How the marijuana ‘green rush’ fell apart
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
And just like that, it's gone. All the big-money growers went to Oklahoma, and only a few remain. Which, I guess makes sense. The only reason they were here in the first place was because of the regulatory environment-- Not because land is particularly cheap or water particularly abundant.
I'm in the wine world, so I suppose I have some sour grapes, so to speak. In the boom times, a single cannabis plant could throw off $500 worth of product. Plus, the indoor grows were usually doing multiple harvests per year. Whereas my plant takes half a decade to establish, then produces $10 of fruit in a good year.
Even if the demand for grapes dries up and withers on the vine, at least you won't have a problem raisin money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UShiwymsX0w
Raised in that California sunshine!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDqMmIqA_Ak
Huh? Wow. Must have been something I ate...
Some problems were bad behavior from legal growers, but I'd argue the bigger problems were caused by regulatory and oversight failures from OLCC and enforcement of existing laws on illegal grow operations.
1) OLCC allowed for way too many grow license at first. For a state of 4.3 million, you have a serious upper bound to how much the legal market can support. There was some discussion about weed tourism, and a bit of work to allow legal interstate sales between Washington and California, but nothing really materialized.
2) A plant could produce $500+ in product, but it cost tens of thousands of dollars per acre just to get your plants in the ground. That's not including harvesting, drying, trimming, and storage. Given that there's no crop insurance, if anything goes wrong you're easily a couple hundred thousand in the hole.
3) OLCC often added regulations mid-grow, after it was impossible to effectively respond. This included things such as dropping the batch size for a test (which costs hundreds of dollars per run) down to 10lbs per batch. This sort of uncertainty, the oversupply of licenses, and the huge up getting operational costs made it financially impossible for a lot of farms to break even. I don't condone it, but I do understand why a lot of folks under reported yield and sold part of their harvest in other states.
4) A lot of the truly bad actors we're organized crime rings moving in (Russian mob and Yakuza from what I heard). They got a hemp license and grew marijuana illegally (usually having a few hemp plants in case a state tester came to the grow site). Local law enforcement knew about it, but they were literally out manned and out gunned. The feds eventually offered support, but it took a while. Folks understandably freaked out, but OLCC mainly used the mob as a pretense to try to wrestle hemp regulation away from the ODA (which they have been trying to do for years) rather than acknowledge that this was an enforcement problem, not a regulatory problem.
The people best included to make good decisions on how much to produce were the growers and their investors, with their own time and money on the line.
Philosophically, I agree with limiting the supply via regulation and licensing for at least the first few years. Everything else was already highly regulated: it's a schedule 1 substance that can't be sold out of state and can only be sold to 21+ in state. Some of the biggest players in the existing black market were the Mexican cartels, and they absolutely were trying to take advantage of the legal status to hide illegal activity.
Nothing about that market says it will go well with an immediate free-for-all. Long-term that may be ok, but short term that was just unrealistic
I'd love to know more about this. I think about this water often.
I'm not the expert, but you might check out Colestin. There was once a resort there built during the heyday of "healing" mineral waters. Land is cheap, although it is quite remote and extremely prone to wildfire.
Demand is very much elastic in response to price.
And, at the very least, the market was saturated below the break even point for production. The retail price didn't completely crater because dispensaries limited the supply based on their location, but a lot of producers could not move their product in the legal market and were left twiddling they're thumbs
Thank you for adding some more nuance to my post. I agree with everything you've written here. It matches my understanding of what happened despite my earlier oversimplifications.
There were compounding problems, but I think the story to be told is one of ineffective regulation and underenforcement. The regulators just didn't have a complete understanding of the industry, which introduced loopholes large enough to drive a Mexican cartel-sized truck through. Better representation from industry might have helped, but it's hard to say.
