We've been hearing about surplus for several years now, and yet the price of weed is going up, not down. I regularly see $400 retail ounces in Oregon for top shelf.
Supply/demand should push the price to the floor with this Surplus gargantus, and yet prices continue to climb.
It's like ECON 101 doesn't apply to pot. What are they going to do? Dump it in ocean?
What I want to know is how retail is maintaining these obviously, artificially high prices in a crazy-lopsided buyer's market?
Collusion is the only explanation I have. They're all just colluding to prevent price collapse.
It's either straight up illegal collusion or a "natural" side effect of allowing only "big business" to enter the market. Combined with sky high taxes and "community impact" fees and there's not much room for price differentiation,.
I live in a state that is just now seeing recreational shops open and miraculously all their pricing is exactly aligned.
Or new entrants just pricing everything the same as previous entrants to grow the industry, and avoid competition on anything besides quality and specific needs/desires from the plant,
but it's not surprising that an industry still maintaining some semblance of customer service is a weird sight to behold for folks.
Sure, up and down the chain, but with that much surplus? That would be irrational. I don't understand. Do you mean it's like farmers dumping millions of gallons of milk to quash supply and support price x? To what end? They're worried if they flood the market, price drops? (To say nothing of legality, because I know nothing.)
> I regularly see $400 retail ounces in Oregon for top shelf.
I think because this article refers to Canada, not the US, we can't infer things about the market in the US due to the low likelihood of smuggling occurring.
What has the quality and the cost of 'low-grade' weed done? I suspect the quality of the bottom shelf has increased drastically at the same cost.
It very much is from dispensaries, which is what is being discussed.
And this does happen everywhere, where prices in dispensaries 'miraculously align' right down to the daily/weekly specials etc.
What should be happening is the price going down as shops compete with each other for business- which, incidentally, they all did ~10 years ago. That also miraculously stopped at all shops simultaneously.
So it's definitely collusion/price fixing but I believe rather than the supplier/seller it's both. Especially in Oregon where the shops have their own grow farms.
I didn't want to respond to the $100 ounce comment because I haven't hit Portland or other larger cities, but I have to agree with you. I can't find even 1/2 ounces for $100. There are shops in Bend selling $75 eighths.
It's greed. It's collusion. I don't believe the “No one's making any money” nonsense in the media.
We're not making any money, but look at that $156,000 Mercedes SUV parked outside in the reserved spot.
In Oregon/Washington the workers, even in the grow ops, are making minimum wage. I could not believe it, even the extract runners.
In Cali, at least where I'm at, most pay with weed only.
None of the workers on the west coast are classified as real workers and as such don't qualify for benefits, and they also enjoy the prospect of being raided at any given time as it's still federally illegal.
I spent a lot of time in the weed business traveling up and down the west coast last 2 years. It was disgusting. I'd ask about jobs everywhere while looking for decent vendors, I was shocked.
Back in the day when it was regulated, I did POS installations, custom POS software, alarms, and set up CCTV with remote viewing for a lot of the local shops, etc. They were supposed to use California weights and measures certified scales but they all used cheap re-calibratable ones. And remember, this is when shops at least pretended to follow the rules. Almost all of them tried to pay me- an actual business, with costs and a brick and mortar location, with weed. And not at their costs- which was nothing initially they operated on consignment but they paid out $2/gram for top shelf weed they sold for $20/g. They tried to pay me at $20/g. I had to step away from all dispensaries completely. I would even go to LA just to buy after that.
Also I would see these people making more money than they could count, and still being unbelievably shady. One place was lying to vendors they were out of town so they didn't have to pay them while counting out stacks of $5k to put in shoe boxes to stack in their home as their storage unit was full. They then tried this exact technique on me when I served them their bill.
When I reminded them I installed their entire network they had me come by to collect cash.
go to greencross in bend, they have the exact prices i'm referring to. Dont go to the stores that purchase from bulk retailers, shops that have their own farms typically have higher quality and lower prices.
I have no idea where you guys are seeing these prices. Chalice, on the absolute high end that I've seen, tops out at 250/oz.
Nectar/Green Cross are my gotos, both of them are well below the prices yall are discussing. Green cross in particular has better stuff than the other venues as well. Maybe try shopping in Salem instead of Portland? Dunno, I never go into the city for weed.
They do in Southern California. It's a brisk business.
Friend says the bulk of his orders were early AM or after dinner PM. He wouldn't really work during the day. Essentially a split shift. He didn't like it much, but the tips were ludicrous.
Retail? No way. Unless you're talking about those 1 oz vacuum bags of burnt yellow-green bud that appears to have been grown in a hydroponic stew for $100/ (hoboweed; spray-painted hemp :D), I haven't seen prices remotely close to that. Not even quality halves at that price. Not even in Colorado, and Colorado is the best bang for your $ in the USA.
try this place in salem, really nice stuff and great prices. "Reserve" is their top-of-the-plant pickings that go for $160 oz. Not a big difference between their bulk (75-100) and reserve.
There's a Green Cross branch in Bend and the prices are what you say they are. Low to mid-weights mostly, however.
I think I went into this shop and it was all prepackaged and jarred like Cali is now. Like visiting a Walgreens, so I walked out. Not sure if it was this place. I'll visit again.
In the US, since cannabis/CBD/marijuana/etc. are still nominally illegal at the federal level, none of the "legal" operators can avail themselves of the financial system. This prevents things like shuffling product between states, for example, or taking out big loans for expansions that would allow flattening of the market.
And, if I remember correctly, Canada's "legalization" has been one disaster after another because the big players keep buying off and sabotaging the system until they can corner it.
There was a bunch of it at the beginning of legalization in Canada I remember reading about.
It took forever to get supply. Then you had to be an "established" medical marijuana provider to get pre-approved which locked out the "little people" to start. Then there weren't enough approvals of the supply because the procedures were so involved. Then there weren't enough people to approve the paperwork even when it was finished. Then there were local vs federal issues.
In all, it was the standard gigantic bureaucratic clusterfuck, with the added problem of large incumbents dragging their feet and throwing grit into the gears of anyone trying to fix it.
Someone better versed with Canadian politics would probably be better at pinpointing it all because it wasn't just one single thing. It was a slow-motion train wreck.
The dispensaries are limited regionally by law, so it's not truly a free market.
There are often taxes on the weed as well. Gray and black market prices are significantly cheaper.
A lot of the excess stuff is sold to regions where it's still illegal, although those hold outs are dwindling.
Production cost per pound is expensive, and going up across the board: labor, electricity, water, commercial leases, equipment, fertilizers, and grow media.
Top shelf is mostly grown indoors under artificial lights instead of in greenhouses.
Further, the farmer's and dispensary's regulations are complex and daunting.
Grow your own if you want it cheap. You'll quickly learn how challenging it is to produce top shelf.
I'm in the States, but much of this applies to Canada as well.
Can you explain to me then why there is such a surplus?
All of above sound rational to me, and yet, massive and growing surplus while retail prices are increasing. There is bullshit somewhere. Is this what you mean by not quite a free market, that these surpluses are a function of market barriers? They have no one to sell it too?
That might explain why concentrates are dropping in price. If you can't sell it, make something with it you can sell. Conjecture, that.
Good question. I wish I had a good answer. You updated your post while I was writing my reply haha
Indeed, I believe you nailed it on the update
A friend had a situation where he grew a few thousand pounds too much in Oregon before his dispensaries had opened. However, the regulators knew he had produced it all and forced him to sit on the inventory...
He decided to send excess trim (waste leaf trimming) from his operations in California up and bring the quality flower back to Cali to sell on the black market here.
