Sully has been tracking the price of good pot, and it’s clocking in between $250-500.
If pot is legalized and farmed (rather than “grown” as a cottage industry), I’d imagine that price will go down by a factor of as much as 1000. Once a bunch of Dakota farmers plant a few quarters (160 acres) of weed, the unit of measure will be the bale, not the bag. And I doubt that quality will go down much. Hydroponic vegetables just aren’t as good as those grown outdoors, and with a real market for pot, the fertilizer and seed companies will come up with strains and chemicals matched to growing conditions.
We could be the world’s reefer basket, instead we’re putting millions of people in jail.
spudvol
“Dude!”
Sincerely,
F. Bandito
CEO, Frito-Lay
p.a.
To paraphrase Darth Vader, ‘Don’t be too proud of this Atria-ogical wonder of yours…’ The image of Jeffersonian family farmers growing weed is quaint, but highly unlikely. Once Big Agra (Big Ganja?) is involved, it will all turn to dirt(weed).
PaulW
Harry J. Anslinger. Read about the ancedotal and questionable testimony he provided back in the 1930s as part of the push to make hemp and marijuana illegal. Also consider that he blocked the American Medical Association from testifying back then, and convincing Congress that the AMA sided with him when instead the AMA was going to counter most of what Anslinger said.
Rook
It is only a matter of time before the economic benefits of Marijuana start to knock on the thick skulls of the Godless Capitalists of America. Then look out world, America will have a new export product! Hallelujah! Peace Out Man, Peace Out!
mistermix
@p.a.: We’re not talking about difficult crop to grow – it’s a fucking weed, dude, more like wheat or corn than tomatoes or asparagus.
Thomas
I could not agree more. I grew up on a farm in Oklahoma. This is a very conservative state but if its legalized, and the commodity price is decent (only has to be at or near wheat to be decent around here) we’ll grow it and do so in huge quantities. Anyone who makes money from the illicit trade of marijuana should be more afraid of legalization than anything law enforcement has done.
djheru
1. Yay! Just what I was hoping for – Weed brought to you by Monsanto. Just don’t try to sow your own seeds.
2. Although it is a weed, in order to maximize the psychoactive compound, a great deal of care is required. If you just throw a bunch of seeds on the ground, you’re going to get the weed that they were smoking back in the 50’s and 60’s. Modern commercial pot requires removing the male plants in order to keep the buds (reproductive organs of the female plants) from producing seeds, and diverting the nutrients away from that sweet, sweet resin. Also, the plant requires different fertilizer formulations during different parts of the growing cycle.
Barring some major advancements in Frankenweed technology, we’ll never be able to grow good pot on the scale that we grow produce. That’s why the best weed is grown indoors either hydroponically, or (preferably) organically with strict controls on light intensity, CO2 and fertilizer.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Medical mj here (south coast Oregon) is around $100 an oz, $200 for the street oz. Top notch stuff, many strains, flavors galore.
If the government can sin tax it, it will hit it hard like they do liquor and cigs. Either way, I really don’t expect the price to drop much around here.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@PaulW:
I have that material on hand in a counterculture book, called Pot Art, that was put together in ’69/’70. Lots of great stuff, medical reports, recipes, growing instructions, news articles and such. It has tons of info on Anslinger and his personal jihad against pot, lengthy articles and such. The Army ‘testing’ of pot on 35 black men was an eye opener for a results oriented testing regimen.
They got what they wanted.
mistermix
@djheru: Hate on Monsanto all you want, but their crop scientists maximize the moneymaking component of every crop grown on farms. If it’s THC that sells, then there’s going to be a hell of a lot of THC in Monsanto Roundup-resistant weed. And they’ll tune their herbicides and put out an application schedule so the GPS-controlled sprayers apply just the right amount at just the right time. Then John Deere will produce a head for their combines that will harvest the buds as gently as possible with machinery, and they’ll modify the thresher to remove stems and seeds, and there will be so much pot the elevators will be overflowing.
jayboat
@mistermix:
Cool, man. Pass the bong.
beltane
There would still be some very expensive herb around (but not $300 an ounce), similar to ultra high-end varieties of coffee and tea. There would also be a thriving seed exchange for amateur growers. One would think the legalization of the hemp plant itself would be the really big economic benefit to come out of legalizing cannabis.
