else good with Jason (according to everyone else), that happy boy facade died in a warehouse but it had been cracking for months before that.

Sure, it wasn't entirely a facade -that's what made it such a fantastic lie- but Jason's big mistake was thinking that their relationship, that it had become true on both ends, instead of a lie he had crafted on his. He didn't even think B lied on his. Fake it till you make it. B said look to the evidence and the evidence said, before his death, that Jason was his son. B had adopted him, trained him, treated him as his child. In and out of the leotard and pixie boots.

After his death, under the headstone Todd. Not in the Wayne family cemetery. Not his son. No, in the cave, where the heart of Batman was, Jason had been a good soldier.

Batman collected trophies from his cases. Once he had come back as Red Hood -a very petty fuck you to Bruce and psychological warfare on Joker- the memorial case existing had been a brilliant red flag.

How did that quote go?

The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interred with their bones;

Jason knew that B believed that about him.

It was no wonder their relationship never mended beyond their stark ideological differences. It was well and good to believe that all deserved redemption and the chance atone. It worked sometimes. But B was at his heart, a classist fuckhead, who didn't understand the really, all he was doing was prolonging the suffering of the victims who deserved justice and not the Joker's insanity plea. Again and again. And again. And again.

Kind of like this whole society was a classist shitstain through genetic lottery.

You had your winners. The Heroes.

You had your average joes and janes.

You had your losers. The Villains.

And then you had the fuckwads creating this status quo, allowing society to fuck everyone over. Bread and circuses, except less Flying Graysons and more children gladiatorial battles as preparation for a life and a paycheck to hunt down those that "deserved it," for breaking the law, when society had broke them first.

Honestly, if it wasn't for the Mystical Shit™ then Jason would have thought he was reincarnated into a personal hell dimension full of everything he hated.

They didn't even have proper heroes here! These incompetent shits stayed dead! But what else could you expect from Heroes under a government body? Even the villains under the government bodies he was used to had access to health care from death ala Lazarus.

Where the fuck were the Wallers here?

Jason really fucking hated it here. Six months into a stable identity and a stable place to live and he still hated this world.

Even this shitty apartment was still several steps up from the level of grime he expected. Not enough urban blight. No serious grit. No personal stakes in the hero vs villain rivalries. No real drama. No stakes beyond the petty everyday shit.

Oh, a purse snatcher. A hero is there. Oh, someone robbed a liquor store. A hero is there. Oh no, somehow an entire building is on fire. No worries, a hero will rescue you and fuck themselves up because despite the training the allegedly had, they don't have the equipment on hand to protect themselves from the smoke. What a heroic sacrifice when the fire department could do it just the same but without ending their own career over it. Basic shit.

There were still the fucked up "villains" who just wanted to hurt people. That sort of thing was just endemic to human biology, which these people were. Allegedly. 4 outta 5 people being born metahuman -sorry, with Quirks- and having powers before they had finished potty training and then having their entire lives defined further by genetic lottery, on top of the normal shit politics of wealth and otherness defining their life path.

Jason wanted to burn the whole Hero Industry down. But that's wasn't a new feeling for him now. A whole year into this fucked up world -no Gotham, no Star, no Watchtower- and he still hated everything about it.

Now the question was, how to avoid martyrs.

Martyrs were the bane of any killer, mercenary or assassin. They wanted to die for a cause. It would get the cause more publicity and thus more power. So the obvious solution was to either not get caught killing them or to dismantle the cause.

Both however was better.

Accident someone who was holding some uh, compromising evidence. Whoops, now there's an investigation. Point it out to the news.

Do a little murder. Frame it the right way. Let the police take care of it. It's an average joe. Just works for a hero.

Oh, no. It looks like there's corruption in the hero business. Except the government body over Heroes says, "no, that's just an outlier."

So again and again. Throw a little dirt there. Some accelerate here on the internet. That shiny image isn't as shiny anymore. Take a break. Let things roll, reassess and then plan and progress some more. Change up the MO enough and space things out enough it looks like coincidence. Maybe to the suspicious mind, multiple actors. Multiple cells. Espionage, not his forte, but Jason could dabble in it well.