This was illegal, obviously! Later, he happily destroyed the "excess" in Oregon!
Same guy, a year later had facilium wilt and powdery mildew infect his 1000 light operation in LA. He had to destroy thousands of pounds there.. but he really moved it to the black market. I feel sorry for the people that smoked those flowers.
It's a shady industry! There is bullshit and fraud everywhere.
if demand is inelastic, then there's actually no reason for dispensaries to lower the price. They might even be buying the weed for less and taking the profit for themselves.
It could be collusion, but maybe dispensaries have tried sales and found themselves making less.
Some areas maybe, but I'm seeing brisk competition across the product board without the related price competition you would expect. Prices are not going down in a surplus market. That's greed.
So wait, they're holding (and destroying!) massive quantities to keep the price of medical marijuana "34% higher" than the black market price, then acting surprised that their product isn't moving?
> Forced, in most cases, to sell to a provincial wholesaler along with everyone else in the sector
Okay I know nothing about Canada's cannabis market, but who thought that could possibly be a good idea?
This is really the worst kind of shit. Destroy food so they can charge more, while so many starving people could use that food.
I've heard it a million times, but it'll never stop shocking me to here about this idea: Keeping market value up is more important than reducing starvation.
I don't think the comment you replied to was saying it's only bad because Canadian. They were stating every time they hear about food being destroyed it pisses them off. Doesn't matter if it is US, Canada or a dictator doing it in front of the people that were hoping to receive it. It's a shit move.
However, let's not forget the logistics of getting the food to locations it was never thought about getting to when it was "made". Farms pretty much know where their food is going to be sold when it comes time for harvest. Food like milk definitely has an expiration factor as well. So if American farmers can't sell their milk normally and have never tried to arrange for it to be sold elsewhere, getting it to elsewhere before expiration isn't as easy as one might think.
>I don't think the comment you replied to was saying it's only bad because Canadian. They were stating every time they hear about food being destroyed it pisses them off.
But if you're against food waste, shouldn't you be supporting supply management (ie. preventing excess production)?
You state this like I'm not, but this is just as complex and complicated issue. Do you pay farmers to just not grow anything in exchange for not over producinng? We kind of already do that in the US. Do you legislate that any producer must have primary buyers as well as secondary/tertiary buyers lined up to ensure never wasting the product? Do you legislate that any one farmer is only allowed to produce X amount of whatever, or state that only X amount of product can be produced annually in total, so put you bids in now for a stake? Do you take the farmer for any crop that is destroyed to discourage over production? Or you can do a startup to disrupt farming with a way to preserve food so it never spoils (a la Twinkies). Good luck selling that product.
Judging by the naïveté of this comment, I don’t think you’ve ever been involved in agriculture at scale. Preventing excess production is extremely difficult.
I thought the milk destruction during the pandemic happened because the processing facilities for the milk were closed and there was no way otherwise to use the raw milk? I.e. we can't stop producing it, because cows need to be milked, but raw milk is useless without further processing.
> And most of us are very happy to support supply management! "Cartel" has very negative connotations.
Exactly. Having a stable supply of food is more important than having an economically efficient supply of food. Of all industries, the food industry in particular should not be left totally up to market whims.
>Exactly. Having a stable supply of food is more important than having an economically efficient supply of food.
Has there any empirical studies/evidence that supports this claim?
> Of all industries, the food industry in particular should not be left totally up to market whims.
The oil industry seems pretty important as well. After all, most of our vehicles run on it. Maybe we should be glad that OPEC is engaging in "supply management", so they're not "left totally up to market whims"!
> The oil industry seems pretty important as well.
Not nearly as important as food; the only thing as important as the food supply is our supply of drinking water. Nothing else is comparably important, so you're wasting your time trying to find analogies. And the instability historically see in the oil industry is precisely what sane people want to avoid in the food supply.
>Not nearly as important as food; the only thing as important as the food supply is our supply of drinking water. Nothing else is comparably important, so you're wasting your time trying to find analogies.
Guess what modern agriculture (tractors, fertilizers, pesticides) runs off of?
Furthermore, if food security really is important, why is only dairy and egg supply managed? Surely if you want to keep your country fed, you'd want to go after the staples like potatoes or grain? If all the milk cows and egg laying chickens vanished, people would have to change their eating habits. Some people (working in adjacent industries) might lose their jobs, but that'd be it. On the other hand, if all the wheat/soybean/corn/rice/potato crops vanished there would be a massive famine.
> Surely if you want to keep your country fed, you'd want to go after the staples like potatoes or grain?
Canada is extremely competitive on grain and potatoes (and lentils and oilseeds and ...). Supply management isn't needed if we're already competitive exporters of a given product.
And again, you’re being needlessly argumentative and couching it all in very poor communications skills. Your comments have had absolutely no value. Please stop - it’s low brow and boring.
Supporting the entire food industry keeps the entire food supply secure. Shortages in one sector will raise prices in another. Libertarian madness is not a sensible way to run a country. Not even America is that crazy.
That poll says 74% of canadians either don't want supply management changed during nafta renegotiations, or it could be changed but only as a last resort? That sounds like pretty high support.
edit: The later questions are misleading - they ask if people would rather buy supply managed dairy at 2.25/L or no-supply-managed dairy at 1.50/L. Meanwhile I go to the grocery store and buy supply managed dairy at 1.23/L every week. Pointing out that people would buy a cheaper product isn't really groundbreaking research...
> most people prefer the non-supply managed products, taking into account the pros/cons.
I don't think they pros/cons they listed (i.e. price differences) are reflective of reality. Specifically, they list milk as $2.25/L, citing statscan as a source. This is $9 per 4L bag, an absurd price outside of the Territories. Reviewing the actual statscan data source [1], milk prices have been very stable at $1.25 to $1.37 per liter as long as they're been recording data. So I don't know where $2.25 came from. The second source they listed is crowdsourced and refers to milk costs as $0.62 per 0.25L which might be accurate if you're buying a 250ml or 500ml carton with your lunch ... but not if you're buying a larger quantity to take home (and to make useful economic comparisons with).
> only ~40% "support" it, so concluding that "most of us are very happy to support supply management" is a stretch.
That's firmly in Majority territory when it comes to Canadian politics :). There's a reason even the conservative party (the only political affiliation with more people opposed to supply management than supporting it) will not touch the issue.
The most interesting data in that study was the age-based breakdown - younger respondents were much more likely to support supply management, apparently.
>I don't think they pros/cons they listed (i.e. price differences) are reflective of reality
What makes you think the pros/cons they listed are just the price? In the linked questionnaire they have:
Supporters of the system say it ensures high quality, safe products and a secure level of profit for farmers who, in turn, don’t have to worry about changing world market prices.
Opponents say it restricts choices and increases prices for Canadian consumers.According to some estimates, Canadians pay 1.5 to three times what they would without supply management for these goods.Opponents also say that while the system once protected more than 150,000 farmers in the 1970’s,it now protects only about 17,000, suggesting it is less necessary or outdated
That seems to line up with the arguments for/against supply management discussed in this thread.
>Reviewing the actual statscan data source [1], milk prices have been very stable at $1.25 to $1.37 per liter as long as they're been recording data. So I don't know where $2.25 came from.
The article was dated August 2, 2017. If we checked the archived page as of jun 17, 2017, we see the $2.33/L price figure.
As for whether the numbers are representative because people buy in bulk: does it matter? The hypothetical non-supply managed prices were obtained by taking the current price and dividing by 3 (which was the suggested price premium according to University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy), so it doesn't really matter which starting price you used.
>That's firmly in Majority territory when it comes to Canadian politics :).
