The buds, not the leaves.
Marijuana is the most profitable crop in the US by far (or at least was and I suspect still is).
Of course if it was legalized the price would drop through the floor.
It indeed should be regulated as alcohol is today and taxed a pretty penny. I do not think even with the taxes people would take to growing it at home (some would of course but not many). You can legally brew your own beer at home more cheaply than you can buy it yet few bother. They’d have to seriously overtax it to run people underground.
Then we get the savings, as mentioned earlier, of filling our prisons to capacity with pot heads. Decrease in crime, law enforcement, legal system, prisons and so on. The US would start saving vast amounts of money and bring in a new revenue stream.
I doubt more people would start using either (maybe an initial spike at the novelty then tapering off). For one thing, when I was in high school, I could get pot with ease. Just not a problem at all. Beer? Forget it. Was almost impossible to get unless someone had a nice older brother or sister to buy for them. Stores would not risk their business to sell to a minor. Further, there is little evidence to support the notion that kids would smoke it in droves:
Simply absurd the stuff is still illegal. There are tons of upsides to legalizing it and few to no downsides. Simply American’s knee jerk reaction to “drugs are bad” that almost no politicians dare suggest legalizing.
Because the scale is completely different. Carrots require a relatively large area for the amount they produce, and they sell for very low cost. That means low-cost production methods are required, and indoor hydroponic growing probably doesn’t make the grade.
Pot is very concentrated. A smallish plant (maybe 24" high) that you could grow on a stand in your home could produce 5 ounces of smokeable pot per year. Five ounces of pot is quite a lot. For casual users, that’s probably a year’s supply, which means that one plant can keep them in pot indefinitely. You can grow it in a sunny room like a decorative plant. It takes almost no effort to grow and harvest.
A good analogy might be to an herb garden. Lots of people grow their own herbs in their homes. It’s easy and it’s cheap. You can buy complete kits for setting up herb gardens. The only reason more people don’t do so is because herbs are extremely cheap to buy, and because there’s a lot of variety in herbs so it makes it hard to grow all the kinds you might want anyway. But if people only needed a single herb like Parsley, and people really loved Parsley, and Parsley was taxed and cost $100/oz, then you’d see home Parsley kits for sale everywhere and everyone would have one.
A man of taste and distinction, I see. 
Why would it kill our internal crop market? People need to eat. They don’t need pot, and if its decriminalized, people will just grow it themselves.
Or, if the government gets in on the act, it can be treated very much like tobacco…heavily taxed, regulated and labelled as harmful to your health, because it is.
Homebrewing IS quite popular. Enough so that there are several stores that cater to nothing but homebrewing within 10 minutes’ drive of my house.
But homebrewing is much harder than growing pot would be. There’s a ton of labor involved. There’s expensive equipment, and the mixes. You have to sterilize your containers, do exchanges, sterilize all your bottles, filter your brew, fill the bottles, cap them, etc. And often the product of homebrewing is horrible if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.
Not only that, but all the equipment takes up a lot of space, and the batches you make are so large that most homebrewers wind up giving lots of it away to friends and neighbors.
You don’t homebrew to save money, really. You do it as a hobby. Yes, your beer is a little cheaper in the end if you do it a lot and you drink a lot, but the time commitment is large so you’re not going to do it unless it’s fun.
Compare that to growing pot. You buy a bag of potting soil, maybe some plant food, you plant your seeds and stick them in the window. Later, you harvest your buds and let them dry out, and Bob’s yer uncle.
Almost everyone grows live plants in their home. If I wanted to smoke pot, and pot was legal, I can’t imagine buying it if I could just have my own plant. They even look nice. I might buy my own if I could get it at 7-11 and it was roughly the price of a bag of chips or other vice that I might partake of to enjoy an evening. But if I had to go to a government store and pay $20 for a week’s supply, or there was a stigma attached and I didn’t want to be seen buying the stuff, then I’d just grow it.
You’d save a bunch of money on law enforcement. You’d decimate youth gangs, biker gangs, and the pot smuggling trade. You’d make it easier to enforce the border. You’d help re-stabilize Mexico, which is degenerating into a failed state because of the drug trade. You’d probably move people off of harder drugs for the cheaper, safer alternative.
Honestly, I can’t think of a real downside. But what if people started to smoke it more? What if Marijuana use doubled? What if it tripled? Wouldn’t that wreck productivity and destroy the economy?
Ask Canada. The 2007 UN world drug report says that 16.8% of Canadians between the ages of 15 and 64 claim to have smoked or injested pot in some form in a 12 month period. That’s almost 5 times the world average, and it’s the highest per-capita usage of pot of any major nation (only a handful of small island nations beat us). In comparison, the U.S. was just over 12%.
