of legalizing marijuana. I'm just saying that there are no relevant powers that stand to gain from it. And since our country is now governed based on the application of monied interests, there is no hope of it happening in the short or mid term.

the people.

currently.

California has realized that the state has something to gain. The mature, medical marijuana regime in California already brings in significant tax dollars...though it's called "miscellaneous income" on the tax forms. Growers who deal with dispensaries basically have to claim their income. They could go outside the dispensary system, but inside it they can deal with unshady characters and large quantities. There's also the charging of sales tax when it's over the counter.

In a decriminalized system there will be no way to establish a full tax regime because most anyone can produce it himself. But the majority of people won't go through the trouble for various reasons. Some will have friends and the monetary exchanges will be under the table. But a lot will go for the convenience of stopping by a store and picking up a few grams. Everyone on both sides of the exchange with legal, retail outlets will be participating in the tax regime. (If the regime is established correctly, i.e. licensing retail outlets as is done with alcohol, the state/local government will collect revenue on that process as well.) Many, if not most, will be fine with it because it allows them to come out of the shadows.

Clearly, domestic supply cannot keep up with demand. CA is basically decriminalized (i think it takes like $75 and a headache to get a card) and has been for quite some time, but the retail price hasn't gone down at all. And that price is roughly the same in CA as it is everywhere else in the country. Further, we can expect demand to explode if the plant were rescheduled/decriminalized/legalized.

I don't have the info handy, but CA predicts that decriminalization will generate revenues into the billions per year by simply opening up the system they already have. That's why state politicians (a fair number) are actually for the 2010 ballot referendum that got twice as many signatures as needed to be put on the ballot.

And if that referendum passes it will blow the issue up, since there won't be any more skirting around it by calling it medicine. CA will be in direct violation of federal law. It'll be Supreme Court, 10th Amendment case time and the Obama administration will be deep in a corner. Throw the will of the people in a huge Democratic state under the bus and fight them, or take their side against the prison-industrial complex. Tough choice.

Strangely, it really is all in the presidents hands. Under the CSA, the FDA and the DEA are tasked with scheduling. Both agencies fall under the executive branch. Realistically, decriminalization requires no votes from anyone, anywhere. Reschedule Cannabis sativa (there's only one species in the genus) and it's done. Moreover, there is significant, bi-partisan support. Michigan's medical referendum passed with numbers that make Obama's victory there look like a close run thing...and they were on the same ballot.

Realistically, letting it go would undercut the organized crime control but it would also almost certainly have an economic impact at least as big as FDR's lifting of the alcohol prohibition.

Give a farmer with a modern tractor and equipment a shot, Monsanto will come up with sexed seeds about as fast as you can blink an eye.

Marijuana won't cost any more to raise than tobacco does, and tobacco companies receive considerably less than $1 a pack of the money you spend. When I was in prison (before they outlawed smoking) an untaxed package of cigarettes cost 40 cents.

I did inhale.

If it goes full-scale commercial agriculture style then no problem with supply meeting demand. And it might, but i would imagine that big farmers would probably end up concentrating more on fiber and seed production since they wouldn't be able to compete on quality...not economically anyhow. But hell, for a lot of farmers even a small plot would be enough to take care of the mortgage for the year or more. It might allow them to quit the off-farm employment and keep them out of the debt trap.

The Dutch and the Canadians (and probably some in NorCal) can already do the sexed seed trick.

I lived in South Africa, at that time in the land, one could obtain pot at $2 a kilo. I'll repeat that. $2.00/kilogram.

The penallty for being caught with pot was 2 years for the first offence. For us. For the local, there was no penalty. The Xhosa use clay pipes, and have for centuries, and tobacco was unknown in that part South Africa. What do you suppose the Xhosa smoked?

Also, I was unaware that pot plants grew higher than 6 inches, as the locals were assidious at keeping them at that height, or lower, and not for any anti-drug reasons.

One day the SAP (South African Police) decided to burn off a field in Germiston. A field with much wild pot. After setting the fire in the field, and with many locals and SAP standing down wind, breathing deeply, they all looked very happy.