In their defense, the market changed underneath everyone. Keep in mind that there was virtually no public awareness of CBD until after it became legal to farm (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=c...). The wink-wink nudge-nudge "hemp" growers knew this, and moved with incredible speed to farm as many acres as possible before the regulators caught up. Somewhat like flooding a small town with Bird scooters in the middle of the night.
I'm not saying the industry was perfect beforehand, but it was mostly fine until it became clear that there would be a 1-3 year window for growers to extract maximum profits. At this point the whole valley got ground up in the mighty garbage disposal of capitalism.
> The wink-wink nudge-nudge "hemp" growers knew this, and moved with incredible speed to farm as many acres as possible before the regulators caught up.
That's super fair. The ODA wasn't culturally equipped to tell whether a company was a cartel front or a legitimate business. Really nice folks, but way outside anything they had experienced. I don't think OLCC would have done any better though.
The regulatory response also made 0 sense to me: grandfather in existing hemp growers and block anyone new. That just locked in the people they were trying to get rid of
> it was mostly fine until it became clear that there would be a 1-3 year window for growers to extract maximum profits. At this point the whole valley got ground up in the mighty garbage disposal of capitalism.
Oof. That, sadly, hits the nail on the head. The folks who were in it for the long term or more than just the money got eaten alive, and then the bubble popped.
So accurate. Also a lot of foreign money in pot farms in OK... sometimes leading to essentially slavery on the farms resulting in the deaths of workers.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/man-demanded-300k-killi...
So your napkin math that "you can get a lot more than $500 off a single plant" appears to overly enthusiastic.
You can get a lot more than $500 per plant, even at $500 per pound.
I've seen guys with 10'x10'x4' raised beds for each plant. They start them indoors or in the greenhouse so they're already several feet tall when they're transplanted outdoors at the beginning of spring. One friend in particular consistently harvested over 5 lbs per plant this way. So did most of his neighbors.
Maximum of four, and if you have it staggered in multiple grow environments, then you’re doing 12, one every month.
/own 20 acres in SE Oklahoma (tangent, my property taxes last year was a whole $9)
Turns out all it took to convince the right was showing them the money.
I would be interested in hearing more detail about the economics of the $10. Is this price you get from selling your grapes to someone else or is the net from selling the wine that you produce from your plants?
Real grape growers are looking to maximize dollar per acre. There's a lot that goes into it if you're trying to turn a profit. But at the end of the day it's about keeping the yield high and the input costs (especially labor) low.
But it looks more like the future will resemble the tobacco industry, with slim profit margins and a handful of conglomerates controlling production. And in reality, for wine as well, LVMH owns many of the most famous upmarket brands and and most wine drinkers stick to the bottom-shelf industrially produced bulk stuff that wholesales for $1/litre.
The joke being that these days it's all the same stuff. It's either complete shit weed (which is rare) or high potency modern bud that is all basically interchangeable. I personally have never even been able to detect a real difference between sativa and indica, let alone individual strains. Does some of it taste kind of different...sure? But smoking something or even vaping it is just fundamentally a different experience. It's not food, it's clearly a drug. It's in your mouth for like a second max. Tolerance works differently too, unless you are a daily, habitual user you're not sitting there puffing on a 90% THC weed pen for hours. One puff and you're fucked up. But you can have a glass or two of wine and feel mostly normal, even for someone who doesn't drink often. You can sip on it.
So IMO all of this had led me to the same conclusion as you. The market is headed for complete commoditization in no time. I have a friend who works for Altria and she was saying even 10 years ago they were planning for complete legalization and to dominate the market once it happened. The growing fields were already purchased back then.
But with this plant, the different strains definitely have different effects, and if you compare a strong indica vs sativa, the effects are very clearly different.
I mean, it is a plant that affects your mind and body, if you spend a lot of time with that you get to recognize the definite differences. The way the grower also handles the plants seem to have a difference, so it can be very sensitive if you have sensitivy for that kind of things.
