California has dispensaries where it’s legal to buy. I think Colorado does too, but I’m not certain. In Colorado, you can grow 4 plants, of which only two can be in bloom at one time. With a license of course. I think you can possess something like an ounce of dried, consumable weed.
Thanks. 
Oh yeah, I’ve heard about the dispensaries. Guess I’ve got a crappy memory. Anyway, thanks.
Big problems. Not in order but here are some.
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There is a large illegal industry that will fight making it legal.
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No matter what is said more will end up in school kids hands, if you think not you are just kidding yourself.
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And the biggest one. Taxing it will be difficult. Look how much is grown illegally. So a lot will still be grown illegally. Taxing whiskey only drove it underground. And marijuana already has an underground system.
More will be consumed but only a little will be taxed so the gov will always be against it.
I think you meant to say “the DEA.” They’d fight it. I doubt pot growers would do anything but keep their heads down and their mouths shut. Small time pot growers aren’t making much money. Large scale pot growers aren’t in a position to draw attention to themselves.
I smoked weed my freshman year of high school. Then I got bored with it. It’s availability had nothing to do with it. I just got new friends and they though pot was dumb.
I don’t think it should be grown commercially, and I don’t want the government getting tax money from it. It should be like going down to the farmers market and buying some asparagus.
Does the government make apple and tomato growing illegal because it can’t collect taxes on all those bushels people share every fall?
Subjects to raids and destruction by the DEA.
The ones that grow it for profit could just send campaign donations to politicians who oppose legalization.
I wonder just how much of an influence the big wig growers could actually have at blocking legalization. Campaign contributions are capped at $2,000. I don’t think they’d be unanimous in opposing it either. I’m sure a fair percentage of those growers would welcome the opportunity to become legitimate businessman instead of having to hide what they do to avoid being thrown in prison for decades. What’s the point of being rich if you can’t flaunt it?
The biggest obstacle to legalization, IMHO, is the apathy of the marijuana using community itself. If they had even half the fighting spirit the NRA has for guns, weed would be legal by now.
Well, it’s easy to have that fighting spirit when you’re armed to the teeth with high-caliber blasters.
But yes, much of the blame for Prohibition II has to go to those who are proponents of legalization for not raising a bigger stink, so to speak. One might imagine that the status quo is seen as acceptable simply due to the stereotype of the cannabis user as unmotivated enough to accept the situation as it is proven by the fact that there is not more visible protest–not that it helped in the '60s.
It does help the gun user that their right to own a weapon is backed up by the Second Amendment more or less explicitly, in opposition to the more nebulous language of the Tenth Amendment, which IMO has been interpreted into nonexistence by the expanded powers of the federal government (specifically, Congress) over the years.
Has that happened?
It is important to remember even if it’s legal in your state, it’s still against federal law.
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I don’t think drug suppliers are quite that organized.
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Better than alcohol, imo. HS kids on pot are far less likely to cause mayhem than when drunk.
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I highly doubt this. Most pot growers do so because it can’t be had anywhere else. How long would they continue tending their plants when they can just go to the liquor store and get a pack of Marlboro MJs for $10? Granted, marijuana isn’t as difficult to raise and process as tobacco, but its still a pita lots, if not most, would gladly give up.
I also wouldn’t worry much about recriminalization once its legal. I would bet big money that most major tobacco companies already have most everything needed for immediate production, from cultivation, to processing, to packaging, to preliminary advertising and distribution. With their declining profits, they are NOT going to let a new cash crop slip from their grasp. For once, big tobacco lobbyists would do a good thing!
Pot is stronger than it was 30 years ago. Decades of dedicated plant breeding have drastically increased the level of THC. Grow ops here in BC are a huge business and I have heard, although I truthfully don’t know if it’s so, that BC bud is exchanged ounce for ounce for cocaine. I could be wrong on that, as I am not a pot smoker, nor a cocaine user.
Had the various governments in Canada and the US been less hysterical and decriminalized it in the 60’s or 70’s, I doubt that anyone would have gone to the trouble of making it more powerful.
Got a cite for that? The studies I’ve seen that showed hugely increased THC amounts all have had methodology problems that keep me from taking them seriously. AFAIK, This is just another example of government propaganda. Besides, even if it were true, there’s a simple solution. Roll smaller joints. “Problem” solved.
And you are dead wrong. I spent a couple of years when I was supposed to be going to university selling drugs in Vancouver. I was buying a pound of weed for about $1800, which would retail on the street for $10/gram. A gram of cocaine was selling for about 10X as much. (I’m not sure on the wholesale coke prices, since the people that are involved in it tended to scare the shit out of me, so I stayed fairly far away from it. Not far enough though, still almost got shot by a stung out coke dealer) Regardless, trading weed for coke is pure urban legend.
Not to say that the marijuana business isn’t booming. I heard on the news that the estimated value of BC’'s marijuana trade is around 5 billion dollars a year, making it the largest single industry in the province. Just think of all the taxes that could be collected from that. Of course, Canada almost did decriminilize it, but the bill got scrapped when the conservatives came into power two elections ago. I’ve got a friend who is an MP’s daughter, and she asked her dad about it for me. According to him, it will never happen while the conservatives are in power, so I guess we’re waiting for another election.