1. this is a sneaky moving of the goalposts from "most" to "majority"
2. Maybe en-CA has a different definition for "majority", but the definition on wiktionary unambiguously states that it has to be greater than 50%. maybe you're looking for "plurality"?
3. even if we use "plurality", using that to paint the picture that the policy has widespread support is misleading, especially when it's split pretty close 3 ways. At best it can be called "mixed".
>There's a reason even the conservative party (the only political affiliation with more people opposed to supply management than supporting it) will not touch the issue.
I don't get it. Why arbitrarily exclude people of a certain political affiliation? You can't say "most people disapprove of biden", then backtrack and say that it's true because you excluded all the democrats.
Alright, lot of comments to respond here, I'll do my best.
> What makes you think the pros/cons they listed are just the price?
I think that because consumers (myself included) will always choose a commodity that costs one third less. The description of the differences is irrelevant.
> The article was dated August 2, 2017. If we checked the archived page as of jun 17, 2017, we see the $2.33/L price figure
Interesting. I don't think that's a relevant price, as people who buy milk generally do it in a 2L or 4L package. I'm glad statscan is now tracking more relevant data.
The price listed in their question as "no supply management $1.50/L" lines up pretty close with actual market costs for a 2L or 4L package of milk, while the other one is enough of a price premium to be absurd for what shoppers consider a staple.
> The hypothetical non-supply managed prices were obtained by taking the current price and dividing by 3 (which was the suggested price premium according to University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy)
It matters because the non-supply-managed-price matches the actual market cost for supply-managed milk. That said, if the question had used $1.25/L and $0.83, the survey respondents still would've selected the cheaper one. Run the same question again and ask if consumers would prefer $1.25/L Canadian milk or $0.83/L American milk and I think you'd get a response more accurate of both what the outcome will be and what the consumers' opinion is.
Interestingly, reading the original report from the UofC [1], they used the 1Litre price and applied a "typical" 2.7 cost multiplier to get an estimate of the 4L price (at 6.02-6.48 for 2010-2012), and compared it with the real 3.8litre price from US Bureau of Labour statistics. The earliest statscan data currently available (from 2015) shows it at $5.52 and slowly steadily increasing to $6.05 in June this year. So their estimated cost differential is off by 10-15% right off the bat due to lack of data and a poor assumption. The paper also picks and chooses whether to compare supply-managed sectors to other agricultural sectors in Canada, or to the equivalent sector (eg dairy) in other countries - I don't find this to be rigourous. They quote the "mere" 12,786 dairy farmers in Canada - without comparing it to the size of dairy industries in comparable countries. Eg the US is down to ~30k dairy farms. I got a bit bored of skimming it to be honest, but I didn't find it to have even attempted to remain unbiased.
> 1. this is a sneaky moving of the goalposts from "most" to "majority"
It wasn't sneaky. That's why I put a smiley-face. It was somewhat satirical moving of the goalposts.
> 2. Maybe en-CA has a different definition for "majority", but the definition on wiktionary unambiguously states that it has to be greater than 50%. maybe you're looking for "plurality"?
Sure, plurality. I wasn't being too precise.
> 3. even if we use "plurality", using that to paint the picture that the policy has widespread support is misleading, especially when it's split pretty close 3 ways. At best it can be called "mixed".
Ok
> I don't get it. Why arbitrarily exclude people of a certain political affiliation?
I wasn't excluding them. I was explicitly including them. Read it again without the parenthetical clause. The equivalent statement would be "most [a plurality of] people disapprove of Biden, even including democrats"
To further expound on my position: I don't believe that supply management is perfect by any means. I think particularly the price of quota is too high, and this has a chilling effect on new entrants and novel ideas. I don't believe the solution is to remove quota, but other options are possible (eg have quota only available to buy from and sell to the relevant board to prevent profiteering on quota sales, or maybe have farmers require to "lease" quota annually, or maybe increase maximum herd/flock exemption limits (particularly notable with laying hens) to allow new entrants with novel ideas to compete on a small/local basis, maybe tie some fees to carbon reduction/addressing climate change, maybe provide tariff exemptions/reductions for novel products not available on the Canadian market). All that said, protection of the domestic industry for certain staples is worthwhile, and doing it with supply management rather than taxpayer subsidies is a lot more fair in my opinion.
Onions too. They used some trade negotiations to put a northeast US farmers out of business for certain onions, which now sell for retail at less than production price.
You're misreading. They're not being ordered to destroy crops in order to support the medical marijuana price. They're destroying crops because there was a bubble and they've created way too much supply.
Cannabis stocks were a fad for a while, and I know lots of people who invested in them blindly. The number of legal cannabis retailers is exploding. I live in a mid sized town and there are three more opening this month, and the ones I see always have customers.
The system's hardly failing, some speculators just played themselves.
> they're not being ordered to destroy crops in order to support the medical marijuana price.
I didn't say, or suggest, that anyone was ordered to destroy crops?
They created too much supply, yes. Follow the logic chain out a step. If they wanted to sell it, they could lower the price...
Instead they _choose_ to keep the price above the black market price. The black market price which is already inflated far above production cost, by virtue of it being illegal.
Legalization in Canada has dropped unregulated prizes. An 1/8oz (3.5G) pre legalization could fetch $30-$40. Post legalization is maxed at $25. This might not seem like much, but as the weight goes up, it gets drastically cheaper.
You seem to be assuming that the producer/grower and retailer are the same company. There are often disconnects in supply chains like this where someone is hemorrhaging money while others in the chain are doing quite well. And besides if your production costs are high there's a point where lowering the price no longer helps. eg. the cost to package it for retail distribution just adds more even more loss.
> Follow the logic chain out a step. If they wanted to sell it, they could lower the price...
This is not true about the Canadian market for a couple of reasons. The majority of this overstock cannabis is unpackaged. Unpackaged cannabis cannot be sold outside of licensed producers -> licensed processors.
> A recent survey conducted by Abacus Data for Medical Cannabis Canada found that those who access medical cannabis legally pay on average 34 percent more for their medicine than if they bought from the unregulated market.
I’m unfamiliar with the weed market in general, but it seems like this problem is self-inflicted.
They’re simultaneously oversupplied and overpriced. Lower prices and both problems sort themselves out, plus they can slowly out-compete the illegal sellers by undercutting their pricing.
It seems the real problem is that they are afraid to cut their margins because it would break their financial models and risk the stock price. It’s strange that they’d rather destroy excess product than try to move it at a steep discount.
I’m also afraid this could create other problems by giving them a huge incentive to try to push more and more weed consumption among the public. Whatever your thoughts about weed, I hope we can all agree that over-consumption is not good and that it could be a problem if multi-billion dollar companies are stuck in a situation where they need to greatly increase the public’s consumption of weed to become profitable.
> those who access medical cannabis legally pay on average 34 percent more for their medicine than if they bought from the unregulated market.
I mean, that’s true with most things isn’t it? If you buy meat from the dodgy guy in a pub then it’s cheaper. Bloke selling televisions from a van? Cheaper. Cigarettes from a corner store that have been imported from a low tax country? Cheaper. Getting the electric/gas done in your house from someone who is unlicensed? Cheaper.
Not sure why we would expect this to be different.
> If you buy meat from the dodgy guy in a pub then it’s cheaper.
I don't know about that. First of all, I've never had a dodgy guy in a pub try to sell me meat. Second of all, the market for meat, at least in the U.S., is relatively unconstrained and therefore the prices are pretty reflective of the cost to produce (including the costs for the various middlemen in the chain, etc.). So with meat, if some dodgy guy is selling it for cheaper, it's probably because it's subpar product in some way or another.