Personally I agree on that the race to increase THC levels in the plants is not the best way, I mean I would be more happy if there was a race to create balanced strains, instead of trying to maximize the "blast you in the face" high THC buds. Like you said, sipping on good balanced strains is a much better experience at least for me, than just getting blasted to the moon with these modern strains coming near 20-30% THC content and almost no CBD.
With wine and beer, the ingredient varieties do impact flavor, but, realistically, they have nothing to do with the price a product can command. There's $3/bottle Cab and there's $300/bottle Cab. The difference in price is ostensibly down to the amount of skill that goes into the production of the final product, not just the grape variety.
I have a hard time imagining that can happen to a significant extent with cannabis. I'm guessing there's not as much room for a discerning palate to pick up on and enjoy subtle terroir distinctions in a product that you consume by setting on fire and inhaling the smoke. Nor do I see as much room for artisanal skill to appear in the final product. Making wine involves careful balancing of a variety of factors in order to fine-tune how an active biological process alters the characteristics of the final product. Cannabis? I'm pretty sure the process ranges from drying it and packaging it up in plastic baggies, to tincturing it and mixing the result into candy. I just don't see as much room for fine craftsmanship in either option.
Not saying there's none at all. Just that I have a hard time seeing how there's enough of it to support much of a very high-end luxury niche to the industry the way you see with booze.
Nor do I see it working out like tobacco where you at least have a (small) minority of cigar and pipe smokers who are primarily interested in the flavor of the smoke. But it sounds like cannabis is now so strong that it's difficult to consume any amount of it without becoming intoxicated. Which I would assume makes the development of a proper connoisseur culture around it about as likely as a connoisseur culture around 90% grain alcohol would be.
But for example medicinal cannabis like Bedrocan was developed to be a very clear and non-intoxicating strain, and you can definitely feel the difference in that vs homegrown varieties, so there is definitely an art there that is still to be explored by the big markets.
Who knows, wine and beer industries have existed for so much longer. With cannabis I understand it's the same thing, there is a lot of fine tuning in how you give nutrients, light and the environment, it affects both the taste and the effect. Also indoors vs outdoors has a different effect, so for sure there are a lot of variables in play that can be tuned.
My hope is that slowly the mass legalization will be going towards in giving the people the strains they need, some need more relaxing, some more activating, some more pain nulling and so on.
Also, smoking is not the best way anymore, vaporizing or eating is the most efficient way. High quality vaporizers the effect is much more medicinal, than smoking it, same way is when you eat it.
Maybe you have not tested a high quality vaporizer? with those the flavor and effect is much more clear, the smoking gives you an intoxicating effect from jus t inhaling smoke into your lungs. With a high quality medical cannabis and vaporizer, the effect is very medicinal, it can be almost non-intoxicating especially when used for a longer period of time.
Too bad this stuff is still illegal in many places. The illegality has most probably been driving the need to pack a lot of punch into as small amount of weed as possible, hopefully the legalization process will lead into more milder variants and strains being developed.
I get more number to the effect also while tolerance develops, I can only imagine what happens after 30 years. I definitely don't use weed daily, it would kill my productivity completely, but when I do after long periods of being sober, the sativa vs indica difference is so clear that seems pretty silly to even discuss about this.
This is interesting to hear because I have the opposite experience. I used to have really bad anxiety and weed was (and still can be) a trigger for it. I took a few years off weed and only starting trying it again since legalization in Canada (and now Thailand). I have definitely noticed that I feel best on something that is under 20% THC, with at least 1% CBD. I also am doing more experimenting with different terpenes and am pretty sure that also has an effect on how it makes me feel - limonene for example seems to be the best for getting the "euphoric" high. This makes sense as there is some research to indicate that terpenes from other plants (such as lavender) can have a positive impact on anxiety.
In terms of indica vs sativa however, I do think the distinction is largely overblown (from what I have read) and those are usually just proxies for the cannabinoid ratios (with sativa usually being higher THC etc and indica higher CBD etc.)
