More Reefer Madness!!

It would appear that close proximity to anything marijuana-related induces complete insanity... at least with respect to philatelic purchases.

When the marihuana tax stamps released by the Smithsonian National Postal Museum Deaccession Auction hit the market, I recall there being a fair amount of hype in philatelic circles. However, I never knew that the stamps went so far as to hit the TV shopping channels.

From my years of late night boredom watching coin shows, baseball card shows, etc. on the shopping channels (never bought anything; usually just laughed at the prices and the claims), I can only imagine what the on-air presentations were like for these stamps.

I just purchased a set of Scott # RJM5-7 from a gentleman who originally purchased the 3 stamps from Shop at Home TV in 2007. He included the paperwork from the original purchase.

Current 2018 Scott Catalogue value for the 3 stamps is $1,275.

In 2007 he paid $1,850.79 for them.

I purchased the set for roughly 1/3 of current Scott. That is a ginormous loss. When I spoke with him, he admitted it was an impulse buy. Live and learn.

The one nice thing about the set is that none of the stamps have a straight edge. Many of these stamps out there have straight edges on one side. Auction results indicate that non-straight-edged stamps hold their value better, so if you're looking to add these, try to find fully perforated examples. Centering is frequently pretty poor. I'm not thrilled with the centering on the $1, but the $5 and $10 are pretty decent.

In summary: Friends don't let friends shop via TV channels.

Just a thought but the bottom of the $5 looks reperfed to me. Comments?

Nice set and tough to find without stright edges and well centered

What about it implies reperfing to you? I don't see it.

Here is just the $5, and then several other examples at approximately the same image size from dealers/auctions for comparison (color/brightness notwithstanding).

I doubt that it has been reperfed. Twentieth century revenues are notorious for having funky perfs. Soft paper + no one really cares = lots of mediocre perfs.

Probably not but what I saw was how straight the bottom was without any of the feathers at the tips of the perfs. Also, it *appears* the perfs aren't evenly spaced. Just throwing it out there for discussion that's all.

Perhaps my eyes are deceiving me, too. 1typesetter's observations match my own conclusions on the bottom row of perfs. They just do not look like the perfs on the other $5 stamps illustrated by Dan.

I wouldn't want to state anything categorically when it comes to the 1940's era perfs unless I had the stamp in hand, the BEP really did not do a good job on them.
Some truisms about perfs do not apply to all of them, such as all perfs on opposite sides must be parallel. On the sheet stamps that remains true, but on the high values it does not($30 and over). I have seen a number of panes of four where one of the inner rows is not parallel.

I'll rescan all 3 stamps at high resolution tonight. There's only so much you can glean from small images. If it is reperfed, it will be the first I've heard of on mid-late 20th century revenue stamps. Given the comparatively small market value difference between straight edged and non, and the fact that the resulting stamp isn't sufficiently well centered to garner a large premium, I don't know why anyone would have bothered...

When I purchased my set they came with certs. I asked why he had bothered getting them certed and he indicated that quite a few straight edge copies had been reperfed.

Interesting. None of the RJM5-7 on SAN (or elsewhere I've seen) have been certed.

I see 10 issued carts from PF for RJM5 so not many.

There are 95 PF certs across the entire RJM series, including the large denominations and booklet panes. If reperfing were a major issue with these, I would have expected to see at least one cert bearing that out, but none of the 95 certs state that the stamp was reperfed.

I'm not certain that is a good metric though. If you look at the cert numbers, the vast majority were certed consecutively with breaks in numbering being filled by other Smithsonian deascension stamps like wines. One would assume that a large group submitted around the time of the sale would all come back genuine since they were likely submitted by the same person and I doubt they would have reperfed stamps and then submitted. It doesn't appear a good sample of any of the RJMs has been submitted since the time of the sale. Of course, that's no indication that copies were reperfed.

Yeah, you're correct. I'd just like to see evidence of "quite a few straight edge copies had been reperfed" beyond a single anecdotal account, i.e., seeing a confirmed reperfed example.

I'm not doubting your account, but the cynic in me says that some dealers will say anything to justify/persuade a higher selling price, and the existence of a cert, regardless of whether or not it is actually necessary, is just such a tactic.

There is no question that some documentary reds have been reperforated. Usually they are the high values done by the uneducated who were not aware that they only come with one or two straight edges. And it would not surprise me to discover some marijuana stamps have also had perforations added to straight edges.