Jude
@djheru:
This.
The quality of the weed today is a direct result of government sanction. If you’re growing acres of the stuff, you can’t stop it from having all the plant-sex it wants, and then you’re back to stems, leaves, and sticks. It’s only because of the lonely, horny female plant parts that you have finger-sized buds.
Not that I know anything about that.
spudvol
It will shake(heh) out just like the beer industry- Monsanto/ADM = “Budweiser” pot
Micro-growers = good pot.
beltane
@Odie Hugh Manatee: The price may not come down dramatically but people would be able to grow it themselves if they are good at this sort of thing. I have a large medicinal herb/rose garden, that is just waiting to be made complete. It may have to wait many years, but the minute the all-clear is sounded I will know exactly what to do.
djheru
@mistermix: I’m sure you are correct, but the DFH in me just hates to see that happen. Back in the day
when I was growingwhen my friend was growing, I remember reading a Hight Times article about somebody who added a crushed up birth control pill to their hydroponic solution during flowering, and saw a massive explosion of growth. It just doesn’t sit right with me on an emotional level. Just like boones farm wine and budweiser.New Yorker
His original link said it was essentially the same price as gold per ounce. I was like, “Wait, what? If a lid of grass had gone for $1300 when I was in college, I would have been dead broke by the end of the first month of a term….”
magurakurin
Asthma prevents me from ever starting up again, but I actually lamented the eventual dominance of Indica weed. The hydro-franken weed was always too much “sleeper” pot for my taste. I actually really enjoyed smoking Colombian Gold and Panama Red. Yes, it had seeds, yes people would now deride it as “dirt weed,” but that would be unfair. That Sativa pot was great. That weed really got you ‘high’. We’d get all amped up and go strolling about the city or start up games of frisbee. Much nicer than laying on the couch all zoned out on that skunk weed grown in water inside. You could roll up big fat joints and share with your friends, because it wasn’t priced so high and it was drier and better for joints. At a party everybody would bust out their baggies and start rolling up doobies and then just start passing them around. Smoking roaches is a lost art, I’d say. I quit in the 90’s, but around that time I remember being very turned off by the way the culture had changed. Weed was expensive, like coke, and people would sneak away to take a hit or two on a bowl. It seemed that the sharing and group partying was slowing ebbing away. A lot changed when pot went from 40 dollars an ounce to 300. And not for the better in my mind.
I would welcome the return of outdoor grown, large sized sativa plants, seeds and all. Not that I would smoke it again, just that I think that pot was better in certain ways. Certainly it wasn’t as strong as now, but the high was better.
El Cid
I hope that no one in US power seriously listens to nitwit right wing Mexican President Calderon with his astoundingly failed strategy to control narco-trafficking, and who quashed a Mexican effort to decriminalize narcotics so as to reduce the problems of illegal narco-trafficking within Mexico while the major source of narco-trafficking and violence, the US population addicted to illegal drugs, gets a chance to consider saving their southern neighbor from the violence we purchase.
Jay C
Dakota farmers? IIRC, the Happy Hemp likes hot, preferably hot and humid climes to generate the protective resin-laden hairs around its (hopefully lack-of-) seeds. Wouldn’t Texas (or Florida) be a better garden-spot for cannabis ranching?
aimai
@magurakurin:
I’m sorry, but was this supposed to be a parody of band talk–you know “once they were all sincere and stuff but now they just sold out for the money at the big venues?”
aimai
Odie Hugh Manatee
@beltane:
Same here…lol! I have the gear on hand but I have a legal grower (gave him my grower card for MM) right now. I got a good set of lights (HP sodium for bud, quartz-halogen for veg cycle, tracks, ballasts, timers) and plenty of other goodies I have collected over the years. I could now but I have no need to, not for the price I get it.