So from my experience and from what we have seen with coffee and beer I can agree that we will see commercialization first (like the Starbucks and Molson/Coors era) but I think that as weed becomes more normalized and more people get a feel for the differences in strains, preparations etc. we will see a shift back towards more "craft"/small farm interests like we have seen with beer and coffee in the last few years.
That said, I still think the big difference between coffee/wine and weed is that finding your optimal drug dosage is a fundamentally different human experience to tasting food and drink. Imagine if all alcohol tasted the same and the only differentiator was the exact type of drunk it made you. It's hard to imagine the same sort of culture emerging, where people are flying to foreign countries to taste wine or lining up outside their favorite brewery for new beers. Flavors are subjective, same as drug effects, but they are also sharable. You can hand someone a glass of wine and ask what they think. You can't hand someone your sense of reality and ask them if they are tripping out in the same way.
Tobacco really is a great comparison, eg. cigarettes likewise claim to compete on taste/subjective factors like "smoothness", but in reality nobody is hunting down 2012 Vintage Marlboros. Maybe an analogy to the high end cigar market could emerge? A product variant intended for less habitual, slower but more refined enjoyment?
As a medical user in the UK, I don't believe this to be the case - I believe these terms are more like proxies for the terpenes than the cannabinoids; you can have two strains with the same cannabinoid content, yet they can have completely different effects.
Do you have some info on what terps tend to be associated with sativa and which with indica? This is an interesting point if there seems to be a pattern!
For me, I'd say terpinolene, limonene and pinene tend to be dominant in the stimulating sativas I've had, where caryophyllene and myrcene take their place in indicas.
But it's no simple challenge, as non-dominant terpenes exert an influence too - and there can be dozens of them. And just to make it an even harder problem, it also seems to vary to some degree from person to person.
I seem to recall seeing Leafly's data in Kaggle, might be worth a look if you want to dig in!
Sure, back in the day lots of stuff was made up. But now I genuinely do get a different taste and high depending on the strain and I can usually tell the difference between certain kinds. Also, for very popular buds like Sour D I can ID by the smell alone. In the end it is just different terps, I know. And while I prefer Indica (“in-da-couch”) I do recognize some of the different effects could simply be psychological and not physical. Alas, I am big fan of medical grade sensi and the sincere peace it brings to my life (it is a boon for treating seizures). Anywho, just my two cents, have a good one!
CBD, the calming, antipsychotic compound vaporizes at a lower temperature than THC, the compound that gets you high. At 185°C you're getting mostly a bodily soothe, while 230°C has you hitting the deck and spaceing out.
Yeah of course, it was done along side the crypto due-diligence
Wine has had a stable market for centuries with products aimed at many customer segments, high and low quality segments included. Weed is just beginning, and the biggest customer segment by aggregate demand will be the undiscerning customer. Thinking otherwise is silly IMO.
I have serious gripes with the high end market in the dispensary. For example, Stiizy will sell you a gram of distillate in a cartridge for $60. It's the exact same product as the one being sold in that same dispensary for $20 from a brand with less instagram presence. Distillate is pretty much commoditized. Also the entire $60 1/8th market is absurd to me, it seemingly exists for people who assume price means quality because at the end of the day, its not significantly different than the stuff being sold for less than half as much, but it might come in a nice glass jar with a sexy lid instead of an opaque plastic bag.
Then if you start growing yourself its like seeing the man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz, with how much excellent weed you can produce in a few months with little investment or effort beyond what you'd do for a tomato plant. It will honestly look better too being hand trimmed and cured versus trimmed by a trim bag facing whatever the commercial growers do to cure it into a tiny, dry rock hard nug (probably good for scaling the process but its ugly to me).
I guess you can say this is true for just about any luxury product though. There are people that say wild turky or knob creek is a lot better than much more expensive whisky some people chase after.