It also happens that Canada has the strongest economy in the world right now, and is one of the most peaceful, stable countries on the planet. So it’s not even clear that increased pot usage is a bad thing.
I think you are underestimating the laziness of the average American. There will certainly be people growing their own, but the expense for the glow lights and the delayed gratification will mean that it will be just as easy to go down to 7-11. The first time someone screws up a planting, they’ll quit. As an example, where I live you can buy a lemon tree for almost nothing, plant it, and within a few years get all the lemons you need for almost no cost. Yet, they still sell lemons in the grocery - more than can be accounted for by people in apartments.
Two more changes - more booths at the farmers’ market, and a bunch of stoned deer.
I suspect the biggest area of government budget improvement will be law enforcement savings as you said, not increased tax revenue. If we believe the governor of Arizona, illegal immigration will be conquered, since according to her they all are carrying drugs. But, before things in Mexico get better, I think they will get worse, since a lot of people with a lot of guns will be fighting over shares of a much reduced market.
Hell, they’d probably steal the TV while they’re at it.
I don’t think so. I have friends who smoke and who can’t afford our cigarette taxes. Bulk tobacco isn’t taxed as much, so they buy in bulk and roll their own.
Do you know what kind of time commitment that is? A two-pack smoker is rolling 40 cigarettes per day.
It’s very common for welfare recipients and other low income people to roll their own cigarettes. It’s orders of magnitude more time-consuming than growing and cultivating pot.
I suspect grow lights are only used because people can’t let their pot plants be seen, so they can’t give them sunlight. I’ve found pot growing wild in Alberta, so I’m pretty sure you could just stick the thing in the window like any other plant.
And yes, there’s delayed gratification - so people would plant their plant, then buy taxed pot until the plant was ready. Again, I have to point out that almost everyone has houseplants now, so clearly people don’t fund the burden too severe.
You get all the lemons you need - and a hell of a lot more. And now you have a big-ass lemon tree you might not like. And it takes years to get a lemon. And ‘all the lemons you need’ probably amounts to less than $10/yr. It would be crazy to plant a tree for that. Bad analogy.
A better analogy would be apple trees. And you know what? There are a LOT of private apple trees.
An even better analogy would be any kind of home garden. Just about every house in my neighborhood has some kind of small garden or flower box.
Seriously, if you smoked pot, why wouldn’t you grow a plant? You grow decorative plants anyway, so why not grow one that saves you a couple of hundred bucks a year? The work in harvesting is almost nonexistent - less work than going to the store to buy it. It seems to me to be fairly obvious that there would be an explosion in home cultivation if pot became completely legal. Hell, even if it was really cheap, people might grow their own to avoid the embarrassment of buying pot, or risking having people they know see them buying pot.
The big question in my mind is whether cheap, legal pot would reduce demand for harder drugs, or act as a ‘gateway’ drug and increase the use of harder drugs. My guess is that it would reduce hard drug usage, and the only reason it’s seen as a ‘gateway’ drug now is because buying it puts you in contact with a criminal element that might try pushing other drugs on you (or at least act as a conduit to harder drugs) and causes you disrespect the law. If pot were legal and cheap, and harder drugs were still illegal, then people who want to get high would have a completely different risk-reward calculus.
Probably right. Even in the '70s both were readily available, and crackdowns on supplying alcohol to underage drinkers have probably been successful because it’s a legal substance, and the vendors can be targetted. So the overall availability to underage users might actually decrease from controls once marijuana is legal. But with the removal of the stigma of an illegal substance, overall usage might rise somewhat. Although many people contend that almost everybody who wants to smoke marijuana is already doing so.
OTOH, Jack Daniel’s bushes would require tall electric fences to keep the drunks off.
To show why your fears are overblown, I’ve crunched some numbers.
Let’s assume that every single adult in the United States decides to become a habitual consumer of marijuana. Based off of my own personal experience, an ounce of weed is more than enough to allow someone to get stoned daily for about three months.
There are approximately 232 million adults in the U.S. Let’s assume that every single one of them wants to smoke marijuana, and let’s say that every single one of them smokes 4 ounces every year (in reality, it’s going to be much less than that, but let’s assume that for our thought experiment).
That’s 928,000,000 ounces (or 58,000,000 pounds) of marijuana consumed per year. With googling, I quickly discovered an old estimate for how much marijuana you can yield per acre: 400 to 600 pounds. This is a 1915 estimate from our own government back when cannabis was legal, and I’m assuming growing methods have improved since then.
That ends up being a maximum of 145,000 acres devoted to growing marijuana. Or approximately 226 square miles. In other words, a plot of land 15 by 15 miles could supply every adult in the United States with a generous supply of weed.