I also have plenty of good seeds stored in a cool, dry place. :)
beltane
@Jay C: Indica is native to Afghanistan and does not really thrive in the tropics. As with so many other crops, California probably has the ideal climate for cannabis.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@mistermix:
I used to work for Monsanto back in the 90s. It was a great company to be an employee of – wonderful, European style benefits. I did some work with the Ag business. I was strongly against the company position on labeling and technology like the “terminator” gene and was able to state my opposition without fear of being fired.
Legalize
If teh grass is legalized it will come with a highly expensive and time-consuming licensing process that only Dole and Tropicana will be able to afford. We’ll still put plenty of people in jail for growing weed without a license.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@beltane:
I have a friend who moved to Barcelona and he’s able to grow two plants legally on the balcony of his apartment. I visited for two weeks for his wedding and on the first day he handed me a stuffed hitter box to keep in my jacket as he took me and some other friends sightseeing.
Man that was an awesome trip. The Catalans make these sandwiches with their special ham and potato that goes great with beer (Estrella is yummy) and bud.
daveNYC
Just need to hire a bunch of peeps to ‘detassle’ the male plants. Big-agra does that all the time for the seed corn fields.
Legal pot would probably go the same way that tomatos have gone. Hydro grown generic weed for mass consumption with smaller farms doing what would be considered heirloom or niche type bud. There’d also be a market for organice weed.
John S.
Sometimes,this country is too stupid for its own good.geg6
All those here saying that it would be impossible to recreate or improve indoor hydroponic weed in more traditional outdoor agricultural settings have never stepped foot on a modern farm or spent time at a large agricultural research facility at a university. This would be a no brainer for these people.
Currently in my area, pretty much any weed available goes for about $200/oz and there is no choice about what you get. It may be awesome or it might be dirt; you pay the cash and hope for the best. And at election time, you can’t get it at all because the legal ptb like to pump up their l&o bonafides by making high profile busts of users, growers, and dealers alike. Forget real crime, bust a guy with a quarter ounce and you make the 11 o’clock news and all the fundies and bitter senior citizens flock to the polls to reward you for slapping DFHs, incarcerating more minorities, and moralizing against the godless drug addicts.
Personally, I’ve grown it indoors (with massive amounts of technology) and outdoors (with massive amounts manual labor). There is little difference in quality if you know what you’re doing. And the idea that you need some special climate is ridiculous. Some of the best weed I’ve ever gotten was grown in the hollers of Kentucky and West Virginia, climates that are only slightly different than what we have here in Western PA. I know of struggling family farms here that would get a great boost from being able to cultivate a fairly easy to grow crop like pot and would jump into it in a minute should they get the chance. And plenty of consumers who would jump at the chance to buy local at a reasonable price, much as they do tomatoes and apples at the local farmers market.
monkeyboy
I remember when living in LA the news would sometimes report the marijuana pollen count.
To grow a field of seedless pot I think a grower would start by cloning small female plants in a greenhouse and then transplant them out doors. If there are nearby male plants then some will be pollinated which screws up the reason for seedless – easier to process and no energy devoted to developing seeds.
What is “nearby” for male plants? That LA could report marijuana pollen counts says that its pollen can easily travel 10s of miles though I have no idea of how this relates to a level of pollen density that would cause problems.
low-tech cyclist
I still think we should see what happens first if we just completely legalize possession, while having commerce in the weed continue to be illegal.
I’d be willing to bet that the price would go way, way down, and pretty much everyone who wanted dope could get it.
The big corporate interests would have to respect the ban on buying and selling, but you’d get people selling to each other all the time, just the way people play poker for money all the time despite its technical illegality, and nobody would bother them.
Seriously, if we’re going to legalize dope, let’s at least see how it works without the involvement of agribusiness and other large corporate interests. If it turns out that too many people can’t get decent-quality dope without their involvement, we can always legalize commerce in dope then. But once you let them in, you can’t get them out again – so why not try it without them first?
John
Hat tip to Sully indeed, but the crowd-sourcing site it here:
http://www.priceofweed.com/
Those with appropriate knowledge may want to post.
liberal
In terms of harm minimization, it might be a good idea to legalize marijuana cultivation and use, but have stiff penalties for selling it.
That way, no profit incentive; and the stuff is so cheap it’s hard to believe that black marketers would step in to fill the void.
liberal
@Jay C:
IIRC, perhaps hot, but not too humid.
