If marijuana were legalized, how would you be able to buy it? Could you just go down to the convenience store and buy a dime bag or a pack of joints? Could you buy it over the counter at a pharmacy? Or would you just buy it, as most people do today, directly from an independent producer (i.e. someone who just grows the stuff in their own house) - provided they’re licensed of course?
Also would giant corporations eventually take over the sale and distribution of marijuana? Could it be possible that once pot is legalized a Phillip Morris or R.J. Reynolds will get into the herb business?
The day after it was legalized, they’d have product on the shelves.
You can already legally buy pot in the Netherlands.
I would just grow it myself. And why would you need to be “licensed?” Do you need a license to grow a tomato vine in your backyard or have an apple tree? All it is, is a plant. If it is legalized, it should be legalized all the way, not burdened with silly regulations. And hell no, the government is not getting a cent of my money through the purchase of weed.
If fully legalized and unregulated (meaning, no special obstructing permits etc required), I’d expect it to show up pretty much anywhere where tobacco and/or alcohol is sold.
Aside: here in the Netherlands we don’t have that situation, since in most municipalities you need a permit to be allowed to sell pot and most cities are actually trying to decrease the number of coffee shops. And even then you cannot operate a commercial coffee shop without hassle, since the amounts you can have “in stock” are typically too small to be useful and the laws against growing and importing and selling large amounts of pot are enforced. No otherwise legitimate shop is going to go through all the trouble. Also, coffee shops can be closed if they let anyone under 18 in.
The moment it was legal, it’d be taxed-- and tobacco taxes are getting brutal these days.
Of course, as many correctly note, marijuana isn’t a crop-- it’s a weed. Once legal, it’d be next to impossible to prevent people from producing their own. It’d be like banning dandelions and crab grass.
There might be a value in selling good stuff, but the home-grown market would depress any potential legal profits-- and certainly depress any taxed products.
Thus, my guess is, if we were to ever have the laws changed, we’d get marijuana legal to use and buy, but still illegal to grow. It’d be regulated like alcohol that way (where making your own moonshine is against the law but you can buy booze at a liquor store).
Update: one thing to add, many U.S. states (like Virginia, for one) have state-run liquor stores. You can buy beer and wine in regular private businesses, but for hard liquor you have to go through a state store. There’s probably a good chance that some states would regulate marijuana sales in the same way.
Well I don’t think there are any injunctions against growing your own tobacco.
I wonder, though, if that’s because it’s a huge plant, comparatively, and it’s not practical for your average 2-pack-a-day smoker to grow enough to keep their habit satisfied. With pot, it’s a lot easier for a person to grow as much as they would want to use. I think that these kinds of regulations are exactly what you would see (similar to the moonshine laws, as davekhps mentioned).
If Monsanto or Halliburton got into it, it would be illegal to grow your own.
I remember hearing a UL years ago about how Marlboro has a warehouse in Kentucky (or elsewhere) full of cartons of “Marlboro Blacks”- a filtered joint- in order to be first to market when pot is legalized.
Of course, it’s nonsense; apart from anything else, they’d be hella stale right now, but it’s fun to think about.
I disagree. I’ve made this argument before. Pot is a drug and would be regulated as such for content (potency) if it was sold on the open market. Early use would be from privately grown plants until regulations could be established for product control. It’s very possible that pot will end up illegal to grow as a controlled subtance. This will have the affect of maintaining a black market for more potent versions of the drug.
I would liken it more to beer or wine than to hard liquor. I think that level of regulation would be best: you can go to the store and buy a six-pack any time, but if you have the patience to make your own, knock yourself out. Like craft brewing, it takes a bit of effort and most people won’t bother.
No denying that would be the best scenario to take the drug lord side of it down and recover the lost tax revenue. I’ve often wondered if cheap home grown pot would replace hard drugs.
No, they’d just make it so that the plants grown from the seeds you bought from them either produced useless seeds or seeds which produced useless plants.
Forgive me if I don’t trust Monsanto and R.J. Reynolds with substances that I put in my body. Fuck “corporate marijuana” - if it is legalized, but made illegal to grow, and corporations have a monopoly on it, as far as I’m concerned that’s no better than it being illegal. We had a discussion about this a few weeks ago, and some people suggested that most weed smokers are lazy and undiscriminating and would rather walk to 7-11 and buy mass-marketed weed than grow it themselves or buy from a local grower. Well, I am not in that category, and none of my friends are either (we’ve had this exact discussion 100 times in the past.) True “hippies” (not trustafarians,) punk rockers and other hipsters would not take to this corporate weed, and rumors would spread very quickly that it was chemically-altered, poisonous, overly-processed, or harmful in some other way. Whether or not this was true, it would turn people off, the same way people would rather shop at a local organic co-op than buy packaged, overly-processed crap. There would still be a strong culture of DIYers who would grow their own weed even if the government made it illegal to do so.
I think the idea of weed being legal to smoke, legal to possess, but illegal to grow, is fucking ridiculous. I do NOT consider that a step forward at all - what it is, is just more government greed, and another example of the government sticking its hands in something to extract a profit instead of letting people be.
I just wanted to take a moment and praise your completely unironic use of the phrase “corporate weed” as the best laugh of my day.
Some of life’s little pleasures are free, but most aren’t. Marijuana, if ever legalized, most definitely will NOT be free, for the same reasons that alcohol and tobacco aren’t free.
Maybe that’s too much of “The Man” for some people to accept, but to them I say: get over it. This is America. We buy and sell things here. You want to grow something good for free without the government interfering, grow tomatoes.
That’s right. And we should be able to grow weed if we want, and sell it if we want, and purchase marijuana from an independent backyard grower if we want. That’s the free market, Jack. Corporations can get into the weed business too - fine - but the “little guy” shouldn’t be barred from it either. That’s just bullshit. It’s the kind of attitude that’s destroying local farming and local craftsmanship and turning the whole country into mass-produced, homogeneous crap everywhere you go.
So you didn’t eat Oreos until 2000?
That’s right! In the same way that all the punks and hippies never, ever drink gallons of corporate swill beer (PBR, anyone?), smoke Camels and Marlboros (when they can afford them), or stuff themselves on Taco Bell.
I mean, I get what you’re saying, but I can count on one hand the number of times I have heard my punk friends say, “Hey, I have the munchies - I should totally bake cookies!” as opposed to “Hey, let’s order pizza!” And if they do, odds are it’s a money issue, not a “damn The Man”.
I really don’t understand why so many people here expect it to be illegal to grow when you can already make your own wine, beer, tobacco etc. Are you guys paranoid or something? 
And sure if you make your own, why wouldn’t it be perfectly legal to sell, provided you’ll still pay taxes on the sale?
Again, over here in the Netherlands, small quantities of pot are for all practical purposes legal, and nobody’s going to confiscate the three or so plants you might grow yourself. Nevertheless, I’d estimate that a very large percentage of the pot over here is bought from shops, and of course it’s taxed then.
Buying from a shop has advantages:
-
You don’t have to have a couple of big ass plants in your house that need lots of light and some care (note that over here it’s only practical to grow pot outside around the summer.) If you’re an occasional smoker (like me), it’s much easier to get some good quality pot for a few euros when you want some, instead of having a big bunch of stale crap lying around.
-
Shops have some minimal checks and can be closed if they mess with their supply.
-
Shops have a pretty large variety of pot and hashish. Useful if you want to try out something different.