Televisions from a van? Stolen. Has nothing to do with economics -- the guy didn't pay the costs of producing those televisions, so his prices don't reflect them.
Among your selection of analogies, only the cigarette one seems comparable. But even with this it's a little different. In that case, the cigs are cheaper because the tax is not being paid. That might be a factor in the black market price difference for weed in Canada, but according to this article, price manipulation by producers is a big factor, which isn't reflected in the cigarette analogy.
Ha, maybe getting dodgy people selling you meat in a pub is a unique UK experience then!
Of course there are differences between all of these analogies, because there isn't anything exactly like the drugs trade and everything will have a difference, I just mean that in every example I can think of where I could buy the same product from illegitimate and legitimate sources, the illegitimate source is cheaper (so I don't know why we would assume it would be any different here).
> In that case, the cigs are cheaper because the tax is not being paid.
Well that's interesting, as Weed sales have between 27% - 38% tax in California and OP said that there was a 34% price increase compared to illegitimate sources, so actually the tax rate is approximately equal to the difference in cost here.
> Cigarettes from a corner store that have been imported from a low tax country?
Probably just smuggled across state lines. Bought in a state with low taxes, then sold in a state with high taxes. The store pockets the taxes instead of passing them along to the state, which it can do because the cigarettes being sold were smuggled so the high-tax state doesn't have any record of them existing.
I was under the impression that anything bought within the EU single market can be legally taken anywhere within the single market, at least for personal use, without taxes and duties. Is that not the case?
You can as an individual. And people do that, it's sometimes refered to as alcotourism, when you cross the border to buy cheaper alcohol in the neighbouring country. Finns go to Estonia. Estonians go to Latvia.
But as a company, you can't just import cigarettes or alcohol from another country and sell them at home. Cigarettes and alcohol have specific tax stamps on their packaging that make them restricted for sale in a specific country. People still do that, but at that point it's the black market.
Absolutely - it's also worth saying that there is a sophisticated tracking system to trace the manufacture of cigarettes from where they were created to the point in which they are sold (and all intermediary stops) in order to ensure that the correct tax is levied (despite there being no physical borders). This means that you can scan an individual cigarette box and see where it was manufactured, what tax was paid on it and every point it has travelled through in terms of the distribution chain.
This isn't fully implemented yet, but will be within the next few years.
>I hope we can all agree that over-consumption is not good and that it could be a problem if multi-billion dollar companies are stuck in a situation where they need to greatly increase the public’s consumption of weed to become profitable.
First, this is semantics, "over-comsumption" is bad no matter the substance, but who is able to define it generally?
But this is an experiemnt I would love to see, big companies pushing weed the same way then, say, the tobacco or alcohol industry before them.
I have a hunch from all the information I have, it would be not nearly as problematic as the former, possibly even have generally a more positive impact on society.
> I’m unfamiliar with the weed market in general, but it seems like this problem is self-inflicted.
>I hope we can all agree that over-consumption is not good.
The following is for the purpose of conversation only, food for thought if you will, and does not constitute any sort of condonement or endorsement, tacit or otherwise, of the use of cannabis products. Tread with extreme caution if you have any personal or family history of schizophrenia or schizotypical personality disorder as their is rather strong evidence that cannabis can have particularly profound effects on this group. Everybody reacts differently to different psychoactive substances, you only have one brain and one body, and treat them as your greatest asset:
What is the “over consumption” of weed? Unfortunately we really don’t have much reliable data on marijuana consumption, that I’m aware of anyway, and the longitudinal studies that do exist are from institutions with an obvious agenda, the National Institute on Drug Abuse being chief among them[1], and there was a ban on marijuana research until 2015 [2]. NORML has a pretty comprehensive overview of what data we do have with context of other substances.[3] Another good, more traditional take, is this review in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry[4]. The biggest problem I see with most of the data is that, for obvious ethical reasons, all the marijuana users are self-selected, I’m personally of the belief that many people who consume cannabis, especially into adulthood, are self medicating, and as [4] suggests this may have a lasting effect on their psychiatric outcomes.
I don’t know how much experience you (or other readers) have with weed or drugs in general, but I have decades of experience (with sometimes lengthy breaks) of what by most definitions is “heavy” use, and know some extremely heavy (i.e. nearly constant) users who are also extremely capable. Before I delve further, I’d like to stop (again) and point out that I’m not trying to focus on the exceptional here, but I feel in the context of recreational drug use, it is important to look at the whole spread of users.
Most of the following is anecdata: One interesting thing about cannabis use that I wanted to highlight for non-users in the context of “over-consumption” is that a very common sentiment among long-term chronic (pun intended) users, is that you develop a sort of “permanent tolerance”, even if such a user has a long period of abstinence, upon recommencing use they will rapidly return to their previous state of tolerance—-a (lower) level of efficacy that might have taken years of use to get too will return in a matter of days/weeks. This seems particularly pronounced in cannabis relative to other psychoactive compounds.
I would, based on my experiences and those of all the (hundreds of) people I’ve met and had frank discussions with about their use, rate weed on a “problematicness scale” between coffee and alcohol, but much closer to coffee. Their is a component to cannabis use that it was[5] seen as something of an act of rebellion, and that people who are past the “teenage rebellion” stage tend to self moderate similarly to coffee drinkers—-many of whom have a cup in the morning with the spectrum going all the way to people who drink coffee all day. I say its closer to coffee than alcohol because if someone is an alcoholic, and drinks all day, it will absolutely be noticeable to most people around them, and have an obvious and severe effect on their health. Conversely, I’ve known near constant weed users who were able to keep their use a secret from their family, employer and colleagues, were in athletic clubs and in some case on the extreme end of physical fitness. I’ve yet to meet someone who drinks all day and is otherwise extremely healthy, but I definitely don’t feel I have enough data to make any claims one way or the other about physical fitness. Overall though, I think the jury is still out about how harmful cannabis consumption is, especially if taken independently from smoking, and one of the best things about legalization movement, in my opinion, is that its given users much healthier alternatives to smoking, gummies are great!
Weed being legal is cool (and a huge deal and way overdue) but, until I moved to SF, I still bought from a dealer. It was cheaper and I got really high quality stuff, got to give feedback to the guy on the strains, chocolates, etc. Plus my guy would smoke me up for free a good amount of the time and we'd just chill and chat for a bit.
Legal weed is wayyyy more expensive in my experience and I dislike the experience. I went to an SF dispensary and it was so odd - had to give them an ID, sit there and fiddle with some ipad, etc. Presumably there's a lot of overhead with taxes, employees, property, etc.
And apparently artificially keeping prices high...
Also a somewhat damning case of "we have no idea how to value this"
I don't really smoke anymore, no time, but it was enough of a difference that the novelty of cutesy edibles wore off fairly quickly.
The regulators were way too aggressive. They overburdened farms and dispensaries to such a degree that legal sources are having a hard time competing with the black market even though dispensaries were considered essential businesses (able to stay open) through the pandemic.
Now California is bailing out the industry to the tune of $100M.
But that's what lots of the legalization activists asked for. I heard "just make it legal and you can tax it all you want" for nearly half a century. Well, now they got what they asked for. IIRC, one of the few voices that said "legalize it and don't tax it at all" was Ron Paul. Everyone else was so enthralled with finding a way to get it legal that they really didn't give much thought to how the government could end up making legal weed a lot less desirable than illegal weed.
>Plus my guy would smoke me up for free a good amount of the time and we'd just chill and chat for a bit.
that was my experience with earlier weed delivery groups in SoCal as well, when recommendations were required.
A guy with a suitcase of samples would show up to your door, and offer you a sampling of everything he sold. That person would even help you light-up or vaporize the goods if you have a physical disability that prevented you from doing so yourself , or perhaps teach you how to in-case you're unfamiliar with equipment or technique.