In the mean time, tonight is a night in. Gotta moisturize and dye his hair again. Forgetting the eyebrows again would be awful; the brow gel was so expensive and so much upkeep compared to just dying it. Mascara at least was quick and cheap.

---

Jason was technically 3 hours into a movie marathon, watching the most recent movie adaptions of classical literature, judging them for their lack of technical skill. Because why have that when there's quirks that can do the same thing?

Basically in this reality anything that could have been done with a quirk was done with a quirk. So special effects? Oh, quirk. Easier to hire someone to breathe fire or something than to get a professional at pyrotechnics or CGI it in. Illegal yes, but no one really cared about the "no quirks in public law without a government permit," unless they were using it to commit crimes or seemed threatening.

Thankfully Jason was always capable of multi-tasking. He had his laptop out, working on a paper. Presumed dead this body was, but Jason had papers that said he was a living person.

Complete with a fucking quirk registration. Because that was also so important to this fuck up society. Positively Orwellian.

Ice quirk, his papers said, because while this body had the instinctual response of lashing out with fire, Jason had been working with the ice. Safer and easier to do that inside than playing with fire and his skin would thank him for it. He may not like this body, but he was at least going to take care of it.

His skin looked more like normal skin now, thanks to some regular moisturizing with the Skin Restorative Serum Knock-off, better known as Skin Goop™ but it wouldn't ever really get back to what it should be. Thankfully he had an explanation for that. His papers said his sad tragic backstory was his family was dead in a fire from a villain and hero fight, he survived with burns and amnesia and now was finishing his schooling online because of having missed so much school and other psychological bullshit that Jason could pull out of his ass like magicians pulled bunnies out of hats.

As much as the stagnation of technology was an anomaly in this dimension -apparently this is what happened when all your "villains" were meta-humans instead of "normal" people with PhD's- it did make faking out his backstory a whole lot easier. Japan had family registries and so it wasn't just a fake identity for himself, but for a whole damn family lineage. That also had to be tied to a real enough one for quirk falsifying purposes and that meant so much fuckery. False taxes, false schooling, falsifying bank records so he could live off of the "life insurance." Which yes, thank you fraud. Steady paycheck, no work. Not enough for vigilante expenses but enough for civilian expenses.

Jason took his time making Himura Touya existent.

Loner in school due to poor health. Yeah, the clinic he used to go to closed down while he was in the hospital. Records lost. Whoops. Yeah, the private school he used to go to developed a leak, so the paper records turned to mush. Electronic records were much more easily faked, but it still took time.

Like it was obviously sketchy as fuck if anyone dug deep and did the legwork and did actual asking but it was a credible enough fake to the rest of society.

So he had a shitty apartment but still better than he was used to for a shitty apartment. He was getting valid credentials for an Official Civilian Life with Normal Things™ like potentially college. That he didn't really need but was absolutely something to do to fill out his time with beyond taking down the Hero Industry.

Plus the insurance fraud money wouldn't last forever and having an official income made it harder for people to think "why doesn't he have a job if he has all these nice things?"

Yeah, even in this world, with the very much real labor shortages, minimum wage sucked. So much of the world was focused on the hero industry and what supported it, that it was absolutely sickening.

But that's what some middle of the week stress relief was all about. Stopping traffickers, rescuing people and arson.

Because why would someone with an ice quirk be a suspect for someone using a fire quirk to make a big ol' fuck you to the world?

Besides, some stress relief was being covered up (and not by him) and well, that's another scandal.

Cremation is just another fun(erl) service

So blaming random 4am thoughts that have been plaguing me all day for this

----

Jason woke to a bright room, thin sheets and the smell of a hospital embedded in his body.

First as always, assess. Hospital. No affiliation printed on the walls or anywhere. Private room, but small. That door looked like it led to a private bathroom. Generic flower picture, a mounted screen turned off. Really fucking bright sunlight from the windows.

