High quality oregano is ~$5 a pound, according to a quick web search. Is there any particular reason to believe it wouldn't stabilize in roughly the same place give or take, say, 5x, if legalized? (And bear in mind that taxes not only don't go to the producer, they actually inhibit produce demand (http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Price_Theory/PThy_Cha... , search for "Who Pays Taxes?"), so that only makes it worse for these guys if the government starts taxes it punitively.) That's still over a full order of magnitude price drop from the estimates of MJ/lb I could dig up. It strikes me as very, very likely the bulk of the cost is compensation for taking on risk, rather than material or labor costs.
True, and grapes are 2.99 a pound at the local grocery store. Doesn't seem to explain why a good dinner table wine can be upwards of $100 a bottle.
Never underestimate the power of a mind-altering substance, or the price that people are willing to pay for it.
While there is an element of perceived value built into the price of a bottle of wine, much more goes into pricing a bottle of wine than the price of grapes.
Different grape varietals can be more or less easy to grow depending on skin thickness, adaptability to different climates, and disease resistance. The pinot noir grape, a notoriously finicky varietal, really only shines in cooler regions and its thin skin makes it highly susceptible to disease. Other grape varietals, like Chardonnay, are highly adaptable to a number of different regions and soil types.
Once harvested, grapes are typically sorted according to quality. The best grapes are used for the best wines. The excess, low-quality harvest is usually used for blending into massive batches of lower quality wine or grape juice or it's thrown into compost to fertilize the next year's crop.
Once the juice from the grapes is pressed and fermented, the wine, depending on type, will either be aged in oak barrels or steel tanks. American Oak Barrels can range in price from $500-$1000 and French Oak Barrels can be double that. If aged in oak, which is typical of many reds and a few whites, the aging can typically take anywhere from a few months to many years.
Once aged, the winemaker will typically select small samples from different barrels and experiment with different blends to get the optimal blend for balance and aging.
All this being said, here's what I learned from working at a smaller winery in Virginia for a year: As a rule of thumb, most of our wines cost about $5-6 per bottle to produce. In the winery, we would sell at retail between $10-30 depending on the type of wine. We would sell at wholesale to restaurants and stores at $8-12/bottle. Stores would typically mark the bottles up to match what we sold the wine at at retail in the winery. Restaurants on the other hand will typically mark up a wine 3-5x what they purchased the wine at to account for corked wine, uncorking fees, storage costs, and of course to make a profit.
So sure, marketing and perception play a big part establishing a market price for wine. (Thus a huge jump in Pinot sales the year after Sideways came out, and a corresponding drop in Merlot sales). But it's also naive to compare the mass-produced Concord or Niagra grapes you're getting at a grocery store to the bottle of wine you're getting at a restaurant.
As naive as some here assuming that all marijuana would be grown, harvested, processed, packaged, and marketed like bulk oregano?
The process of cultivating, harvesting, trimming, drying and curing medicinal-grade Marijuana is as involved and labor-intensive as any other artisanal process like winemaking or gourmet food preparation. It can't be that everyone still thinks it's essentially Cheech and Chong growing bagseed in their high school dorm room closet.
Take a look at the lengths people will go to find and cultivate world-beating cannabis:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsKOzrymxZE
I can definitely tell you this much: California has had essentially legal cannabis for over a decade now, Amsterdam even longer. Growers and dispensaries/shops operate in clear view of the law and only a few ever see serious legal repercussions.
I can also tell you that properly dried and cured cannabis of an exotic or perceivably powerful or flavorful strain is about $400 per ounce. Regular, serviceable "bulk" weed grown outdoors for commercial trade runs about 75-100 an ounce. THAT market I can see becoming commoditized. The high-end market, maybe a bit, but not nearly to such an extent.
Yes, and by the pound is how bulk MJ is bought and sold at a wholesale level.
> Doesn't seem to explain why a good dinner table wine can be upwards of $100 a bottle.
This has been post-processed, aged, and blended by masters whose work is more art than science. I'm not sure there is a good analogue in MJ world except perhaps hashish or hash oil. Hashish is relatively easy to produce and may be aged. It is certainly refined to a greater potency than bulk MJ.
So it will cost more per weight unit than bulk MJ.
First, it takes ~3 lbs of grapes to make a bottle of wine (and the grapes aren't likely the same as the ones you buy in a store). So that would be ~$9/bottle based on the 2.99/lb you mentioned, which is probably a lot more common than $100/bottle. Trader Joe's wine is what, $3?
Even so, you haven't accounted for the winemaking process, which I imagine is significantly more complicated and time consuming than the marijuana-making process (does it involving anything more than drying the leaves?).
Surely there would be craft/luxury brands that are more expensive, but I think for mass-producers, selling a cheaper (as in not cost prohibitive) product would be significantly more profitable.
Well, if we're to set aside the actual strain-crossing, hybridization of sativa and indica (not to mention with ruderalis for a different flowering and flavor profile), cloning, pulling of males and hermaphrodites, creating plants simply for harvesting feminized seeds guaranteed to yield _foo_ amount of grams per plant or per square foot of space depending on lighting, and on and on... then yes, cannabis is not like wine.
Making high-quality hashish, butane hash oils, tinctures, or other "decoctions" such as icewater extraction, are supplemental processes that require significant labor for the amount produced.
I hear you, though. Winemaking is fancy and there have been shows like "Falcon Crest" that chronicle it with an heir of refinement and love's labor that you don't see from, for example, "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle". Cannabis will, until fully legalized, always be demonized and caricatured as a rebellious college kids' vice.
It is an extremely significant cash crop in the US, though; and I think it will be even when legalization does come around; much moreso than, say, oregano or sage.
I think you may be making a critical, but easy, economic error, which is considering only one side of the supply/demand dynamic. Yes, demand may be sky high, but that only implies high prices if supply is scarce. Things with sky-high demand and a corresponding sky-high supply are still frequently very, very cheap. And legal MJ's supply would be sky high; as others have pointed out, it's called "weed" for a reason. It is not hard to grow, it is not hard to process, it is not hard to move, it doesn't take specialized equipment beyond what already exists off the shelf. The only two ways for the price to end up even remotely high is for the government to tax the hell out of it, or for a cartel to form. And it's very difficult to see how a cartel could form under those circumstances, too; how would you form a dandelion cartel?
A lot of pro legalisation campaigners take the "imagine how much you could collect in taxes" approach and calculate based roughly on the current size of the industry.
I think marijuana is easy enough to produce and responsive enough to modern agricultural tricks to be a pretty small industry. Perhaps orders of magnitudes smaller then alcohol.
As others have mentioned, there will probably be a premium market, but even there it is hard to imagine a prices anywhere near $2k per pound
Please don't take this the wrong way, but your account is 49 days old...I'm not sure that you're at the "I get to tell people what sorts of discussions they're allowed to have" stage yet, especially not to people that have been here for almost three years.
I'm sorry I didn't know that you had an alt account, it's just annoying when people start showing up and trying to dictate how things "should be" to established members of an existing community.
Actually, I'd be ok with the latter discussion too, but only in person, not on an internet fourm.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=554166
which links to this article: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...
Perhaps not an argument against, but certainly a 'reality' check argument against the "it's so obvious we should do it" mentality that seems to thrive in online forums.
EX: A "major" issue is it's hard to detect if someone is currently under the effects of pot. Because, apparently drug test are designed to detect if you have smoked not if you are currently impaired. However, an officer can do a road side sobriety test without using a breatilizer so it's not a real issue.
Now if there was some sort of bioaccumulation of pot ever time that caused massive issues then that single issue could prevent legalization on its own.
I don't see a problem. Pot use can be detected, sometimes days (or weeks) after. The law in most of europe is simple: If you're tested positive while driving then your license is gone.
Seems fair enough.
The bioaccumulation idea was a separate issue; if smoking pot for 30 years turned people into zombies with an uncontrollable desire to eat brains then it should be illegal regardless of other negatives. (I could not think of any issues like this so I made something up for the sake of argument.)
PS: You can probably detect pot in the blood of 75% of Americans if you set your threshold low enough. (Second hand smoke from 2 blocks away etc.) That does not mean it's impossible to separate smokers from non smokers just you need to set a reasonable threshold and accept you might miss the occasional smoker.
Well, the tests are not that precise (yet), but it's the same with alcohol. You may very well be tested positive if you had been drunk the day before.
Imho that's just fair. If I want to smoke then leaving the keys at home for a few days seems reasonable. If I want to be a regular pot smoker then I shouldn't be driving anyways, as my reflexes are permanently reduced.
I can attest to the latter from experience, as I used to smoke quite a bit for a while. The longterm effect on concentration and memory have been fairly small, but definitely noticeable.
Anyway, as a non smoker I assumed Pot like most drugs had a fairly short term effect, if you are impaired for 3-7 days then that's a separate issue I was not aware of.
FWIW, I've been smokin' quite a bit myself for a few years, I'm in no way against it.
I think your reasoning is not correct. I think the quick-tests go for the metabolic waste simply because there is no other reliable test short of taking your blood.
I've not been in the situation but I guess that blood test will take place before you actually lose the license, just like with alcohol.
Anyways, like I said, I know what I was like when I was smokin' frequently and anyone who does will probably agree that your overall performance is slightly reduced even a few days after. For that reason I'm okay with not allowing people to drive during a reasonable timespan.
Legal marijuana makes it so that people don't start using more dangerous drugs on a whim. They are no longer presented with an easy opportunity.
If pot is on the same level as alcohol which do you think is more of a gateway drug? One that makes you introverted and cautious or one that makes you more confident while simultaneously impairing your judgement?
I have a couple of pretty simple one (it's worth considering).
The long term affects of pot abuse are pretty easy to develop - I've seen medium-heavy users become fairly "brain dead" after several years of use. This is entirely from observation but it seems to occur faster than the same effect due to alcohol abuse. As a result we could see quite a few problems from more long term users.
It is also harder to determine if someone is under the influence. This would mean some industries would have to begin mandatory drug testing prior to performing sensitive work - random examples: doctors, pilots. That's costly, time consuming etc. And if the long term affects of the drug are as pronounced as I suspect you could see heavy abusers in those fields actually pass drug tests and still fail to concentrate at a critical moment.
It's certainly an area that needs a lot more research before legalization occurs.
Mandatory drug tests are common already (Home Depot does drug tests on all employees -- don't you feel safer about hardware?) People's performance are also impacted by stress, sleep deprivation, etc. - they should be monitored for performance, not blood chemistry.
>It's certainly an area that needs a lot more research before legalization occurs.
No it doesn't. It's safer than other existing legal drugs: http://www.saferchoice.org/content/view/24/53/
A gallery of loser stoners: http://coedmagazine.com/2009/02/06/the-10-most-successful-po...
And if it is a concern about people's health, why is it treated as a criminal matter?
Solid point. I can't disagree. Possibly the only issue worth raising is that cannabis influence may not be as physically obvious as those things you mention. For example a nurse may notice a brain surgeon is looking fatigued and raise concerns, but if on drugs his attention may wander at random moments which are not immediately obvious in the same way.
They don't call it "weed" for nothing ;)
You can cover up a multitude of sins using solvent extraction + chromatographic separation + blending. If legalization takes off, I suspect we will see the rise of blending conglomerates that assemble products for various tastes and purposes, like we see with whisky.
It would be pretty lame if the Budweisers and Phillip Morris of the world come in and commoditize Marijuana, and it would put a major dent in some local California economies. But like a fine microbrew or boutique web shop there will always be a market for quality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction#Downsides_...