They would sit there and smoke with you or bullshit for a few minutes about strains/strain-quality/benefits/whatever, make a sale with whatever was chosen during the sampling, and then head out the door.
Since those days medical prices have gone down significantly, but the process is now more sterile and 'mass-friendly'. Gone are the days of interactive sampling or someone teaching you how to use a bong or vaporizer -- it's now mostly all 'delivery-fied' : "give me my cash, here's your delivery that I know absolutely nothing about, and i'm gone ASAP."
It's a shame in some ways -- the earlier methods were a lot more compassionate towards actual medical patients and actual medical needs for this product -- the status in SoCal now feels more on-par with UberEats-profit-maximization than it does compassionate-care; a shame since 'weed products' have gotten way more complex with the addition of a million different tincture/extract/compound/etc and the various ways to imbibe them.
In california. I only do edibles. For $1.50 (including tax) I get 5mg so I either spend 1.50 or 3.00 when getting high on a night. Its within walking distance of my house. They do check my ID - but seems easier than dealing with a person I have to meet on a random corner. And if you were a woman or old person - that option would seem even less safe.
My yearly budget for pot if probably about $100-150 which seems remarkable low compared to my food or alcohol budget.
It's often the second one, as under the prior medical-only regulations, dispensaries were all technically organized as cooperatives. I've definitely been in places in the recreational era where I just had to verify my age though.
When it was legalized in Canada, the legal prices were pretty bad. There were also restrictions on only allowing the sale of flower (ie no edibles or concentrates IIRC).
Since then, the government has pulled up their socks. The prices are competitive, the quality is fantastic, and the doses are accurate (as opposed to a “300mg edible” actually having anywhere from 50-500mg THC).
As a result, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t buy from legal dispensaries. There still exist some grey area mail order services, but the concept of “texting your dealer” is largely extinct.
I've been kicking this idea around in my noodle since judgement Day passed: a business like a local wine u-brew, where you come rent a stall in my warehouse and we grow your weed for you, in your name. When it's time to harvest, you can either take it home damp and dry it yourself or pay for us to cure it for you. Secure, safe, convenient.
I can currently easily grow a (reasonable) year's supply for someone within the legal 2-plant limit, this just takes all the pains and theft-risk away from the end user (mom and pop Canadian backyard growers)
Pretty sure this would be highly illegal under the current laws, but I'm old enough to remember when homebrew was illegal in Canada, too.
I know a cat who’s trying to raise funds for this concept now. From what I’ve gathered, it’s a real pain to get going. Let me know if you’d like me to introduce you two - my email is in my profile.
Here in the Netherlands tax for weed is really high. 50% if I recall correctly.
Not sure I hate the idea -- at least tax money is put to very good use. But for those for whom it's more than merely recreational (e.g.: medicinal use), I wish they'd sell a tax-free version. Too prone to abuse I guess.
However, heading to a coffeshop[1] isn't a big deal. It's a person behind the stand, you pic what you want from a menu, and they hand it over. Very nice and friendly, not dissimilar to ordering at a cafe.
I don't look under 25, and they've NEVER asked me for an id at any of these places. It surprised me in the US that even to sell alcohol to someone clearly over 40, they still ask for an id.
[1]: Stores that sell weed here are called "coffeeshops".
It's fucking nuts, 40, looking 50, got IDs buying a pack of beers in Walgreens I think, just stopping two night usa back to Europe. She wasn't happy that she couldn't scan the EU driving license but eventually she relented, same next night, I was perplexed, do they not enpower their workers? Uk is over 18, but ask for id if you have any doubt less than 21, 3yr margin, common sense
The US is pathologically concerned with blame, and with avoiding blame. Everything about the US makes a ton more sense if you understand that.
If you don't empower workers, then anything they do is their fault. If you do, then anything they do might be your fault, for failing to restrict them ahead of time. It's as simple as that.
So you let them make as few choices as possible (then, if they do and it's bad, you're off the hook).
>>>Uk is over 18, but ask for id if you have any doubt less than 21, 3yr margin, common sense
People are much worse at estimating ages then they think. If the policy is "ID anyone that looks <21" many 16/17 year olds will look 23 and not get asked. I worked for a chain of liquor stores that had an "ID 25 and under" policy - and to check it, they would send in 25 year olds. Lots of time staff would fail those checks. In my jurisdiction the penalties for selling to minors are strong enough that I'd consider a blanket "ID everyone" policy, or at least "ID everyone <40" or similar.
Well, not sure if typo, but the margin of error is the point surely?
It's fine that 23 year olds who look 26 slip through as long as 17 year olds who look 23 don't.
Otherwise the store is effectively saying "we expect your judgement to be up to 7 years too high and account for that" but also "you're in trouble if your judgement is 1 year too high"
Two things - first, no typo, but in my jurisdiction legal alcohol age is 19, so +6 years is the margin of error (at that particular set of stores, anyway). Second, it's more about changing how the question is framed in the mind of the clerk. Instead of "is this person definitely over 19?" it's "is this person definitely over 25?" - which has a much safer error rate if there's a big penalty for selling liquor to minors and a small penalty for asking for ID when you don't need to.
UK actually went from "Challenge 21" to "Challenge 25" a few years after the former was introduced, so most places have a policy of asking for ID if you look under 25 now - a 7 year margin.
Though the extent to which staff really do challenge anyone who looks under 25 obviously varies considerably, even in businesses where Challenge 25 is the official policy (which afaik is a recommendation that most chains, including pubs and supermarkets, and many small businesses follow, but not a legal requirement).
In many states the cashier can face a $500-$1000 fine for selling to someone underage, risking being fired. The company pays a similar or larger fine. With a few of these fines that location can have alcohol sales suspended for 6-12 months. So many companies require ID for all sales regardless of age. Losing a few sales here and there from people without ID isn't worth risking it
I was in Virginia with a California drivers license and they wouldn’t let me use my California ID. Workers are paranoid about getting busted for selling booze to a minor. I guess no one ever gets fired for blocking an alcohol sale, but if they cause the store to loose their license they might be out of a job.
No empowement. Mistakes could lead to too much bad PR, court cases, or fines. It also means that if anything bad happens, they can fire the employee that didn't follow corporate's rules and claim it was a mistake by the employee and totally not the company's fault.
Fair enough, but I closer 50 than 30, and look so, and the same girl did the next thing the next night, it was a store near an out of town Airbnb so I doubt my first interaction was forgetton
Could she have been under 21? I remember when I spent a summer working grocery that my under-21 coworkers were required to id on all alcohol purchases.
I'm not sure on the 50%. I didn't even know there was a separate tax. It seems unlikely to me as weed is still 'illegal'. The police won't look your way if you use it or sell it in shops. But everything that happens before the shop (growing and transport) is still very much illegal and you will get a big fine if you get caught. You are only allowed to have 5 grams or a small amount of plants.
The government together with a few selected municipalities is starting an experiment to grow it in selected growing facilities. As far as I know no municipality has started selling those yet.
In California, medical marijuana is taxed differently than recreational: if you have a prescription you pay 15% tax, instead of 23-38% tax. The variation in recreational taxes is based on municipality; medical tax is a flat 15% everywhere.
The tax is probably still too high, but it's better than not distinguishing between the two. I suppose if the variation was large enough people might go back to paying sketchy doctors to prescribe them weed for "back pain" (which was fairly common in CA when weed was medically legal but not recreationally; the going rate in SF was somewhere around $80 for a host of back-alley doctors to write you prescriptions), but who knows.