Scott P.
And we could also be the world’s human organ basket if we wanted to. After all, we have prisons filled to capacity, not to mention all the homeless out there. But those moral scolds out there insist on not exploiting this opportunity.
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
According to my cousins in Humbolt Co. in CA (the Columbia of pot), the pot growers there are terrified of legalization.
Bnut
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“All those here saying that it would be impossible to recreate or improve indoor hydroponic weed in more traditional outdoor agricultural settings have never stepped foot on a modern farm or spent time at a large agricultural research facility at a university. ”
I’m wondering how long the Ph.D students at that university would take to complete their thesis on growing pot.
Also, for amusement, let’s speculate on who would endow or what would the name be of the first pot research institute at a University. Ideas?
Wodwose
Like Greg Proops said: we can’t legalize marijuana. If we did that, then people would smoke it.
Martin
If Prop 19 passes, we’ve got a little plot, precisely the size allowed by law, that my son is going to turn into his own horticultural college fund.
Wife already has an eager group of buyers at the elementary school drop-off each morning. All those single moms with lots of discretionary money to burn.
Prices might drop to $20/oz, but not until he’s in college, paying his own way.
Roger Moore
@Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan:
The Cheech Marin Cannabis Institute at UC Davis.
ornery curmudgeon
@Scott P.: Yes, because pot smoking is just like harvesting organs from prisoners!
Wow, good head on your shoulders, Scott, maybe we could even find a buyer for it … for a rich man’s ashtray if nothing else.
Martin
@geg6:
A lot of those farms already grow the stuff off in a little noticed corner or inside. Not much, because you don’t need much to make mortgage, but it’s a common fallback crop. If the main crop comes in, they destroy the plants rather than risk any legal trouble, if the main crop gets wiped out due to pests/weather/etc. then they risk getting arrested in order to keep the farm.
NonyNony
@Martin:
How long until he gets to college?
If legalization goes through, you should plan for the price of pot to equalize with the price of tobacco pretty damn quickly. Within a year, maybe two. No less than five years at any rate. And plan on the government taking at least as much in taxes from the retail price, because they will. Maybe even double the tax amount.
You better believe that the tobacco companies have contingency plans drawn up for how they’re going to enter the market once legalization becomes an inevitable reality. And the government is going to do its damndest to make sure that selling the stuff isn’t any easier than selling tobacco – so they can get their tax money. “Think of the children” will be the excuse, but the reason will be to ensure they’re getting the taxes from it.
eemom
This thread is giving me the munchies.
Cris
…..
what?
There are stiff penalties for selling it, but the stuff is cheap.
Because… people who cultivate it are giving it away free?
Either I don’t understand what you’re saying, or you haven’t thought this through. Maybe both.
Cris
Why? Other than the delivery mechanism, the two drugs don’t have much in common.
Death Panel Truck
Yeah. And then John Deere could invent the Marijuana Harvester – call it the DopeStar 6000. That way, you could farm more than just a few measly quarter-sections. You could grow it in irrigated circles, like we do with winter wheat here in eastern Washington.
mac
I predict a thriving exchange in good seeds and bragging rights.
Farmer’s markets will never be the same.
Cris
And we’ll see the grooviest crop circles on the planet.
Death Panel Truck
@Cris: True dat!
Loneoak
@Roger Moore:
Yeah, you don’t understand the UC system, man. UC Santa Cruz all the way. We do host the Grateful Dead Archive, after all. And Rolling Stone called us the “highest campus on Earth” a few years back in a feature.
I really don’t understand the people claiming that you will get good weed from Monsanto. You’ll get *a lot* of weed from agribusiness. But agribusiness can’t grow a delicious heirloom tomato. It’s contrary to the economics of massive agriculture.
My pet economic theory: Prohibition killed the small breweries of America, and only the Coors, Anheisers, and Buschs survived. So we had shitty beer for generations until the new microbrewers, all blessings upon them, made a major economic and cultural innovation in American inebriation. But with marijuana, prohibition has caused major innovations in quality and technique, resulting in a radically better product. Being forced to go small, indoor, and highly technologized, resulted in precise control of the plant and the world’s best agricultural genetics research. My prediction is that we will not go back to dirt weed because consumers have come to expect the good stuff. It’s price will go down, but the people who smoke and grow it now during prohibition will still be willing to pay for the good stuff and will bother with Monsanto weed.