From this tale, I deduce quantity is more important than quality, and quantity in an unrestrained market is easy. So I suspect your belief that quality is important goes to pot.

What do you believe?

In late 1972, Manhattan District Attorney Morgenthau announced that he would not prosecute any marijuana cases that had weight of less than two pounds. That was one smart man. He had a great deal of crime on his hands. By doing this, police resources were focused on real crime against people and the line was held for a safer Manhattan. The rest of New York had the draconian Rockefeller laws which maintained the state sponsored prison complex of the time. There was simply no opposition to speak of to Morgenthau's decision. That's why we used to say, "New York is a fun city!"

there are lots of price quotes like that from the 60's/70's with pounds and pounds of the stuff going super cheap but the stuff that was sold was full of bunk, literally. cannabis was so cheap because you were getting the whole plant, shade leaves,( the typical large fan-like leaf symbol) seeds, chunks of stalk. All heavy but worthless (smoking wise) parts and i've heard it was often all ground up before reaching the user so they probably weren't getting as good of deal as it sounds and that's not even counting if the stuff was prepared properly as if not, water can make up a third of the weight easily. Modern cannabis is usually more processed and you are buying just the bud, but it takes lots of time and work to get it to that stage, thus a fair increase in price. That stuff could have just been the bushweed verses the cultivated plants but I can't speak for SA, so that case may be different but today I could go to India an get cannabis and cannabis products dirt cheap compared to canada but i could probably get much higher quality here, possibly it would be the same case in SA, not as cheap as it was but still cheap by our standards and in our currency.

as for the field of dreams
no matter what cannabis will get a reaction, especially with non-smokers and the wild stuff grows big and tall with potentially pounds to a single plant(6-7ft) and the burning of fields of the stuff pure cannabis or not is legendary for getting the local area stoned.I think I can recall a similar incident in afganistan a few years back, where in the soldiers ( cant remember if they were canadians or americans but you know, generally people well known for never ever using drugs) torched a field and were happy for a long while. just think about every story you have ever heard of someone trying special brownies for the first time, they get so high they think they are dying where as for a normal user the effect is only pleasant. Ultimately you really dont need that much cannabis to get high, even the most hard core cannabis smokers don't smoke all that much compared to tobbaco smokers and they usually share in a group. take the rastas for instance, they smoke huge joints all day long, but its mostly tobbaco. same in europe, they smoke mostly tobbaco joints. though they try to claim that's just because their stuff is better, they don't need a pure cannabis joint. really they are just lightweights as our stuff is measurably in terms of desirable chemical content just as good if not usually better.
the quality aspect comes in on characteristics besides potency/flavor/smell with things like burnablitity which is influenced by things like sulfur content. A cannabis hit piece published in britan a few years back tried to prove that cannabis was worse than cigarettes buy using cannabis that had been grown with intentionally far too much sulfur content in the fertilizer, that crap would have been unsmokable literally by being nearly impossible to light and keep burning, let alone the absolutely disgusting taste and inhaling burning sulfur into your lungs. yeah that shit was worse than tobbaco.
That reminds me, even big brother acknowledges the increase in general cannabis quality. Its one of the newer propaganda points that it should stay illegal because its so much more potent than decades ago.

as for keeping them short, that would be a quality issue as many indoor growers practice the same technique. Its all about getting the plant to focus on bud growth and development instead of diverting nutrients to a massive stock.

so i guess im saying that yes quality is important considering that cannabis has greatly improved in that regard and that to attain that quality you have to get a lot of work done which inevitably costs plenty if you want to even attempt anything large scale.
really consider just how available cannabis is in NA, the inherent failure of prohibition is that it can't ever be truly enforced,despite the thousands and thousands of people rotting in jail millions and millions more consume cannabis regularly.
at this point ,and as always, it might as well be legal.

double post

pot will sell for a fraction of its current cost in a non-black market economy. The profit margins will plummet as well. At best boutique pot is a cottage industry, not the mammoth that bootleg ditch weed is.
But to reiterate, the cartels are making most of their money off meth, coke and heroin.