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/west/2022/12/08/698377...
This brings questions up about contaminants for me
Raw garden too has been sued in a class action suit over terpenes misrep.
I agree be the wizard and make your own potions.
$73 3.5g testing at 22% https://embed.getmeadow.com/organizations/1328/products/1176...
$20 3.5 testing at 32% https://embed.getmeadow.com/organizations/1328/products/8834...
MedMen is even worse with their top shelf prices, you probably won't find any $20 1/8th there and I keep a wide berth of those places myself.
I don't feel like founders, employers, consumers or anybody standing nearby ever believed that.
But founders had to convince investors.
You can taste a lot more when you stop burning the plant and I think that's where the industry needs to go if it wants to develop that way
It seems like a market ripe for disruption to be honest, the undisputed king among non portable vaporizers at least is still the volcano vaporizer which came out over 25 years ago. I think that's why distillate cartridges are so popular, because they avoid all these issues dry herb vapes seem unable to work around. They don't smell very much at all compared to a dry herb vape, they are cheap, they have no maintenance issues or learning curve, and they are on and off with a click of a button.
Although, sure, it is expensive, as you say, but it's very good. And no matter how gunked up the top cooling part of the unit might get, it will never not turn on/off. I don't find the maintenance of the unit to be a big deal (particularly having an extra top /etc), but as always with such things, YMMV.
The problem with these types of vaporizers is that they can inadvertantly introduce contaminents to the body. This is largely fungal and bacterial matter that can infect the lungs as it is not destroyed fully in the heating process.
Be careful even with tested weed.
Because mine was indoor/soil/organic and didn't require driving up to Ukiah or waiting for the outdoor harvests, I got the same premium rates for it that are noted in the article.
As soon as I realized that weed was eventually going legal, I stopped entirely because I could see the writing on the wall. It was becoming commoditized to the point where it was impossible to compete. Too much money was being thrown at it.
Articles like this are zero surprise.
Meanwhile with crops such as corn, you have entire land grant universities planting test crops as we speak and biology departments dedicated to maize genetics, and thats true for almost every other large commercial crop. Billions are spent on research by the federal and state governments. Agriculture takes advantage of all of this research and development when producing commercial crops, but none of this investment is being made for cannabis and when it is done by these private companies they are not proliferating their findings.
There are so many cannabis forums on the internet (I used to be on the top 5 waaaaay back in the day) that you can find tons of research and tips on various culture methods. Right down to micro-sample cloning techniques.
It is a fascinating plant.
Where are prices so low that $100 for 2 ounces "isn't cheap at all"?
Its also illegal.
$25 FA Ranch Mangolicious at Electric Lettuce [1]
$28 Blueberry Muffin at Floyd's Fine Cannabis [2]
if you're willing to travel, $20.83 Pineapple Upsidedown Cake at THClear [3]
[1] https://weedmaps.com/dispensaries/electric-lettuce-northeast...
[2] https://weedmaps.com/dispensaries/floyd-s-fine-cannabis-on-w...
[3] https://weedmaps.com/dispensaries/thclear-lebanon/menu/park-...
Once the federal level stuff gets sorted out, you think ma and pop growers will be able to compete with big tobacco or some other outfit? This is a dependency-forming market opportunity. It's likely a 10s of billions market, maybe hundreds. Alcohol is 287 billion per year.
I guess the only good news is that cannabis is a lot easier to self-produce than tobacco.
And once they figure out how to get nicotine into cannabis...
Grey market at scale is a pain in the ass, and risky. You need people to buy pounds at a time, in cash. A big bag for a big bag.
You basically need to set up a supply chain that you can trust... this is why the DEA a lot of the time finds weapons with drugs.
So yea... growing for friends is easy... growing to make a living, is a real pain in the ass.
Fact #2: The thing that made cannabis expensive was it's illegality. The difficulty in growing cannabis was that it had to be done in secret, and you could go to jail if you got caught.