By contrast, there are 88 million acres devoted to growing corn. Even if my crazy scenario where everyone becomes a stoner overnight came true, that still amounts to less than 0.2% of the acreage of corn cleared away to make room for marijuana. In other words, a trivial amount of land that will not make a dent on food prices.
A quick survey of full time stoners indicates something more like an ounce per month, and that limit is based on availability and money. Not sure how to judge the guy who says he could do an ounce a day if he had it. Still, not that much, and most people who use marijuana are probably not stoned 24/7. Your figure is probably pretty good based on my observation that some guys always have it, and end up sharing with their less fortunate brethren.
Reminds me of something I heard from a sheltered, middle-aged woman many years ago: I didn’t realize those kids were so poor, they’re all sharing the same cigarette!
You don’t actually need seeds to grow pot. It can be cloned fairly easily from cuttings off another plant, dipped in rooting powder. This is one way that a high quality plant can be kept going perpetually.
If anyone asks, I claim to have read that somewhere. 
They are addicted. You don’t get addicted to pot.
Depends on where you are. In California, lemon trees grow much better, and lots of people have them. I have one because when I lived in the East I was jealous of a friend who had one, and I like the convenience of going out to get one for my tea. I never touched pot even when I was in college in Cambridge where it was de facto legal. But if I did, I would grow it myself. I don’t grow decorative stuff - I grow expensive vegetables, like snow peas, or things which are much better fresh, like tomatoes. In the Bay Area you don’t have to be a genius to grow vegetables, but lots of people don’t anyhow.
I agree with this. The response to the gateway drug argument has been you could call cigarettes a gateway drug also. This will become more true.
They could easily make money off it, you have to buy a tax stamp/permit to grow for personal use. Just like you theoretically need a license to brew more than a certain amount of beer or wine. I know that is to actually prevent your selling your booze without paying for the proper tax stamps, but you could easily just make anybody with grass growing that doesn’t have the permit an annoyingly expensive ticket. Not that the cops would go around enforcing it, but if it was discovered while doing a building inspection or whatnot, it is just a nice additional ticket they can give out. Maybe a wallet card like a dog rabies tag to prove you paid the tax if you get caught with some grass away from home.
I’m assuming an amount that would still allow people to hold down jobs, take care of their families, etc. The only people who can get away with being “full time stoners” are the unemployed, the retired, and college students who don’t have to work. I have enough faith in my fellow americans to believe that our economy won’t collapse due to everyone being stoned all the time.
I feel that farmers would see and believe that pot would be a huge “cash crop” and begin to farm that because of the money. If I grow 60 acres of corn for 500,000 dollars a harvest or 60 acres of pot for 3,000,000.00 dollars. I’d be willing to bed they would farm pot. Thats just my opinion though.
Marijuana won’t be nearly as profitable if the market is flooded with it. There’s only a finite amount of herb that the American public are willing to consume even under a best case scenario, and that is only going to take up a miniscule fraction of farmland.
If every farmer decided to quit growing food and start growing cannabis, the price of marijuana would plummet, as well as its profitability. We’d see huge stacks of weed sitting in warehouses unsold, eventually going past their expiration date and needing to be thrown away.
You obviously have no clue what you’re talking about, re: growing pot. You’re not going to get 5 ounces of pot from a 2 foot tall plant unless you have a very sophisticated indoor grow setup. You’re certainly not going to get ounces of weed from a plant sitting in a sunny room like a decorative plant. And it won’t be good weed, either.
For a moment there, I thought you were starting to understand what it takes for a proper indoor grow room, and the results of what happens if you don’t know what you’re doing…
Step 1: Steal underpants
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit
You sound just like the South Park underpants gnomes. :smack:
I’m positive you don’t know what you’re talking about. For someone who doesn’t know anything about the requirements and economics of growing desirable pot, you sure do have a lot to say about it as a reason not to legalize pot.
The fact that you keep comparing a pot plant to other houseplants is just telling of your ignorance.
Because it’s not as easy and simple and straightforward and not-time-consuming like you keep trying to portray it to be, despite being clearly completely ignorant about what it takes to grow good weed?
Because a pot plant is nothing like a typical decorative plant, with completely different growing requirements to wind up with a productive plant?
Have you ever harvested a pot plant? :dubious:
Perhaps, at least until a bunch of the new trendy growers realize that growing good pot is hard and is time consuming, and they give up due to the dirt weed that most home growers wind up with. Who cares if they did it for so cheap if the bud is undesirable crap? Clearly all those stoners are certainly going to become a bud-growing masters, and not ever want or need to buy commercial weed from professional growers.