Norwegian Shooter
Hey, I’m with you dude, but you can’t say weed laws even in combination with 3 strikes laws are putting millions of people in jail. The entire incarcerated population is around 2.5 million.
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“Yeah, you don’t understand the UC system, man. UC Santa Cruz all the way. We do host the Grateful Dead Archive, after all. And Rolling Stone called us the “highest campus on Earth” a few years back in a feature.”
Naw, UC Davis has the aggies, and they’ll do for weed growing what they did for wine growing in CA.
UC Santa Cruz has good biotech, though, so I’d see the O’Leary-Monsanto Center for Cannabis Engineering as a prospect for youse.
Cris
@Loneoak: I think you’re quite right, and hopefully legalization will follow the beer model.
I don’t object to big corporations flooding the market with swill (schwag) as long as the home brewer (grower) and the microbrewery (small farm) are still allowed to provide for the higher end of the market.
What I’d hate to see is a regulatory regimen so exacting that it’s impossible for anybody but agribiz to grow.
WayneL
Uh, barely on the subject, did anyone read where former NFL QB Chris Simms was busted for pot? The arresting officer said he approached the vehicle and smelled marijuana. He got a headache and his tongue went numb. Huh? Simms was not charged with dusting his pot with coke or novacaine.
Nobody is ever dubious of cops, are they?
More on the subject, if they grow pot on farms, will anyone ever steal another watermelon?
jake the snake
Since mj is currently the #1 cash crop in my home state of Kentucky, legalization would crash its economy.
All those guys who hide pot plants in the rows of corn would have to turn to cooking meth. And we already have plenty of meth labs now. Just about every week some dumbass burns down his house, usually with his kids in it.
Cris
@jake the snake: Can’t you people plant some opium poppies?
JLMerkle
Actually the reason that hydroponic, greenhouse grown weed is so expensive is because it is stronger. Not allowing male and female plants to interact increases the amount of THC that the plant excretes thus creating stronger weed. There will still be a market for the super kind bud even if it becomes legal to grow and purchase. It’s like comparing Budwiser to Sam Adams, there will always be those who will pay more for better quality, or higher potency.
mclaren
@jake the snake:
Exactamundo. Moreover, we need all those millions of people in prison so America can compete with third world countries in the global labor market.
Q: How do you compete with some Chinese peasant willing to do call center work for 50 cents an hour?
A: Install call centers in those prisons and pay the inmates 40 cents an hour!
The prison-industrial complex: America’s engine in the global economic race to the bottom!
New Yorker
I don’t know about the name, but I’d make an annual contribution to the Ag school at my alma mater, Cornell, to help them perfect bud-growing and breeding techniques.
electricgrendel
Actually- growing a bunch of weed outside in a field is pretty much guaranteed to produce ditch weed. The good stuff is labor intensive. You gotta separate the plants to prevent the seed forming process. Once it starts growing seeds, etc. (and you should refer to your end of century gangster rap for confirmation of this) it’s of diminished quality. Don’t expect good weed to be grown in fields. That’s some donkey stomp waiting to happen. You gotta separate the plants and let them plants develop those nice sticky crystal and hair laden buds for quality. Growing it out on a quarter field of some farm in SD will be okay for the stuff you put in brownies and other products. But for primo smoking bud, it’s going to be a hot house effort.
….or so I’m told. >.>
mclaren
In the long run, marijuana could only be nationally legalized by a joint session of congress.
Corner Stone
This whole thread makes me want to watch the Katt Williams stand up The Pimp Chronicles again tonight on Netflix.
The part where he’s talking about how weed is so much stronger these days and dealers give it the wacked names.
This shit right here? This shit right here? It’s called DEATH.
Wait, I hit it and die?? I got shit to do today!
No, not DEATH, DEAF. You hit it and can’t hear shit!
Brachiator
@mistermix:
Already being farmed.
