Growing Your Own

The thing is, it's so easy to grow high-quality marijuana that if it became "legal to grow, possess, and use cannabis and to give it away" there would be no commercial market for it. There's a reason it's called "weed", after all. Captcha says "farms other" ...

Would it not be possible to carve out a category for a controlled substance like we have for prescription drugs? Until recently prescription drugs were not advertised. A different category for cannabis could be that commercial production and sales are OK but advertising and promotions (i.e. NASCAR) and lobbying are not OK and the product is sold in a plain brown wrapper. Maybe it could be deemed a controlled substance and then the government could license production to pretty much anyone but the terms of the license would include the restrictions listed above. The lobbying part is important to prevent the pile of money this would attract from getting into Congress. Even then I'd be a little worried. As we've seen, the best laws can be ignored by bad politicians.

A few years back there was a ballot initiative in the city of Berkeley that sought to only allow coffee shops to sell fair trade or organic coffee. Everyone scoffed—you can't do that! It's unconstitutional! As a matter of fact, restrictions and regulations on the means and manner of products in commerce may be regulated heavily. Berkeley could have done it and legalized pot can do it. As for "free enterprise," try starting a bank, a medical practice, a law practice, etc. without a license. All that has to be done is that sales should be restricted, taxed, and any business doing it for profit needs to have a license contingent on no marketing. Or you could just do it like alcohol. Who cares?

Let people grow it but not sell it. Charge a modest yearly fee for the privilege.

"So I'd prefer to legalize commercial operations. But practically speaking, is there some way to open up commercial cannabis sales but limit their operations to a fairly small size? It seems like there ought to be, and it would certainly be a boon to those of us without green thumbs. Ideas?" You could require that any organization which sells the substance be a registered non-profit. Or, you could have regulations like the ones on people who distill their own spirits, setting production limits.

Does Mother Jones have two separate servers for comments, one stoned and about 40 minutes late, and the other on Linux?

The wine industry seems pretty close to the model people are looking for here, it might be worth looking into that.

The interesting thing about the Cali experience, it that is fomented this white-black market initially from the players in the previous all-black market: that is, allot of illegal growers in the north simply went grey, the big city former dealers went into business with a license and a storefront and law enforcement made it just difficult enough to keep out the un-serious and chopped the heads of those who tried to go too high-profile. This system is holding up shakily for the moment, and even has a speakeasy feel to the whole experience what with the ID checks and surveilled anti-rooms. The Feds still manage to make the dispensary owners nervous, and so prices (and profits) remain relatively high due to the still sketchy nature of the enterprise. If pot became legal here, either gradually or in a single legislative pass, this system would possibly remain for awhile - but would depend on a couple of things. For one, I'd bet bars and clubs would want to sell joints to their customers - and that just like Amsterdam, there would at least be a demand to license "coffee houses" or lounges for the sale and consumption of the weed. The second thing is that, at some point Phillip Morris may very well want to start selling packaged joints and they will have quite allot of political muscle to dictate how manufacture is licensed and taxed. What exactly do "we" or the band of growers in northern California really have to say if the Feds rescheduled and lobbyists from Morris get to write the legislation regime? The middle ground, and the most likely in the near term, is a reschedule of pot as a medicine, and then state-by-state decrim along the "medicinal" route that California is experimenting with. This will preserve, strengthen and spread, with slight modifications, this grey-market system. Some states will attempt a highly regulatory and stringent regime, others will become very lax. Somewhere, someone will open a successful lounge open to the public and that place will become the Amsterdam of America. Then there will be two, then four then ten cities where there is at least one pot lounge. Taxation and regulation will become a necessity at this point, if only at the local level. That's when Morris will lobby to package the weed. 15-20 years.

ABC type regulation is eventually the way to go, and I imagine allot of States will get to that point. I guess the question becomes, who gets to write the regulations governing growing, packaging and sales? As long as it allows easy entrance into the business and the ability for any grower with a good strain to compete against the lab at Phillp Morris, then eventually that plan will kill the black market and illegal importation. And in that respect, then pursuing any kind of medical model is exactly the wrong way to go (despite what I said above) for pro-pot activists, since presumably a medical-only role would require FDA approval regimes, and thus, legally limit production and distribution to big-Pharm and actual doctor/pharmacies. This would not kill the black market (and it probably wouldn't even make Pharm much money).

Progressive revenue taxation. Make pot growing legal. Tax revenues at 20% of the first $10,000 and 90% thereafter. Or, carve out a bracket for the $100,000 farmer/distributor. Still, pot growers would be expected to form the equivalent of the National Dairy Council. I suppose they could be forced to publish their membership list, making large contributors subject to IRS audit, but I suspect that we'd see billboards anyway. The overall market for pot is simply too large and campaign finance laws too weak.

That'll only happen if it changes on a local level - like insurance or benefits regulation; you cannot effectively make these changes on a scale smaller than people are allowed to move around. Of course people have their pot stolen while prohibition is on. That happened to wine growers in California or moonshiners in the east. It doesn't happen now, when you can go to the grocery store and buy it, or borrow a cup from your neighbor.

"25 plants is way too many for personal use." That depends on how much one smokes, how much a particular strain yields under the conditions, and whether you count seedlings and clones or just mature, sex segregated plants. Depending on the strain and the conditions the plant is grown under, a single plant could yield anywhere from 2 to 20 ounces of dried pot. Someone who uses it to control pain might smoke 1/8 oz a day - so if one were germinating from seeds (as opposed to cloning) which requires sex selection of aprox 2:1, meaning half the plants are killed about a month into the growing period, and the growing period is anywhere from 3 to 6 months, 25 plants could easily NOT be enough to sustain a need. Of course, the real issue is that cancer and pain patients rarely have the ability to grow and tend plants. This is how California arrived at the "co-op" scenario, where patients are allowed to register with growers in the role of "caregivers" who contractually grow and maintain pot for medical patients.

Their poor grasp of customer service, erratic hours, etc. should reduce pot's glamor.

That's worked pretty well for the last 71 years, though you forgot to mention the armed paranoiacs in the back seat.

As I recall, a lot of casinos in Vegas used to be run by organized crime--the large corporations didn't want to sully their image. Eventually of course MGM and their ilk couldn't resist, but I suspect that even if pot were legalized it would be many years before Altria would want to get into the business. Keep in mind that Big Tobacco is an enormous business; likely pot would be much smaller if legalization lowered the price as it almost certainly would. As for trying to keep things small, California tried to do that with farmland and water rights when we started irrigating the Central Valley. I'm not saying it's impossible to mandate smallness but one has to be very vigilant about enforcement.

I vote we legalize it entirely, and then address the larger advertising issues raised here, which have impacts far beyond hypothetically-legal marijuana. Excessive advertising for pharmaceuticals, unregulated "supplements", "free" credit reports, "no interest" loans, and yes, cigarettes, are all problematic. The idea that the first amendment, coupled with the legal fiction of corporate personhood, requires us to allow all this dangerous noise is, frankly, farcical.