Now if you put these facts together, you realize that legalization means there's no more justification for ridiculous prices on a plant that's easy to grow. The only winners in the "green rush" are the established dispensaries, and the prices will continue to drop as more states legalize marijuana.
The major black market producers are against legalization because they know it destroys their profits. An odd case where cops, criminals and pharmaceutical companies all share a common goal.
For pharma and criminals it’s the exact same reason; the laws create an economic moat.
Lots of farmers switched to other more stable crops. The big players stayed and the small farmers producing high quality fruit continued.
The market stabilizing. Interesting times.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-04-21-mn-61072-...
[edited to add: see also: https://homeguides.sfgate.com/interesting-chandler-strawberr... -- but there are a lot of astroturf pieces out there also]
Camarosa ships well (high firmness), but the taste really isn't there.
That replacement was more of a circa-2000 thing. Perhaps the further decline since then has been due to relocation of berry production even farther away from U.S. markets (e.g., in Mexico or Central America).
You can still get the other varieties from local producers, at least where I live in southern California. The taste difference is enormous, it's worth going to a farmer's market just for the berries.
Same kind of thing has happened with tomatoes.
We'll buy a pint of massive, red, perfect looking berries that have zero flavor before we'll buy a smaller, dented berry that has the best flavor on the planet. Add to that the berries tend to be picked green and shipped long distances and you have the perfect maelstrom for the next 'red delicious' debacle.
They buy on size and appearance signals that, within familiar varieties, correlate very strongly with taste, because you can't taste offerings in the store to choose which to buy.
This is then exploited by the commercial supply chain in a way which proves Goodhart’s Law.
That's a very interesting example of Goodhart's Law in action, and one that broadens the circumstances when I think about it applying. Thanks.
I think people don't really taste with any attention at all. They eat in a rush, preoccupied, and the ingredients may be mashed together into some mix. As long as something isn't incredibly off, they'll not consider it a "lesser" taste, this is just how a strawberry tastes.
...until you take the time to demonstrate the vastly superior taste.
https://strawberryplants.org/japanese-strawberry-growing-sec...
The Mexican cartels have been squeezing avocado farmers, there is an episode on Rotten (Netflix, I think) about it. Any price swinging makes me wonder how the cartels may have been involved.
I once went to a cannibas "church" in San Jose, CA, where they told me I could smoke up in their parking lot, directly in view of a residential neighborhood. Another time I called a dispensary to verify that they were open, and a super-stoned person answered the phone and immediately went into a monologue about how to get to the store.
I've never been to a liquor store where the help is visibly drunk or encourages drinking on their property.
alcohol and weed are not directly comparable.
(i would also posit that many servers and bartenders do in fact enjoy the devil's juice on the clock)
Note the emphasis. A lot of people can moderate their drinking to not appear drunk at first glance, or slur their speech when they answer the phone. The same can be said for pot, too.
There's a pretty clear line between too drunk to run a store / bar / whatever, versus sneaking a shot or two on the clock.
Here in NY, we have a different kind of "gray market" that has been filling the vacuum created by a lack of legally sanctioned stores. It started as weed vans all over the city (selling products of questionable quality) and then it was bodegas and smoke shops selling flowers and prerolls on every street corner. Now we have full-blown recreational shops with bright lights and branded packaging selling nothing but weed 24/7, and they are completely illegal.
The first legal stores finally opened up a few days ago.
That said, I must say Delta 8 and 11-Hydroxy-THC are two very different but enjoyable and legal substances in Texas. 6mg of D8 is just enough to take the edge off a day, and a full one will just totally chill you out for movies. Then THCjd, HHC or 11 Hydroxy THC will level you if that's what you want.
Honestly knowing some of the backend of a grow in a medical only state, the grows aren't where the money is.
The article glances over this very quickly, but real money is in the dispensaries.