There was no fucking way he was in Gotham then. Everything was too nice. Normal by standards outside of Gotham. There were blinds, not metal shutters. The walls were cleaner than Gotham allowed outside of Downtown and he could see greenery through the window.

Okay. So what had he been doing? Jason remembered and then wished he had his Jerichos to shoot himself with. Mystic Shit™. Okay. Okay. That was not one of his better ideas, but if he's recovering in a hospital, it worked. World saved.

So recovery. How fucked was he?

His skin looked so fucked. Which meant he had been worse. He's had time to recover and lose muscle tone in, going by how twiggy his arms were. His hands looked good. Clearly someone knew he cared about those if they went through the effort of restoring those.

Hmm, that was odd. No matter how much Jason hated the Lazarus Pits and all its by-products, it would have been a faster and more simple way to recover from near-death than the long incarceration in a hospital for a John Doe.

Jason wasn't sure if he'd been abandoned yet again by those who called themselves his family because he could, "take care of himself," or if he had been written off dead. Again.

Hospital beat the coffin by a long shot.

And it was with that cheery thought, a nurse -obvious meta human nurse- came in and burst into excited Japanese, because that was of course, his luck.

It's after the nurse and doctors leave that Jason loses his shit.

It looks like he's sulking in bed, but mentally everything in his head is exploding. Imploding.

Three. Fucking. Years. Coma.

Burn victim so bad they not only expected him to die in the first couple of days, but still expect it because of the infection risk his fucked up skin represents.

Still the conversation with the medical staff -of varying degrees of bizarre- was enlightening.

No, he has no idea who he is. Did he ever get anyone visit? How did he get here?

Of course some amnesia is to be expected. No, some of the nurses visited. No one knows how he got here.

Does he know what his quirk is? Uh?

Trauma blocked amnesia, the doctor mutters.

What's the last date he remembered?

Saturday. Maybe? The last year? No, I'm pretty sure my memory is shit and I'm trying hard not to freak out over not knowing anything. So could I get the year number?

And then there's the fucking year number. Once he got it translated into more normal terms.

Mystic Shit™ said fuck you to the future.

Except Jason knows this is not his future. Again, if it was, this would have been treated as a fucking inconvenience. Effective skin restoration goop -the proper name escaped him- was easily available to those with the right connections. A normal baseline human with 2nd and 3rd degree burns would be fine in less than two weeks with it, with nary a trace to show for it.

Thanks to the three year coma, his muscles were all atrophied as fuck, despite their best attempts at physical therapy. Because of all the burns and later burn scars and infections making it basically impossible to actually do fuck all about maintaining muscle tone until he was basically burnt skin and bones anyway.

He was so fucking weak now. It wouldn't last forever. He'd escape this hospital before he was discharged, before whatever "benefactor" showed up for whatever "purpose," he was suppose to serve now, as they had the medical debt over his head or was threatening his loved ones or whatever. If one didn't show up in the next week, he was losing his genre-savviness, because shitheads always wanted to claim shit, if it looked useful.

And Jason was used to looking useful, until he was no longer useful and they just didn't care. The amnesia made him less shiny, but Jason couldn't pull off the brain dead zombie imitation without actually being a brain dead zombie crawling up out of his grave.

So under the thin hospital sheets, Jason twitched his muscles.

Two weeks of emotional freak outs, watching the news, physical therapy and drugs Jason had had enough.

And he broke out.

----

Yeah, he regretted it almost immediately. Hard not to in the stupid paper gown, barefoot and bare ass.

Thankfully people were people, even with the plethora of meta humans he had seen, so it actually wasn't hard to find clothes. Someone left a hoodie in their car and Jason broke into said car. Put on the hoodie. Hotwired the car and drove off.

Somehow for being in the fucking future by two centuries and change, cars really hadn't changed. More evidence of Mystic Shit™ slamming him sideways.

He drove to the next town over, picked another direction, drove some more. Parked the car near what looked like a chop shop, negotiated the car for some money. He probably got ripped off, but better than nothing.