Again unless i am terribly mistaken about the quality of medical cannabis in california, high quality cannabis is already being sold at minimal yet still profitable(and taxed) prices, prices affordable by cancer patients and numerous other disabilities and conditions. As in the poorest and most vulnerable people whose health-care industry is ruthlessly exploitative of. As in the stuff is being sold for less than what the outdoor stuff from mexico is going for. It should be mentioned of course that medical users consume more than average users, yet it is still affordable.Ive heard of one place in cali that offers a gram in exchange for an hour of doing phone activism or sending out letters and emails. All of those growers could make far higher margins selling illegally but would rather make a fair profit in a stable and safe market.

maybe some numbers would help. I know growers who can sell for 110 a half ounce and make 10$ on that sale, that's less than 10$ a gram. Accounting for cost of clones, lights,water system,various soil mixes , various expensive nutrients/fertilizers,organic pesticide,harvesting and drying/curing, and still makes enough money to cover several months worth of mortgage a year for a nice house off of one room. As I understand it's lower for medical sales but that is done in bulk. They could sell for far higher prices but chose not to. sure the profit margins aren't great but there is always demand, demand is never really met.The good stuff just can't get that much cheaper, im sure some effects of scale or new techniques could lower the cost to produce, but ultimately just the medical market itself is huge and will expand because patients will finally have decent access without having to cross hurdles of bureaucracy let alone everyone else.

as for the outdoor majority were it legal, organized crime would get out because it would no longer be worth it and they would be competing with legitimate business. but the demand is so huge somebody will fill it, it would mean that many farmers move on but simply larger operations take up the slack and many outdoor growers would move in since there would be no more risk of arrest.Already people have warehouses set up with seas of plants, ever hear of the old brewery that was turned into a massive grow-op in canada a while back, what if people could do that anywhere with out legal threat?

and this is all without considering the possibilities of cannabis use beyond just smoking, the otherwise useless seeds are just like the cousin of cannabis, hemp, as in incredibly nutritious. among many other uses. take the preventative medical uses, the reason cannabis is popular for cancer/chemo patients isn't just the pain and nausea relief but because cannabis works to inhibit the growth of cancer and can actually help prevent it in the first place by encouraging natural cell death, where cancer is unnatural cell growth that does not die and be replaced like the rest of your cells.It has also been known to actually kill tumors. considering that a third of us will develop a significant form of cancer in our lives any preventative step is worthwhile.

cannabis is far too marketable of a product, i just can't see the good stuff do anything but expand. If only because once legal the only edge you have over your competition is your quality.

no disagreement on the cartels, if anything it only reinforces my view that we are already working with the basis of an established economy that is not entirely subject to the black market and would not alter very much when legalized.

I could be wrong, but I doubt we will see it legal to test these theories any time soon.

There is only one species in the genus Cannabis, Cannabis sativa. The cousin of cannabis is Humulus lupulus, japonica, etc. (hops). There are a few others (some recently added) in the Cannabaceae Family, but they're trees.

The only real difference between hemp and marijuana is horticultural practice. Varieties within the species will do different parts of the growth cycle with different degrees of "success", but it's minor. Fiber hemp doesn't have THC because it's harvested no more than a week or two into flowering. Marijuana doesn't contain much THC before it flowers either. And seed hemp is just pollinated.

Still, fiber and seed are not to be overlooked in this equation. They could have a serious impact on multiple issues. But they can be grown until Cannabis sativa is reclassified (the whole genus is Schedule I).

Unusual coming from you.
Cannabis (Cán-na-bis) is a genus of flowering plants that includes three putative species, Cannabis sativa L.,[1] Cannabis indica Lam.,[1] and Cannabis ruderalis Janisch. (Wikipedia)
As a grower (ex) I can assure you Sativa (never grew Indica) is very potent long before it flowers. The leaves are very potent but less so than the mature flowers.
Hemp is in fact a different variety which is extremely low in THC. I have had the displeasure of smoking it. A friend brought back a bag of beautiful flowers of "hemp" from the Midwest. They looked great, smelled great, and tasted great; however, after smoking a few joints all we got was a bit dizzy and even that didn't last more than a few seconds.
The Japanese are growing hemp that also has close to zero THC.

