I don’t buy a lot of weed anymore. There was a time when I bought a lot of weed.
If weed were legal, and you were part of a social circle where people smoked it, EVERYONE would have it. At least outside of city environments, in places like the Midwest where there are farms all around, every single person would probably know at least one friend with a plot of land and a half-acre of weed growing if it was legalized. Can you conceive of all of the people who would inherit soybean and corn fields from their family and decide that they could make a better profit growing weed instead? Lots of people would grow their own not out of any kind of higher purpose but just because they want to make money. It wouldn’t be a world of shady dealers with hidden grow-operations anymore - there would be acres and acres of locally grown organic weed everywhere.
They would buy walmart-brand weed wrapped in pink packs with Paris Hilton on the front if they could buy pallets of it. It’s pot for Chrissakes not indie films.
As for the OP, I’d give it 10 years at least before it becomes legal, assuming a democrat administration by then, I doubt weed would ever be legalized by republicans.
I hope it does become legal. I’d pick up smoking again for it. I just hope the same laws for smoking cigarettes apply to pot, it’s great to smoke but it smells like shit.
I guess I’m just inherently distrustful of big corporations handling anything. In my mind, corporate-marketed weed would be the weed equivalent of McDonalds and Bud Lite. But maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way. Maybe the corporations would hire lots of scientists and engineers who also smoked weed, to try to create all kinds of different varieties with different highs and stuff. I don’t know. Around here there are a hell of a lot of gardeners and I have a strong feeling that if weed were made legal, lots of them would be growing it in large quantities just as a hobby, and these people alone would be able to fill the need of the whole town.
There is a bewildering variety of different strains of weed, and many of them have totally different and distinct highs. It’s most definitely a complex and multifaceted product. And people who are into it, are INTO it, and won’t settle for “Beast” if they could smoke “Jack Herer.” Dedicated stoners can be a discriminating bunch.
You’d also have your Heineken and Pilsner Urquell right up to Patron and champagne.
ETA: As for your comment regarding dedicated stoners, sure. Just like you have wine connoisseurs. That doesn’t mean the great majority of consumers won’t buy the cheaper stuff. There’s a market for every level of quality.
What makes weed so different from liquor that a commercial market would not arise for it, sufficiently diverse to satisfy a variety of tastes? I mean, there are people who brew their own alcohol too, but they form but a tiny niche of the total drinking population; what’s so different about weed?
To some extent, perhaps the reason you notice a DIY ethos, independent streak, anti-corporate bent, whatever, among weed smokers is that such an ethos correlates with the kind of person who is willing to flout weed’s current illegal status. Were it legalized, that would no longer be a relevant factor.
If corporate weed was taxed, lots of people would grow their own or buy from local growers rather than pay sin taxes. There would be local growers undercutting the corporations and taking all of the business away from them, until the corporations were forced to lower the taxes to a level that consumers found acceptable.
And then in a few decades we would find out that all these new altered pot brands were giving us and anyone around us cancer and we would start stigmatizing weed smokers not because of the legal aspect of it but because of our own health paranoia and so people would call for even more stringent pot smoking laws and some would even whisper about criminalizing pot and the irony would be one for the ages.
I think you’re underestimating the laziness of the average stoner. I also think you’re underestimating the advantages corporate weed would have over a farmer’s market. Ease and ubiquity of availability, consistent and predictable quality, and, to be honest, I don’t think it would necessarily be any more expensive.
Lots of people who smoke weed (and I know you really can’t generalize because there are all kinds) are paranoid and distrustful of anything corporate or mass marketed. Although I don’t really smoke any more, most of my friends do, and I can say with great certainty that if weed were made legal and sold by corporations, IMMEDIATELY all of these people would start circulating stories about how the corporate weed is dangerous, causes illness, or is malevolent in some other way. Immediately. They would continue buying from local growers (who would no longer have to HIDE their operations) and rail against the evils of corporate marijuana at every opportunity.
But maybe the people I know are just a bunch of kooks. I mean, a lot of them actually thought that voting for Ron Paul would accomplish something.
Well, beyond the fact that I doubt that is representative of the weed-smoking population at large, there is also the factor, as I mentioned before, that if weed were legalized, there may well be many new people smoking it who were previously deterred by its illegality. If weed use happens to correlate with an attitude which is skeptical of “the institution”, so to speak, surely that, to a great extent, is a byproduct of its very illegality, and not intrinsic to the substance itself.
If they’re anything like the potheads I’v jknown througout my life (and I’ve known plenty, not to mention been one), they’d talk a lot of shit at first and then become loyally branded customers within a year. They’d still turn their noses up at the “Budweiser” brands, but have great things to say about a “Grolsch” or a Beck’s" type brand.
A really quality commercial market would arise in no time. Homegrowers wouldn’t be able to compete with the resources, equipment and research capabilities of the corporate world.
It’s already started. Hopefully California is starting to panic and they think a tax on the wacky tobaccy will help with their economy woes. And since the nation has a tendency to follow what California does, legalization can only follow suit soon. I give it about 10 years or so as well before we see high priced generic joints in every corner drugstore.
Again though there’s the taxes. Maybe my experience is unique because I live in a very “DIY” town where you’re constantly being bombarded with buy local this, buy local that. I’ve lived my whole life here in Bloomington, Indiana, my parents were members of the farm co-op since when I was born, and I’ve been surrounded by a very strong sense that the “right thing to do” was to buy locally, at the farmer’s market, co-op, etc. There are varying degrees of it, from the people who just prefer the taste of organic and local food (like me) to the people who genuinely believe that you’re some kind of traitor if you don’t buy everything that you can locally. But the mentality is pretty strong here at least among the set I grew up with and know, so I have little doubt that most of my circle would still be hardcore about homegrown. God knows I’d never hear the end of it from my girlfriend if I bought a SuperPharmaCo joint…she’s one of those girls who takes home the groceries in a cloth bag.
Really? The reason there’s a DIY ethos is because there’s no feasible alternative. Profits for the grower are ridiculously high owing to the inefficiencies of the black market. I’ll grant you hippies, of course, but ‘indie rockers and punks’ already drink commercialized and prepackaged alcohol without complaint, and neither indie rockers nor punks are known for, say, growing their own food or weaving their own cloth. Like I said, it’s not an ethos, it’s simply a lack of competition. If we ever see no-strings-attached buy it at 7-11 style legalization, those guys’ll be competing against entire farms; farms with irrigation and combine harvesters and economies of scale and other agricultural doodads. Even with a hefty sin tax, store-bought ganja will be more than competitive with one guy tending a couple plants.
You may be accurate with regards to the suburbs, where families can each set up their own herb garden in the backyard and get enough for themselves with minimum tending, but urban areas without land to spare would switch over to store-bought entirely. Have you ever known anyone who built a hydroponics system and rigged his closet with floodlamps so he could grow tobacco?
Edit: this was like for ten posts back. Had this tab open an hour ago and I forgot to refresh.
Your right that I am thinking of this in a very narrow small-town (small-“progressive”-town at that) way. People in cities would be a totally different story. There, I can see corporate chronic taking off hardcore. You realize your post was made precisely at 4:20?
1:20.
Yeah, I agree we’d see two different kinds of markets emerging. Though on the other hand, if word got around that a person was growing an acre and a half of weed, TPTB wouldn’t be sending the DEA anymore; they’d sic the revenooers on him.
Oh, for the people who mentioned it; the actual figure Ammiano is pushing is a tax of $50 an ounce, which the Board of Equalization is estimating would produce $1.3B annually for the state.