> But for those for whom it's more than merely recreational (e.g.: medicinal use), I wish they'd sell a tax-free version.
(I'm not Dutch but) Are you sure they don't? Obviously not claim tax back having bought on the street corner, but if it's medicinal as in actually prescribed, not just 'self-medicating', then surely it's tax free just like I assume anything else would be?
Same actually. But this was 25+ years ago. Oddly think we got IDs for the sex museum though and was it beers in McDonald's at lunch, there some oddities that trip.
My limited understanding is that for most states, if a store, even if accidentally, sells to a minor and gets caught a certain amount of times, the store will lose it's liquor license.
This results in the following problems:
* Underage College students and teenagers are very creative at appearing way older than they are if it means getting booze
* People who are of legal age, particularly older men, will often get offended if carded since it implies the person asking thinks they are young looking
Making it a policy to just check the ids of everyone decreases the amount of people offended and decreases the risk of losing your license which could destroy your business.
I imagine your varying experiences across multiple states is a combination of individual business decisions and how strict that state is with enforcement.
Not everyone was lucky enough to have a chill dealer. It reminds me of joe Rogans bit about how in order to buy this harmless plant you have to interact with a criminal. Oh, and commit a crime. Legalization is 100% the right thing.
You can grow it yourself or get it delivered if you hate the dispensary so much.
Yes, you can legally do this where it is allowed, but other than that, it is pretty much a copout. Not everyone can grow things well. Not everyone has a green thumb. Also, weed is not the easiest plants to grow and takes a lot of time and effort to get quality flower. It's also not like you can just walk over to plant(s) whenever you want to smoke up. The plant has cycles of when it is making flower and when it's not. Now, you can trick it out with grow tents, lights, hydroponics, etc, but now you're a freaking grow house and most people definitely don't want that.
I love when the inexperienced stand up like an expert.
There's a huge difference between having a plant that is alive and a plant that is producing quality flower of enough quantity to make a difference. There is much better info on the web a simple search will show you compared to me describing to someone that already thinks it's super easy.
Correct - there's a big difference between growing standard weed and high grade shit.
However, I feel like people in the thread are slightly overstating how hard it is to learn how to grow good weed. I live in a country where smoking and growing weed is illegal.
I know people (yes, more than 1) who grow their own using best practices learned from YouTube (and others). pH, heat, nutrients, CO2, light levels, everything is monitored and tweaked. I've been in grow tents with 2 plants inside and grow houses with >50 (highly, highly illegal).
It's really not THAT hard, especially if you can follow basic protocols (I.E probably most of HN). It's not exactly rocket science! There are (genuinely) illiterate people doing it as we speak.
While it's not classified as a drug, it's definitely addicting. Also, you question is very leading. More accessible? Depends on location. There are plenty of places where meth is much more accessible than anything else including alcohol.
>While it's not classified as a drug, it's definitely addicting.
I'm starting to realize how true this is. I didn't know my beef jerky has sugar in it until they came out with a sugar free version. I assume that's how they get people to eat otherwise garbage food and eat a lot of it. I bet if they starting taking sugar out of everything the US would get a lot healthier real fast. At least make it more obvious if something has sugar than the 15+ variants on nutrition labels.
That'll never happen, the US government is already bought, sold and paid for.
Coffee. Tea. Coca cola products with extract from the coxa plant (cocaine removed, other medicinal compounds retained), cinnamon which is a blood thinner, olives and hot peppers and myriad other things which have medicinal uses.
Edit: I forgot to say alcohol for those folks who think of "drugs" primarily as recreational drugs. Not everyone is into getting high. Some people have other interests in "drugs."
I have a "friend" with a single solitary plant in "their" backyard right now. It's been growing from a seed since February. It is barely 10" tall. No signs of whether it will be a female or male. It has been getting watered and fertilized with all of the other veggies/herbs in the garden. This plant is not going to be keeping my "friend" in supply of flower for any kind of regular use.
You too sound like someone that has never tried growing their own plant. I can tell you from experience, of my "friend", that it takes way more effort. My "friend" is not using lights or anything to trick the plant into doing more like other places do. It's just a green thing with unique leaves in the garden.
Try growing a cannabis plant indoors without a pH probe when supplemental nutrients are needed and get back to me. Outdoors is another story but indoor growing has a significant learning curve.
it's easy to grow the plant, you can put seeds in your garden and it will grow. It's not easy to grow and then process (!) the good product people are used to.
> It reminds me of Joe Rogans bit about how in order to buy this harmless plant you have to interact with a criminal. Oh, and commit a crime. Legalization is 100% the right thing.
I'm all for legalization but that's just a really bad take. The whole point with it being criminalized is that you SHOULDN'T buy the plant. Anyone pro criminalization would also probably not call it "harmless". Making it inconvenient and illegal is the point.
I think most people pro criminalization simply want to control others. There is objectively far more damage caused by alcohol and I have yet to meet anyone that wants to criminalize cannabis and alcohol.
I hated the 'dealers system'. I didn't want to give some lowlife drug-dealer my address, nor my phone number. Neither was the idea of meeting such a person in a parking lot somewhere appealling to me at all. Consequently, I virtually never smoked weed at all until it became legally available in stores, except at parties where somebody else had it. Two or three times I bought from a dealer, and each time it confirmed all my biases about the experience.
Weed is a bit more expensive now than when I bought from a dealer, but it’s still seems very cheap for what you get out of it.
The amount of modern, high potency cannabis I can buy for the price of two beers would turn me into a complete zombie if I was even able to smoke it all in one sitting, and I’m a habitual user.
Of course, I’ve noticed a large variance in how it affects different people.
The shops on the main roads in SF have a certain aesthetic to appeal to a new audience of smokers. If the new age guru / apple store thing isn't your vibe, look for shops off main roads, they tend to be somewhere btwn the LA medicinal alleyway shop and the apple shop. Bloom Room comes to mind. Small, focused on quality, had (? pre covid) a volcano you could use on premise. It's still a store, they aren't gonna smoke you out and be your friend. But SF weed scene is not yet a techy monoculture
Once you learn the system, dispensaries are very convenient. At practically every location you can peruse the menu and place an order ahead of time. Then, at the dispensary, show ID, receive selected cannabis products.
On a gram for gram basis, legal weed may be more expensive. But most people don’t appreciate that legal weed is significantly more potent. (Not to mention the health benefit of smoking less plant material.)
The average THC content in illegal states is around 10%. High quality legal strains regularly clock in above 25%. So even if you’re paying twice as much per gram, you’re getting a better deal per mole of THC.
I don't think that necessarily holds true if you're making the choice to buy from a dealer though, as having the choice implies you're already in a legal state.
At least in California, I'm under the impression the legal and illegal supply chains are still very intermixed, so the stuff from your dealer is as potent as dispensary. Though I'm not sure how true that holds as you get further from the major growing areas.
From my experience, there are huge differences between stores in terms of pricing and customer service. The industry is so new that just having your doors open is a license to print money, but it’ll start to standardize once banks are allowed to enter the field, permitting successful dispensary operations to scale storefronts. I just stopped at a dispensary in CA about and hour and half outside SF and picked up an ounce for $100, which is a better deal than I ever got from a dealer.
In Illinois, I felt the original medicinal stores were more warm and very friendly and helpful esp to first time users. Compassionate to first time users who are dealing with legit pain and medical issues.
Newer recreational stores have popped up everywhere with many many more to come, but the few I’ve visited are cold and the staff act like they could give a shit.
Anyone who's been in the industry knows that there is not only not enough demand, but it is also seasonal. Other than the heaviest users, people don't consume 365 days out of the year, they go through phases.
If you grow weed year round in high tech facilities that maximize production, you're going to just have massive piles of it that you cannot unload.