Generally, a species differentiation is delineated by an inability to interbreed. All of three of the putative species within the genus can readily interbreed. Most modern strains of marijuana are not 100% indica but have some varying proportion of sativa parentage. Ruderalis interbreeding is like a holy grail of Dutch breeders because it is not photoperiodic. (It will do it, it's about finding the right varieties to match up.)

Certainly, varieties can be bred to have little to no THC, just like varieties have been bred to have very high THC content. Neither situation changes the fundamental, botanical classification. I can't speak to sativa leaves, but given the very long flowering time i would assume that the plant was in flower but still months from maturity.

I'll stick with the serious botany on this one and continue with there being a single species. After all, a Pomeranian and a Great Dane are significantly different pheno and genotypes but they're still in the same species.

I'll take you to task on one of your statements; "While you can grow as much as possible outdoors, it will always be of significantly lower quality than properly grown indoor cannabis."
Definitely not true. Most indoor seedless pot is Indica. It has it's merits but Sativa is a far more complex high. The strongest pots (sp?) I've ever smoked were Sativa's grown out doors by me and Mexicans south of the border. It was generally agreed by most of my social. Yeah, yeah, all subjective, but, another well experienced point of view. Seeds are the key and most Indica are cloned and passed on (sold) so there is very little variety and frankly the high is lethargic and boring.
And then there is Josephine County, Oregon and the infamous Humboldt County's #1 quality smoke. All grown out doors.
IMO, legalization may come sooner than you think.
Imperialism, GWOT, Hegemony, Oil conquest and world policing are all expensive and require a huge resource of manpower; legalization frees up a lot of humans for more important things.

it should be said that subjectivity is a large part of cannabis, some people can't stand particular strains that others love, some people get blasted from a couple hoots of something that barely stones another. Cannabis is a subjective drug.

By the raw numbers the indoor stuff has the chemical content, the best if grown properly though in the end the strain is what makes the biggest difference for the user. you give two examples of good outdoor strains, but im betting that if you take a comparable indoor strain the difference would be noticeable if only because you didn't need to smoke as much to get as high with the outdoor stuff but the high would be the same.

its true that most indoor is indica but again it is subjective, I have heard the arguments for the superiority of sativa and it makes sense given the longer growing period but again not everybody needs that particular family to get a good high, some don't like it, others do. were it legal I would not doubt that more growers would go with sativa given the relief of legal pressure and thus time becomes less of an issue. I would still maintain that indica can still get good highs, varying on strain and user. Though it is a more than fair criticism that not nearly all indoor growers have a commitment to quality or are interested in experimenting with more than one strain,developing their own ect.

as for legalization, all of those problems are fundamentally based on prohibition and ultimately benefit from it. We impose our laws on other countries and make them buy our shit to enforce those laws, make them cooperate and integrate with our intel/drug enforcement agents/military under excuses like prohibition, further influencing and controlling them. Just look at columbia. We are in afganistan to get the opium and the oil pipelines.
Remember we purposely expanded the whole drug empire to fund our dirty deeds in South America and elsewhere. crack, cocaine, opium,heroin, were all made popular by efforts of the U.S. goverment , from the contras to giving the Afganis guns to fight the soviets in exchange for planes full opium.
All the way back to the good ole days of the British and US narco empires that had the whole of china as captive buyers for opium.

in America (U.S.) is home grown and Canadian indoor Indica. The cartel (Mexican) is dealing in the larger cities; not the more urban areas. For most of the U.S. it just ain't so. With ever increasing medical pot being legal the cartels will concentrate on the hard drugs, not pot.
The cartels must rely on inner city poverty and this is their strength.
I don't minimize the significance of the cartels; but, put them in perspective of the reality of the present situation.
One must be suspicious of all government claims regarding the reality of anything.

like, totally! But what has not been yet mentioned are the other uses for hemp. A nice clean fiber for clothing and paper, as well as seed for foodstuffs. The seeds are rich in omega-3. I used to get hemp bars at a local health food store until they were no longer able to source them. They were hemp-flaxseed, tasted great, quite filling, and fairly cheap.

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