I agree,also you could take law enforcement officers away from wasting time and resources on what is in reality a non crime so that they could concentrate on DANGEROUS drugs like smack and crack and serious crime.
It depresses me when I see newspaper headlines about self congratulatory police units crowing about busting a mariuana farm over here in the U.K.
Operations that use up the time of many police officers in our badly overstretched forces when murders,rapes and crimes of violence have risen to unheard of levels.
If you ask even for example a totally abstemious O.A.P. who has never touched a recreational drug in his life how busting an M. farm has improved his quality of life I suspect that the answer would be not at all.
Ask him if those police had been used instead to catch some muggers or burglars I think that you might get a different answer.
You are wrong on that, and its that kind of misinformation and misconceptions about the plant that are going to doom this legalization effort, at least in the short term. I just hope that a public discourse would clear things up before any referenda.
Hm. Thanks for the straight dope, Mithrander.
I live out in the valley, on a road that is less than a mile long - a “dead end” road. In the last 2 years, 3 large grow-ops have been busted on this little road. One was at a mushroom farm, and it wasn’t until we saw the police helicopter and about 100 cop cars speeding past our house that we all of a sudden realized we hadn’t seen a mushroom truck going by for awhile. Another was in a machine shop that wasn’t a machine shop any more, and yet another was in an actual greenhouse, the one farthest from the road.
It’s a big business, no doubt about it. We’ve had hints that our big sheds could be used more profitably, but since IF you get into growing large amounts you have to deal with really bad guys, we’ll stay out of it.
The quality of marijuana has increased since since the 1960s and 1970s. The main market pressure was the US government. Prosecutions are based on weight, so any grower and dealer is given both economic and legal incentive to maximize profit and minimize risk. An eighth of an ounce available at a California dispensary is much more powerful than an the ounces folks bought back in the 70s. This is not being grown in the wilds of Humboldt county forests. The plants are raised hydroponically, carefully sexed, manually fertilized, trimmed…all with the goal of producing a better product. The growers are further encouraged in maximizing the effectiveness of their product by California law allowing any individual to grow 99 plants. Only a fool would grow crappy pot when those 99 plants could be O.G. Kush. Same risk, much greater reward.
There probably aren’t laboratory measurements of THC levels, but there is a raft of anecdotal evidence. Check out this New Yorker article for an overview of the CA pot trade.
What do you mean by allowing an individual to grow 99 plants? Is that before some different penalty kicks in?
How do you sex a pot plant anyway? I’ve heard of that before. Sorry for the hijack.
Omaha News, Weather and Sports - Nebraska News - KETV NewsWatch 7 After they retire police can say what they think. There are a lot of legalization groups with ex cops involved. They know how much of their professional life has been wasted.
From the New Yorker article:
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By taking care to stay under the local limit of ninety-nine plants on each of his properties, Emily’s host had averted most of the risk inherent in his profession while enjoying an income large enough to finance a laid-back life of self-exploration.*
I don’t know myself, but the article describes a grower’s set of plants as being exclusively female, and I understand the male plants are usually isolated to prevent accidental pollenization. The female plants produce more buds, and the THC is concentrated there.
Reading about the labor that goes into production, I doubt RJ Reynolds is going to produce the same quality of product if it gets legalized.
Thanks, I should have read the whole article. Fascinating how a person can be an almost legal pot farmer.
Yes, there would be political consequences. Those who would oppose legalization are very well organized and would be able to tap into very significant public opinion against it.
Law enforcement organizations, overall, would almost certainly fight it, one reason being that under the current civil asset forfeiture statues, they derive a great deal of funding from pot busts.
Those with an interest in the “corrections” industry likewise…if non-violent pot offenses were no longer crimes, the prison population would decline drastically.
The large producers would definately oppose legalization, because it would eliminate their profits. (and never underestimate how organized those groups are)
And of course, conservative/fundamentalist groups would be outraged. (what else is new?)
But it SHOULD be done anyway, and I suspect a majority of Americans would support it. That support would become more vocal with the possibility of legalization. And given a few years until re-election time, the opposition would be put in a position of sustaining interest and outrage long-term.
With more states approving medical use and/or decriminalizing personal recreational use, this is becoming a states-rights issue and an unfunded mandate.
But I really think that the legalization of industrial hemp will happen first. It is idiotic that farmers in the US cannot grow this incredibly valuable crop when the UK, Germany, China, and most other indutrialized nations do (and we import it from them).
Hemp could help rescue the American farmer, restore our topsoil, improve our carbon balance, replace signifigant quantities of oil and fiber currently derived from trees and petro products (and corn, in the case of ethanol), and allow entire industries to develop and create jobs nationwide. It’s a win-win.
Historically speaking, the reason pot is illegal is because hemp was made so, not the other way around. I think we will see hemp legalized first, then “pot”.
BTW, re’ sexing plants, the females are the ones which produce the THC. Once they reach a certain size, it is easy to tell the difference (for one thing, the males are taller and spindlier with different leaf distribution…the males must be culled out before they fertilize the females, at which point the production of THC rich buds ceases and they go to seed.)