Making it legal didn't really create that much more demand because it was already easy enough to get in most places where there were enough consumers.
I drove through Oregon not too long ago. There is literally miles of weed shops right next door to each other. There are more weed shops than gas stations... and the gas stations usually have one right next door anyway. I have no idea how they all stay in business, but it couldn't be good.
Now this is the comparison to tulip mania that kind of works.
> There are more weed shops than gas stations... and the gas stations usually have one right next door anyway.
In Washington state [or just Seattle? I'm not sure], there are laws restricting how many square feet the signage for a weed store is allowed to have. In response to this, weed stores devised a trick where they buy up neighboring businesses and run them under the same brand name as the weed store, with very large signs. So next to "Bubba's weed store" with small signs, you have "Bubba's Car Wash" with very large signs. Anybody looking for Bubba's weed will see the huge sign for Bubba's car wash, and know they found the right spot.
I sort of question the framing here? Not yours, but the article's. There is exactly enough demand, because however much people want of a mostly harmless plant is how much people should want of that plant. Nobody turning a profit should be no surprise: farmers barely turn a profit either, because selling commodities is not a means of getting rich quick. Considering how low-risk buying pot was before legalization, it boggles the mind why anyone thought there would be a huge growth in consumption, especially when the legal product is priced so much higher that it might as well still be illegal.
As far as why such a low fraction of transactions are in the legal market: the only way to move pot transactions out off the black market would be to either make it substantially as convenient to buy it legally, or to dramatically increase enforcement against black market transactions at the same time that weed was legalized. It seems Canada did neither.
As a culture, we over produce, under consume and just throw the rest away. Ever looked into the dumpsters behind super markets?
I may have known a grower who would always struggle with the seasons. Indoor growing is year round, but the outdoor stuff is what everyone wants. So every time the outdoor harvests would happen, it was nearly impossible to sell the indoor stuff.
So now you combine massive indoor with massive outdoor and year round production... and a customer base that is also trained to be seasonal (wait to stock up on the best stuff when it is available)... total recipe for failure.
Needless to say, my grower friend saw the writing on the wall and exited the business before things became legal. It was really too bad, their multi-year cultured strain was excellent and no longer exists now.
That whole hippy sun / nature plant thing appeals to people.
Less sarcastically, there is two types of indoor. Hydro and soil. The hydro based is only grown in water and fertilizer and as a result, has a more chemical taste to it. Since both are fed very specific spectrum lights and even airflow (added co2 is common), they also develop their own characteristics.
Outdoor brings people back to that natural feeling. Of course there is different outdoors too... like container based or just allowed to grow like a tree. Elevation, climate, water, bugs, etc... all play a role.
At this point, strength is all relative... it has been enough years of professional growth that the strains are all super strong and bred for very specific highs.
The botany of weed is fascinating. It grows like a weed, but it is a super complex plant in the things that it requires to grow well.
>Considering how low-risk buying pot was before legalization, it boggles the mind why anyone thought there would be a huge growth in consumption, especially when the legal product is priced so much higher that it might as well still be illegal.
I have no idea how much consumption has changed. But for a casual/occasional user seeking out a dealer seems like a fairly high bar. And even if legal prices are higher, again for a casual user, the total incremental amount seems pretty trivial.
Last year lots of people planted hemp around me, as it just become legal and there was a small market opening. Very, very few of these people had any notion what it would take to harvest, process and store their crop, and no notion of how or where to market it once in.
I've seen multiple Craigslist ads attempting to sell garbage bags of wet, mouldy, untrimmed hemp. I've been told that anyone who has a sales channel has been inundated with "buy my crop" offers. Ive heard one guy had grown and harvested several acres or so and had a couple truckloads in round wrapped bales he was looking to sell.
People didn't dive into cotton farming this way, when it became viable in the area again.
I did the math on this a few years ago and it came out to be less than 10 farms to supply the entire US with weed.
Edit:. Found my post:
For comparison, bulk price of tobacco is a few bucks a pound. Admittedly I am not an expert in marijuana vs tobacco cultivation, but I doubt it's 1,000 times more expensive. Ultimately, the problem with profiting in a legal marijuana industry is that people simply don't smoke that much pot.
Say that there's 260 million adults in the US and they all smoke 1 joint per day. Assuming:
1 joint = 1 g of marijuana
1 lb = 454g
1 acre can yield 600 lbs of marijuana
1 farm is 1000 acres
If you do the math, that means we need roughly 350 farms worth of marijuana. Or in terms of acreage, roughly 0.04% of all the acreage in the U.S. under cultivation. In other words, even if we assume a ridiculous level of smoking there's simply not a huge demand for pot. Using more realistic amounts, a handful of large farms could produce all the marijuana consumed in the country.
I really like this analysis because it's so conservative. Even among regular pot smokers, 1g/day is extremely high! (No pun intended.)
Not to mention weed is fairly easy to grow at home; I've had a few friends do it, and they always end up with truly ludicrous amounts that they end up just giving away for free. I don't think the same is true of tobacco, or even alcohol — homebrewing good beer is harder than growing good pot (at least, in my relatively meager homebrewing experience), and making distilled spirits at home is a recipe for blindness and death. I don't know a lot about tobacco curing, but a little online research seems to confirm what the sibling commenter posted: it's a difficult art, takes a very long time (up to a year?), and doing it yourself usually ends in poor quality tobacco. Weed you just... leave out to dry for a week, and then stick in a glass jar for a few more weeks.
As a vice product, weed just isn't going to be that expensive absent high regulatory pressure. It's a weed, it's easy to grow.
Edit: that being said, edibles are a different story. Making those at home often results in disaster, since controlling the THC levels is fairly difficult. There could be good margins there, as well as for all-in-one vaporizers, where making hash oil is quite difficult and potentially dangerous. Flower, though, seems hard to make profitable as a consumer product.
Tobacco is harder to grow and cure than good cannabis.
The tobacco industry consolidation bent the market to the point that "tobacco" as sold is the result of a large industrial process that happens to use nicotina plant matter as an input.
I think the cannabis industry is flying hellbent to that point just to have an excuse for spending all the investor money. As well as a literal distaste for burning plants as a social thing.
Not just housing but even more so commercial and industrial facilities where property taxes give great incentive for scorched-earth demolition in response to only nominal downturns in occupancy or utilization.
Always with less than one-year deadlines before reassessment since these are recurring taxes, one of their most destructive features.
Regardless of how many nearby citizens are homeless, jobless, and/or capable of operating a prosperous small cannabis farm if they could freely grow & sell their fresh product at the local farmers' market with no different regulation or taxes than the other crops.
One problem with processing it is that there are very low limits on dosages of edibles in Canada (currently 10mg THC per serving). I think lifting this absurd restriction would help enable those ideas.
This is a new era though where companies can survive for over a decade on hype and the promise of future profits. In fact present profits make it seem like you’re running out of room to grow.
Not that any of the companies anyone here works for work the same way.
In 2017 a good number of the VCs investing in blockchain in Vancouver, pivoted to investing in weed. I guess their investment thesis was actually "invest in things that can be sold on hype alone."
Tonne is the more common form for (but exactly equivalent to, assuming metric tonnes) the SI megagram (Mg).
Anyone that would use the hypothetical 'kilotonne' would use 'Gg' instead. Agriculture works in tonnes though, not SI prefixed grams, so it would just be 1000t.
(Source: from writing a lot of code for doing conversions and display and things with differently denominated quantities for ag users!)
Sure, it's just as fine as tonne in the first place (I assume you do mean (metric) tonnes, kilo with Imperial or US customary tons would seem to me as weird as calling thou 'milli-inches'). But does anyone actually use it?