He walked to a corner store, bought some flip-flops after bullshitting an excuse that his had broken. First aid stuff. You know, for his feet. Hair dye in three different colors, because Rose Wilson could pick out a bad dye job at a hundred meters and so Jason learned how to dye his own hair properly so as to avoid her mockery, only to get mockery (affectionate) anyway.

It was a mix of instinct and lifelong observation that let him find an empty apartment quickly. He stole some sweatpants and passed out on the bed.

----

The thing is, Jason doesn't regret his crimes like Bruce thinks he ought to do, with a massive pity party and flaming self-hatred and punching criminals instead of shooting them. He hates the necessity of doing crimes, even if that crime is a net gain to society, but that's why all his serious crimes are premeditated. He's homicidal, not a psychopath.

Not Pit-mad either, no matter what the rest of them might have thought.

Again, he's homicidal, not a psychopath. And when he doesn't have to be some sort of costume soldier to be discarded by family for the disgrace of disfiguring the memory of a dead boy? He's actually chill and boring.

That is to say, he crashed at that apartment for three days, felt progressively more like himself, especially after the dye job -white hair all over, now a solid and boring black- but it still didn't change all the other issues the Mystic Shit™ inflicted on him.

This body isn't actually his. Too young, scars not right where the burns didn't fuck him over. Thankfully his existing coping mechanisms for dysphoria work and it's shoved to the side.

It's also a shit body. Not even a month out of a three year coma with inadequate -by his standards- of medical care. It's weak and building muscle to do everyday civilian shit, is going to take months to do. Pushing as hard as he did during the escape wrecked him the next three days. Jason may not know what's going to happen, but with his luck, it's going to suck and training is preparing to make it suck less. The only certainty he's got is that his skin or lack thereof is going to kill him from infection if he doesn't fix it.

He's got no legal identity here. Which basically puts him back onto familiar ground of legally dead.

Beyond the lack of paperwork, he's got a lack of funds. He also has no easy target to steal funds and equipment from, even just for fun.

For more disadvantages, he's in a different country, with different laws and a whole different culture. He would be climbing on board a fucking plane to Gotham, if it existed in this world, for some familiar ground.

He really is the unluckiest Robin. It also means he is also the most prepared Robin.

---

The first six months after waking up in this mockery world of heroics were the absolute worst.

He started at one foot in the grave and crawled out of it before the casket could really eat him alive. Jason had experience in casket busting. He didn't wanna repeat it.

He still didn't know who he was -in who was he inhabiting- but it wasn't like Jason had a lot to go on. 'His' quirk was thermo-manipulation, most obviously in the blue fire he could call to his hands but he could do some ice too; it was thanks to Duke's light and shadow manipulation that he had even tried for the duality. He had white hair. Presumably Japanese heritage but quirks had really erased or blurred a lot of racial lines. Also presumed dead and young.

Access to the Quirk Registry took some doing, but again, not everyone followed basic computer security, much less what it took to keep someone bat-trained out of their systems. Again, for nearly two centuries in the future, a lot of the technological development had stagnated. Searching through the Quirk Registry hadn't yielded any result but none of his other methods had struck anything either. And he had looked at the recently dead and/or presumed dead. Sure, he had some leads that looked viable, but he wasn't going to follow those up yet.

He had fixed a few of his most pressing issues the past six months. His ignorance of the local area, the local and national politics and so on. This world supported and had an entire industry catering to making child soldiers and sell their image and reputation to make money and more child soldiers that called themselves Heroes.

His weak ass body no long cried doing daily tasks and only hated him after working out. Yes, Jason was pushing it but he was well aware of how months of preparation could mean shit in the face of seconds.

His infection risk was severely reduced after quick research bender let him make the most generic knock-off brand of the skin restoration goop in a shitty homemade lab. Did it fix his skin being patchwork fucked in places? Some. He wasn't going to get feeling back properly, but at least he looked more normal. Maybe with enough moisturizing he might look a little less Frankenstien's monster.

He also had a cash inflow. It wasn't great, but it supported his apartment. And the second set of papers. And the 2nd apartment.

Which meant in grand old tradition for Jason, time for him to bounce to the next apartment and come up with a new name.

[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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