What's wrong with saying "tonne" instead of "billion grams"
A metric tonne is a million grams, but yeah "1000 metric tonnes".
What do you do with a billion grams of surplus weed?
141–150 of 227 posts
Re: What do you do with a billion grams of surplus weed?
#142It sounds like Canadian regulators screwed this up pretty royally. The First Nations counterexample is fairly compelling: farmers able to sell directly to consumers from a farmstand.
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.
Re: What do you do with a billion grams of surplus weed?
#143"The business model at that time didn’t demand actual weed sales: selling hype, selling the potential of selling weed, was proving lucrative." Where have we heard that before?
In 2017 a good number of the VCs investing in blockchain in Vancouver, pivoted to investing in weed. I guess their investment thesis was actually "invest in things that can be sold on hype alone."
Re: What do you do with a billion grams of surplus weed?
#144Data from Washington State: https://data.openthc.org/ (a small side project)
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.
Re: What do you do with a billion grams of surplus weed?
#145Weed being legal is cool (and a huge deal and way overdue) but, until I moved to SF, I still bought from a dealer. It was cheaper and I got really high quality stuff, got to give feedback to the guy on the strains, chocolates, etc. Plus my guy would smoke me up for free a good amount of the time and we'd just chill and chat for a bit. Legal weed is wayyyy more expensive in my experience and I dislike the experience.…
Here in the Netherlands tax for weed is really high. 50% if I recall correctly. 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,…
In California, medical marijuana is taxed differently than recreational: if you have a prescription you pay 15% tax, instead of 23-38% tax. The variation in recreational taxes is based on municipality; medical tax is a flat 15% everywhere.
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.
Re: What do you do with a billion grams of surplus weed?
#146A bit off topic, but for the smokers here what are your thoughts on lung cancer and other negatives associated with smoking? I bought a vaporizer but not sure it is actually healthier than smoking joints. Tried edibles but can’t stand the lack of uniformity and time to kick in.
> A bit off topic, but for the smokers here what are your thoughts on lung cancer and other negatives associated with smoking?
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.
Re: What do you do with a billion grams of surplus weed?
#147Many planning failures in the field. 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…
I did the math on this a few years ago and it came out to be less than 10 farms to supply the entire US with weed. 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 m…
I really like this analysis because it's so conservative. Even among regular pot smokers, 1g/day is extremely high! (No pun intended.)
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.
Re: What do you do with a billion grams of surplus weed?
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much easier can it be than literally growing from a plant?
I love when the inexperienced stand up like an expert. 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.
It's not called weed because it's hard to grow.
If you're not a weed snob and just trying to save a few bucks anything that the plant makes will be fine.
Re: What do you do with a billion grams of surplus weed?
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the consequence of the “regulate and tax the hell out of it!” policy that some Americans want to apply to all vices.
But that's what lots of the legalization activists asked for. I heard "just make it legal and you can tax it all you want" for nearly half a century. Well, now they got what they asked for. IIRC, one of the few voices that said "legalize it and don't tax it at all" was Ron Paul. Everyone else was so enthralled with finding a way to get it legal that they really didn't give much thought to how the government could end…
Not sure why you said “but”. Those are the people I’m talking about. They were wrong.
Re: What do you do with a billion grams of surplus weed?
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the consequence of the “regulate and tax the hell out of it!” policy that some Americans want to apply to all vices.
But that's what lots of the legalization activists asked for. I heard "just make it legal and you can tax it all you want" for nearly half a century. Well, now they got what they asked for. IIRC, one of the few voices that said "legalize it and don't tax it at all" was Ron Paul. Everyone else was so enthralled with finding a way to get it legal that they really didn't give much thought to how the government could end…
Taxing is only half of what GP mentioned - regulations can be even more costly and burdensome than taxes if done poorly (and they often are).