A joint committee of the Israeli health and finance ministries recommended allowing exports of medical cannabis to other countries last year, which they predicted would bring the country as much as $4 billion a year. Now that exports have been delayed, these companies have to choose between letting their new cannabis crops rot in storage, or selling them off illegally.
Cannabis industry attorney Hagit Weinstock believes that Netanyahu’s decision will increase the supply of marijuana available to the black market, not decrease it. “What are they going to do with it? Are they going to be drug dealers?” The attorney said that she will petition the High Court of Justice against the prime minister’s decision. “The ministers are busy scaring the prime minister that the streets of Israel will be covered with marijuana, detached from the reality in which we live where tens of thousands of people smoke and consume marijuana without interruption,”MK Tamar Zandberg, the chairwoman of the Knesset Committee on Drug Abuse, also criticized Netanyahu’s decision, calling it “a destructive one stemming from ignorance and fear. ” Medical cannabis is “good for the economy, it’s good for agriculture and it’s good for the sick,”
Israel is not the only country scared about legal weed flooding into an illegal black market.