The crisis might come in handy. The US govenment now has to spend billions of dollars for keeping cops busy looking for weed, and keeping otherwise upstanding citizens in jail. They could spend less and less on the prosecution of weed, and more on taxing it.
The two combined could be a huge economic boost.
The situation in the Netherlands might be used as one possible real-life scenario. Contrary to what many people believe, weed is NOT legal here. (Really!) It is just tolerated, or non-enforced, for individual use. If you bother no one smoking pot, and only buy small quantities for yourself, or grow your own, no-one bothers you. But if you cause trouble while smoking or selling or growing pot, you will feel the full penalty of the law. From Wiki on drug use in the Netherlands:
Why are you assuming local growers wouldn’t have to pay taxes?
You think if you start growing weed and then start selling it as a business that the government is just gonna be ok with that? They’d also be taxed! Sure maybe a few would be able to have a little bit of business and avoid being noticed but certainly not enough to disrupt a market.
Don’t you mean a sixth of your plot of land?
I used to never think it would be legalized but recently there has been so much talk of it that I can’t help but to think maybe it will be. I’d have to say if the democrats stay in power for the next term too, then it’s a strong possibility. I’d imagine that it would start with the local governments not enforcing the current laws and from what I see this is already starting.
Believe me plenty would buy a commercial product. Like others have said, home brewers are not hurting the big breweries one iota. How many people do you know are growing their own tobacco/How often do you see organic tobacco at the farmers market?
I hope so. It’s looking like it might be headed that way. Of course, quite a few old-timers I’ve spoken to thought it would be legalized, or at least decriminalized, back during the Carter administration.
I haven’t been a regular toker for over 15 years; I haven’t lit up at all in 6 years. It would be great to go down to Willies House of Weed on the corner and pick up a few loose joints to enjoy while I sit in the backyard and watch the sunset over the lake.
I believe it will not be fully legalized until some sort of simple “stoned” test is developed, like a Breathalyzer test. Nobody wants stoned people driving cars, just like nobody wants drunk people driving cars (and I’m not making some argument about which is worse.) I think one of the big fears of legalization is that people will start driving or showing up for work or tending our children stoned and we won’t know. Sure, if you’ve been around stoners you can guess when someone is high but I know for a fact my parents couldn’t spot a stoned person, even up close. They sure as hell know when somebody is drunk. That makes people fearful that their bus driver or the day-care provider could be on drugs! And we are going to need to develop social rules similar to alcohol usage (don’t show up for at church stoned) and that is going to take a while.
Illegal drugs were initially made illegal because they had serious, harmful effect on society - you can read about hashish houses from hundred years ago. Marijuana was kinda broad scooped with other, more harmful narcotics. Now we know, that while marijuana isn’t harmless, it certainly hasn’t any kind of harmful mass effect on society (with what, like 40% who smoked at least once?). Nor is it particularly harmful compared to tobacco or ethanol. So, there is no logical argument why it should be banned. Controlled, licensed, taxed - sure. You don’t want corner shop to sell it to schoolkids. Just like alcohol. But there is no practical reason for ban.
It’s just matter of time, and maybe a little paradigm shift on point of contact between health care, law enforcement and politics.
ETA - oh, and I just recalled how Dutch acquittance commented when asked about Marijuana - with perfectly uninterested tone “Oh, it’s just something teenagers do”.
I highly doubt that farmers are going to scrap their soy and corn fields for marijuana fields.
First, crops like soy and corn are ubiquitous. They are in EVERYTHING. The market for that stuff is 100x what it would be for weed.
Second, if everyone started growing weed, it would not be the cash cow that it is now. There are a lot of hands involved in getting the weed from wherever it’s grown now to your local stoner’s pocket, and every hand expects a cut. If weed was coming from the farm down the street and delivered to the 7-11 in the farmer’s pickup truck, it would be seriously cheap. It’d have to be cheap because it wouldn’t be viable to make it expensive if everyone can grow it in their windowbox.
Third, I don’t think that the DIY hippie type is as much of the weed consumer population as you think it is. Only about 1/4 of the people I know who smoke weed carry their groceries in a cloth sack. The rest drive big cars, buy clothing based on labels, shop at Wal Mart and drink Bud or “whatever you got, yo.”
Allowing local farmers to grow their own weed will be great, don’t get me wrong. It will take a lot of the nastiness out of the business (unless people start holding up domestic weed trucks). But I don’t think allowing anyone to grow it anywhere will be that great of a deal, either.
The problem is that a typical slippery slope-style argument will be invoked whenever legalization is brought up: “marijuana is a gateway drug.” There aren’t a lot of good statistics to prove this one way or the other, but people feel it is true, because their parents and churches warned them about this, and so they don’t look to science for the answer. This “gateway drug” argument is the anti-legalization trump card: good economics, civil order, and fairness be damned.
I think this is exactly one of the reasons it’s possible that it would be legalized. We’re all older now, and there are many responsible members of society that are saying ‘look this isn’t the evil the older generation thinks it is’. I 42 and I can say my parents didn’t say this to me. They were more like ‘It’s illegal and you will get in trouble’. I’m sure their parents said something along the lines of ‘it’s a gateway drug and next thing you know, you’ll be listening to that music and worshiping the devil’
Lot’s of people wouldn’t, or can’t, but lots of people grow their tomatoes for fun.
Pot is different though. It’s kinda like hot peppers. Most people only need a few plants to keep a stash that will last awhile. I know I like growing hot peppers and I have bags & jars filled with more than I need. If you can grow a hot pepper successfully, pot isn’t much more difficult.
Tobacco isn’t a good analogy. It’s a larger plant, needs more particular growing conditions and the process of drying, curing, fermenting, flavoring and milling is very much more complicated than pot. Like I said, pot is a bit more like growing your hot peppers or basil, and at something like $300 or more/oz, I’d say there’d be a lot it being homegrown.
Anyhoo, I was thinking about the commercialization and corporatization (?) last night. How is it in Canada? It’s legal right? Have big corporations stepped in, driven the price down and put all the pot growers out of business? I haven’t heard so.
You certainly can get a wide variety of specialty products in California medical dispensaries. I’ve heard of all sorts of cookies, candies, butters, you name it. It’s all pretty much hippie produced, and dispensaries do pay taxes on 100s of thousands, if not millions of dollars of legal sales.
There are quite a few other products that would lose marketshare if marijuana became legal- if you are growing it not for consumption, but just for profit, it beats the hell out of cotton for vegetable fiber production, as I understand it, with multiple crops per year, better insulating, etc.
It isn’t just about the drug part of cannabis. Hemp seeds are healthy and nutritious! Potbutter sandwich, anyone?
I think all you’d need to do for a stoned test is ask them a couple of simple questions like “what is your middle name?” or “what was the last question I asked you?” If it takes them more than 4 seconds to answer, you know they’re baked.
Sorry; I was just surprised that you thought pot was legal in Canada, to the point where we could ask “Well, has the Canadian store-bought pot business driven home farming out of the market?”; I wasn’t sure where you got that idea. But I understand that “Um” comes off as unnecessarily snarky.
So if you blow a .08 on the cheese dust scale they haul your ass in.