We use plain t everywhere because, afaik, that's what the users want, how they think about it even if it's thousands or more of them.
A thousand tonnes is ambiguous because you cannot know if it's metric tonnes or not.
A billion grams is unambiguous, because a billion prefix for the regular reader would mean pretty much the same as infinity. The 0.0000001 as the multiplier after billion prefix doesn't discount that, because you still have to read the billion out loud.
It's mostly supply side (B2B) deals, the data about crop and harvest they provide is worthless.
I could add in all the retail transactions (I just don't load them every month).
You can get it too, FOIA request to the LCB, they'll send you a link to some zip files. They drop new bits every month.
What I have heard anecdotally from people who grow is that regulations have stymied their ability to profit. In many places there are limits on how much you can grow, or how you can sell, or how much, or to whom. Illegal sales do not have any of those problems. It's like we've tied the legal producers' hands behind their backs and then wonder what all the struggling is about.
I've bought edibles and weed in Canada, mainly in Toronto. It used to be a lot stricter but now a lot less people check my ID or whatever. Overall the process feels more informal than before and less go through all these checks etc. Could be I look a bit older although I was able to buy weed at different places when I was much younger without showing my ID either back when it was stricter.
Also I've stopped calling them dispensaries because the places that sell weed have diversified, specialized or started marketing themselves with different products that it isn't just a buy weed location anymore so it's hard to put them in one category.
People buy weed in grams, eighths, quarters, ounces, and pounds typically. Not tons. I assume they went with grams because that is the most common purchase amount and people can possible get a sense of quantity.
Know a few “pot lawyers” and retail operators. The real money is in gaining a license for a dispensary. Growing is a race to the bottom. From humboldt era $5k lbs to $800 lbs
What's the advantage of handing out these licenses to companies that will then be run like a Silicon Valley start-up?
Why not just allow dispensaries to grow a small amount of their own stuff on premise, say 20Kg / month? Limit each customer to a 5g purchase. You just need a proper space and half a dozen staff (if that). No need for massive investments and all this maxed-out capitalist accounting trickery.
Legalisation should put dealers out of business on day 1. There's no way I'm going to engage in criminal activity, texting a dealer and waiting on a street corner if I can just walk over to a bar and buy what I need, super chill like it is in Holland.
Unbelievably sad they managed to screw it up so badly.
A bit off topic, but for the smokers here what are your thoughts on lung cancer and other negatives associated with smoking? I bought a vaporizer but not sure it is actually healthier than smoking joints. Tried edibles but can’t stand the lack of uniformity and time to kick in.
> A bit off topic, but for the smokers here what are your thoughts on lung cancer and other negatives associated with smoking?
No one knows if smoking weed causes lung cancer, but if it did, you'd think someone would have noticed sometime in the last 10K years.
However, everyone knows that smoking tobacco causes lung cancer. But this notion is technically not true. Smoking national brand cigarettes definitely causes lung cancer because what is in national brand cigarettes is not tobacco. It is about 50% tobacco and 50% additives, and also intentionally includes about 300 added carcinogenic chemicals to increase the addictiveness of nicotine... that is what is causing lung cancer, not natural tobacco. Pipe tobacco is just tobacco, nothing added, and pipe smoking (or rolling cigarettes from pipe tobacco), whether inhaled or not, doesn't cause lung cancer. Tongue cancer? Mouth cancer? Maybe to probably. Emphysema? A surity.
Here are a few quotes from the US Surgeon General Report on Smoking and Health[1]
No. 1103, p.112:
"Death rates for current pipe smokers were little if at all higher than for non-smokers, even with men smoking 10 pipefuls per day and with men who had smoked pipes for more than 30 years."
No. 1103, p.92
"Among the pipe smokers.... The US mortality ratios are 0.8 for non-inhalers and 1.0 for inhalers."
...which means pipe smokers who inhale live as long as nonsmokers, and pipe smokers that don’t inhale live longer than non-smokers.
I am a bit skeptical of that studies findings. However, it is quite absurd that the US anti-smoking legislation (taxes, advertising bans, etc.) completely ignore the different forms of tobacco. Pure tobacco is probably better, and chewing tobacco is considerably better, and vaping is not even tobacco. Yet the US treats most the same way and many states are even adding tobacco taxes on vaping.
The reasons I can come up with:
1. The anti-smoking movement became very classist.
2. Big tobacco certainly prefers that cigerettes remain the most common form of tobacco since they are more profitable.
3. States like collecting taxes and don't care about the actual effect on public health.
Vaping is quite substantially healthier than joints/bongs. You aren't burning the material but baking it at oven temps.
I tried to get my stoner buddies into vaping and everyone's switched except the guys that are culturally infected to give up being the "joint smoking guys".
I switched from bongs to dabs and felt better cardio wise. Live resin extracts are suppsedly pretty minimal in extra stuff. I think the vape oils have a lot of extra crap. I went back to smoking for a bit though I think the dabs are to potent and I was getting panic attacks
>Barely more than half of all pot sales today are conducted through the legal market
When the government won't pay more than $850/lb no matter the quality of the weed, what do you expect?
The weed in legal dispensaries is straight trash. It's dry, usually packaged months before in containers or bags, costs more than the old medical dispensaries or literally anyone else selling weed.
There is zero reason to go into a legal dispensary, spend between $25-$40 for 3.5g of weed that's going to be pure garbage when I could get high quality weed for $15-$20/3.5g from pretty much any street dealer or delivery service.
Why would I spend more money on 10mg edibles when I can spend less money on 100mg + edibles.
It's completely mindboggling how badly the government fucked this up. It's hard to believe it wasn't intentional.
Which is why there should never be a "cannabis industry". We created a food industry that produces sub-standard food and much of it goes to waste. Applying the same obviously flawed principles to cannabis is another mistake. Pot should be legal to grow/possess/use, but not to buy or sell. There's no point. It's so easy to grow. Just plant some in your backyard and smoke it. Or give it away. That's what it's for.
There needs to be SOME kind of market. Not everybody has the time, space, inclination, or knowhow to do a good job of cultivation, and not everybody has friends who grow.
You could make exactly the same arguments about alcohol. I'm an enthusiastic homebrewer, but I wouldn't say that everybody should brew their own.
It sounds like Canadian regulators screwed this up pretty royally. The First Nations counterexample is fairly compelling: farmers able to sell directly to consumers from a farmstand.
That being said, I am a little tired of authors trying desperately to work an anti-capitalist bent into their pieces where it doesn't fit. Critiquing capitalism is trendy! But calling for market deregulation — which is exactly what the author seems to be calling for with the First Nations example (the Indigenous farmers aren't running socialist collectives where each grows weed according to their ability and to each is given weed according to their needs; they're running weed farming businesses and selling weed for profit) — is hardly a critique of "shareholder capitalism." The problem doesn't seem to be the shareholding — and the author's banal assumption that Indigenous-owned businesses have no shareholders seems a little racist — the problem is Canadian farmers aren't easily able to sell their product due to Canadian regulatory burdens, and are forced into relationships with the few giant wholesalers who are able to comply. I'm sure the farmers' shareholders would love it if the Canadian regulatory burdens were eased, and somehow I don't think it was them lobbying for the regulation in the first place.
Supply/demand should push the price to the floor with this Surplus gargantus, and yet prices continue to climb.
It's like ECON 101 doesn't apply to pot. What are they going to do? Dump it in ocean?
What I want to know is how retail is maintaining these obviously, artificially high prices in a crazy-lopsided buyer's market?
Collusion is the only explanation I have. They're all just colluding to prevent price collapse.