“The Jack Daniels Compromise.” Pretty sure that’s gotta be the title of the future federal regulation that governs growing in states where it remains illegal despite lifting of the federal ban. Kids will be reading about it in history books 100 years from now. And quickly forgetting what it was the lesson was about.
I can see a move to greenhouses, but I can’t imagine the market would ever accept pot growers being forced to move back to outdoor growing. Mainly because all the techniques used to produce the sticky, resinous buds beloved by pot consumers requires controlling plant sexuality. And you simply can’t do that with naturally pollinated outdoor crops.
Oh for fuck sake. Corn and MJ aren’t even close to the same thing. If it were possible, they would have figured it out decades ago.
Some thoughts:
[ol]
[li]When indoor grows were illegal and clandestine, they technically weren’t regulated. Now that they’re legal in some states, they’re going to be subject to the same regulations as other businesses. There is the chance that legislatures will pass new laws directly aimed at indoor grows. Other businesses have experienced targeted adverse legislation before. IGs will have to deal with that. [/li][li]IGs have been known to use diesel generators to avoid a huge electrical bill giving them away. Hopefully use of the electrical grid will be at least slightly better for the environment than an individual generator.[/li][li]Let’s go even further and examine how IGs handle fertilizer. There’s a huge concern with outdoor crops that fertilizer runoff does awful things to the water supply. If indoor grows are a closed system AFA fertilizer is concerned, that’s a point in their favor.[/li][/ol]
So shouting “Oh, behave!” isn’t going to do anything?
Regarding the OP, I’m going to go with “No”.
From what I understand, legal penalties have provided the main pressure to improve pot potency - if your sentence is going to based on the weight of the plants, it makes sense to ensure those plants are the most productive possible. And indoor grown, carefully managed female plants with trimmed leaves and huge buds set the standard, and the consumers are not going to accept a return to the “ditch weed” of the 1970s.
Memory is usually unreliable, but back in the mid 70s, R. Crumb illustrated a cookbook, and one of the recipes was for “5 Joint Soup” for the amount of time it would take to cook it. There is no way anyone could smoke five full joints of current product over the course of a few hours and not wind up so wrecked that they wouldn’t have abandoned the soup project and run off to White Castle.
Now on the other hand, I can easily see a move away from totally light controlled grow-rooms to greenhouses. Why not? It’s legal, the sun is free and pot growers are not fools.
While it’s true that no one’s going back to the 1970s in terms of potency, I think we may see a shift away from the extraordinarily potent weed that’s the norm now. During Prohibition, smugglers didn’t import much beer; there was a much lower return on a shipment of beer than on a similar shipment of whiskey, gin, or rum. You could make a lot more money for the same amount of risk doing so. However, after Prohibition ended, we saw a return to beer and wine as the most common forms of alcohol, because most people want to enjoy the experience of consuming, and if they’re not intoxicated enough, they simply buy more. Likewise, some people want to enjoy the experience without becoming totally stoned, and they’ll want a weaker product. I think we’ll see something similar with cannibis; a focus more on the taste and feel of the high, rather than simple THC concentration. No, we won’t go all the way back to the 1-2% of the 1970s, but I think that lower levels like 5-10% will become more common than they are now, and that average THC concentrations will drop even as the strength of the very strongest stuff continues to rise. After all, I mostly drink beer, not whiskey, because I frequently want just a little intoxication over a long time, rather than the big hit of intoxication that hard alcohol provides.
If it’s legal to grow your own, why should people who live in apartment buildings be denied the right to do so?
While I don’t disagree with you, we deny people who live in apartments the right to grow many legal things, like cattle.
Can’t grow outdoors in Colorado, or most people can’t.
The crop must be ‘secure’ to be legal, and that means more fencing and dogs than most folks have.
(I already can’t keep the kids out of my yard. 
)
And meanwhile, lots of people grow lots of other crops indoors, including myself.
Peppers, cacti, all sorts of things.
Indoor growing uses more power but saves a huge amount of water, btw.
Especially with newer LED lights that run a lot cooler than older technology.
Because it’s a huge health risk, and it’s hard on the property. Do either of those apply to hydroponic weed?
A hydro system could cause a flood like a water bed could.
And many places exclude water beds. So that’s probably not a good argument.
No, of course not, and that’s why I said that I agree with you. But you’re arguing as though location or size of a residence is a protected class of some kind, and it’s very clearly not. We put all kinds of restrictions on people based on where their house is, and you very much said something else: