What do you do with a billion grams of surplus weed?
thewalrus.ca
thewalrus.ca
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.
but it's not surprising that an industry still maintaining some semblance of customer service is a weird sight to behold for folks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Greed doesn't begin to describe what is going on.
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.
*Fall harvest prices might dip that low.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It could be collusion, but maybe dispensaries have tried sales and found themselves making less.
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.
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.
Weed is sold in stores at local prices. Theres lack of competition.
> 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?
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.
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.
But if you're against food waste, shouldn't you be supporting supply management (ie. preventing excess production)?
The issues in this article are also entirely different.
edit: you forgot to mention our nefarious healthcare cartel!
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.
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"!
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.
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.
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.
sounds more like the real goal is protectionism rather than "having a stable supply of food"
Two things:
1.) This grammar is atrocious.
2.) You’re being needlessly argumentative.
Is it? This poll seems to say otherwise: https://angusreid.org/supply-management-nafta-renegotiation/
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...
That's one way of spinning it. The other replies paint a different picture. Specifically:
1. https://i0.wp.com/angusreid.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/S... most people prefer the non-supply managed products, taking into account the pros/cons. (emphasis mine)
2. https://i1.wp.com/angusreid.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/S... only ~40% "support" it, so concluding that "most of us are very happy to support supply management" is a stretch.
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.
[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=181000...
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170617054025/http://www.statca...
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.
> 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.
[1] https://www.policyschool.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/suppl...
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.
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.
Unless you’re a cartel trying to price fix for long term gain, selling this stuff at >$0 is a win.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You see people in Sweden with packaging with the health warning in Polish, for example.
This isn't fully implemented yet, but will be within the next few years.
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.
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.
(Source: https://www.leafly.com/news/lifestyle/california-weed-tax-gu...)
>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!
[1] https://www.drugabuse.gov/news-events/nida-notes/2018/02/lon...
[2] https://www.marijuanatimes.org/medical-marijuana-research-ba...
[3] https://norml.org/marijuana/library/cannabis-mental-health-a...
[4]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3221171/#ref47
[5] https://archives.drugabuse.gov/news-events/news-releases/201...
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.
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.
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".
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.
Nobody ever carded me in Amsterdam coffee shops when I was 14-15, I don’t think it’s a common practice.
No, big chains like that in the US don't even empower middle management.
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).
I cannot guess ages with anywhere near that precision. In California the usual standard is if you look under 30.
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"
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).
it's weird, some american states are like that, others are not. also, it depends on the bar.
seattle, for example, always asked for id. new york was suuuuper chill with ids.
sf was hit or miss, some bars would ask, some other wouldn't.
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.
(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?
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.
[0] https://staragritech.com/crop-report/
[1] https://www.ato.gov.au/Business/Excise-on-tobacco/Excise-obl...
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.
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.
Give me an example of a more accessible drug than marijuana.
Edit: Didn't mean to post a one word reply
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.
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'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.
If you're not a weed snob and just trying to save a few bucks anything that the plant makes will be fine.
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.
Edit: Correction, it's barely 20" tall now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Anyhow, i suppose there is still a black market for other drugs, that would be curbed with legalization.
It would be quite a feat if Canada were to be the first, but it seems more time has to pass.
https://biv.com/article/2021/04/most-canadians-not-ready-exp...
My yearly budget for pot if probably about $100-150 which seems remarkable low compared to my food or alcohol budget.
in my case, they just looked at my passport and that was it.
Now California is bailing out the industry to the tune of $100M.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-06-14/californ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
The Canadian cannabis market is regulated by idiots for the benefit of companies, and the consumers are taken advantage of.
Reminds me of the neoliberal take on housing and healthcare.
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.
See here https://www.change.org/p/remove-the-10mg-thc-limit-on-edible...
Where have we heard that before?
Not that any of the companies anyone here works for work the same way.
…one kilotonne?
Edit: english subtitles say „hundreds“ while it is actually „thousand“ in the German version. ~1 minute into https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPVKaj9hVcY
Edit: it would most likely be written as one thousand tonnes.
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.
Edit: yes, seems to be like that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonne
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Metric%20Fuc...
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!)
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.
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.
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.
> What do you do with a billion grams of surplus weed?
Burn it in bonfires at festivals like Coachella and Burning Man.
But they already give the stuff away at many festivals..
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/07/new-york-cit...
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".
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.
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.
That's kind of everything these days.. Tech, stocks markets, housing, etc. is less about fundamentals as it is the "potential".
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.
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.
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.