(this is from a dispensary angle)
> Carl Giannone, the co-founder of cannabis company Trade Roots in Massachusetts, said an eighth of an ounce used to reliably sell for $55. Now he has to price it near $40.
> “And the scary part is that product that’s selling for $40, I can buy from a large wholesaler for $7.50,” he said.
> “The green rush has never happened,” Luchini said.
Nothing like a 533% markup.
Or alcohol, where a $10 wholesale bottle of whiskey will sell for > $100 (20+ shots at $5/shot).
Retail is mostly overhead, not product. Something like cannabis, which is cash only and requires extra security, is actually fairly within norms.
Yep, and you will see distillate used for things like edibles/drinks/vapes.
This has two problems (in my mind), but both the same cause...consumers are picky.
First issue is most states require the date of extraction to be listed on the product packaging. If they see a really old date, they get sketchy about it. (ex: I have recently got some R&D stuff from a grow, and the extraction date was listed as February 2022 and that set off alarm bells in my head, even though it's perfectly fine like you mentioned.)
The second is a group of issues in consumers minds and they are all closely related. Distillate doesn't have all the terpenes the other forms do (and therefore removes the 'strain specific' effects that some go after), so you lose out on the entourage effect[0]. Some grows will start re-adding the terpenes to distillate using cheaper plant based (tree in some cases) terpenes and again, people are picky and this turns them off of the product.
As long as it is stored well, I don't think this is as major of a concern as you're making it out to be.
Now it seems like at least half of them closed down, a lot of the chains opened too many locations. This was supposed to bring in all this tax money that was going to fix the roads and the schools and who knows what else.
I just don't know why it was going to be such a big deal to have legal places to buy when everyone that smokes already 'knows a guy' or three.
CBD (particularly the terpene infused ones) fill that gap.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/vaping-cannabis-oi... [2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/xweejk/cannabis-vapes-pens-b...
Edit: Should also mention there's a market for the effects of weed, without the 'high'.
I also use it when I get dental procedures, because it's not intoxicating like Ativan or similar.
Or maybe just the greenhouses and gardening equipment, since hydroponic has a limited set of vegetables/plants that it can grow.
https://svaec.ifas.ufl.edu/media/svaecifasufledu/docs/pdf/ag...
The theory is the same regardless of the plant species, but irrigation equipment and consumables targeting the cannabis industry tend to be quite expensive, sometimes because the higher-value crop justified that, sometimes for no good reason. The lighting requirements for cannabis are also unusual (very high PPFD, controlled photoperiod for non-autoflowering strains), so the greenhouses would need some reconfiguration. So the capital investment doesn't go to zero, but it's a big markdown.
A lot of graduates of top agronomy and horticulture programs (Cornell, etc.) also seem to have ended up in cannabis, I assume because the money was good. It will probably be better for society overall if this crash redirects their efforts to the food supply, though sad for them personally--vegetable growers are paid quite badly, even by the already dismal standards of the life sciences.
https://www.leafly.com/news/cannabis-101/where-did-the-word-...
Socially its also not up to the level of alcohol is even in California. Every work event I have for instance has a selection of beers and wines and hard kombucha for us, but never any weed even if its legal for all of us, a few of us do use it, and our company does not care that we do it or not. One can argue "well a whole joint is a lot for most people" but I counter with the fact that you do not need to necessarily imbibe to the point of total impairment just like how you would not polish an entire bottle of scotch at the work event. They even sell seltzers with just a touch of thc in them these days, that would certainly be healthier than a white claw.
That being said, smoking weed has been normalized in california for perhaps over 50 years and you still don't yet see these drinks offered to people at social events really even though there will always be a ton of booze. Maybe it would take establishments actually getting licenses to serve and consume THC to really change how our culture looks at this stuff in contrast to alcohol.
Do you expect them to have a selection of cigars and cigarettes too?
Huh, never mind, I guess HN doesn’t support emojis