The markets already set the price for marijuana. Do a google search for marijuana price index and its variants. The price probably would not drop that much. The price of booze didn’t drop by a factor of 1,000 when Prohibition ended. And just as people are willing to pay for premium scotch, they will also pay for premium weed.
John - A Motley Moose
@liberal:
It’s not likely to happen that way. How will the government make any money off it?
daveNYC
The barriers for entry into farming weed are much lower than for making booze. Twelve years lower in the case of quasi-acceptable scotch.
Brachiator
@daveNYC:
RE: And just as people are willing to pay for premium scotch, they will also pay for premium weed.
Really not relevant. I’m not talking about quasi-acceptable scotch, no more than I am talking about cheap wine.
People pay through the nose for premium liquor. Hell, people pay through the nose for premium coffee. Much would be the same case with premium weed.
sacman701
Assuming it were legalized nationally, I’d be surprised if we ended up with more acres devoted to pot production than tobacco production. Tobacco is confined mostly to NC (with a little spillover into VA and SC) and KY, and with pot you’d have fewer users who don’t smoke as much. I don’t think anyone smokes 2 packs of joints a day.
JWL
Jim Stafford performed a song on national TV (circa 1975), about two good ol’ boys whose pot farm gets busted by the local sheriff. The sheriff confiscates the crop, but doesn’t arrest them, instead issuing a stern warning to them to mend their ways. They express their gratitude, and wave goodbye to him while sitting on grain bags full of marijuana seeds.
I only heard that song once, yet to this day it sums up the idiocy of America’s modern day Prohibition. At that point in time, I naively assumed it would be (at least) de-criminalized within a few short years. Suffice to say, I did not anticipate the election of Ronald Reagan.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@JWL:
Wildwood Weed was one of my high time favorites from the 70’s. I probably heard it on the radio at least a couple thousand times.
Wildwood flower grew wild on the farm
And we never knowed what it was called
Some said it was a flower and some said it was a weed
I didn’t give it much thought
One day I was out there talkin’ to my brother
And I reached down for a weed to chew on
Things got fuzzy and things got blurry
And then ev’rything was gone
Didn’t know what happened but I knew it beat the hell
Out of sniffing burlap
I come to and my brother was there and he said,
“What’s wrong with your eyes?”
I said “I don’t know, I was chewin’ on the weed”
He said, “Let me give it a try”
We spent the rest of that day and most of that night tryin’
To find my brother Bill
Caught up with him about six o’clock the next mornin’
Naked, singing on the windmill
He said he flew up there
I had to fly up and get him down
He was about half crazy
The very next day we picked a bunch of them weeds
And put ’em in the sun to dry
Then we mashed ’em up and we cleaned ’em off
Put ’em in the corn cob pot
Smokin’ them wildwood flowers got to be a habit
We never seen no harm
We thought it was kind-a handy
Take a trip and never leave the farm
Big ‘ole puff of that wildwood weed next thing you know
You’re just wand’ring ’round behind the little animals
All good things got to come to an end
It’s the same with the wildwood weeds
One day this feller from Washington come by
And spied one and turned white as a sheet
And they dug and they burned
And they burned and they dug and they killed
All our cute little weeds and then they drove away
We just smiled and waved sittin’ ther on that sack o’ seeds
“Y’all come back now, y’hear!”
An oldie but goodie.
Richard W. Crews
It will be a wonderful chaos. No way will there ever be significant tax revenue raised; the provenance will not be provable. It will open pot use to a certain demographic – the small subset that is adventurous/curious yet still roped in by fear/respect of the law. Has to be A SMALL SET OF FOLKS.
It would be different if it was Cocaine. Cocaine is a straight drug in that it reinforces the capitalist/yuppie/gimme drives, and if widely available many very normal people would ride it to ruin.
Not so with pot.
Kat
@New Yorker: His original link said it was essentially the same price as gold per ounce. I was like, “Wait, what? If a lid of grass had gone for $1300 when I was in college, I would have been dead broke by the end of the first month of a term….”
I was about to say, this really must be one helluva depression, because premium Oregon indica was going for $400 an ounce way back in 1987 — in Mississippi !
.