How the marijuana ‘green rush’ fell apart • Hacker News Board

Re: How the marijuana ‘green rush’ fell apart

#131

Post by olivermarks » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 8:57 AM UTC

ramesh31 wrote: post #100

manicennui wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/29/us/oklahoma-marijuana-boo...

It's funny that marijuana advocates wasted decades pleading their case under the guise of personal freedom, social equity, compassionate use, and the like. Turns out all it took to convince the right was showing them the money.

@ramesh31 my take on the California commercial weed disaster is the opposite: the greedy supermajority progressives legalized to get more tax revenue to spend on their various pet projects, but their crushing bureaucracy quickly killed the golden goose. The various libertarian weed growers either went back to the black market or left the state.

Re: How the marijuana ‘green rush’ fell apart

#132

Post by kybernetyk » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 9:08 AM UTC

lelanthran wrote: post #125

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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> There are now college professors floating the idea that pedophilia ought to be socially acceptable There might be a nuance that I'm missing; are they talking about the physical act (which should remain as illegal and socially unacceptable as it now is), or the sexual orientation which is typically also labelled the same? Because society has already decided that who a person is sexually attracted to is not a choice,…

Being a pedo is not a sexual orientation. It’s something went really wrong with you territory.

Re: How the marijuana ‘green rush’ fell apart

#133

Post by denkmoon » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 9:11 AM UTC

raspberry1337 wrote: post #126

hilbertseries wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are now college professors floating the idea that pedophilia ought to be socially acceptable - they are just misunderstood people that see beyond age or something like that There have been people floating these ideas for decades. It’s not catching on now.

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Re: How the marijuana ‘green rush’ fell apart

#134

Post by inDigiNeous » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 9:34 AM UTC

extr wrote: post #83

rippercushions wrote: post #16

The cannabis boom seems to have been predicated largely on the assumption that it would resemble the high-end wine market, with expensive vintages, "budtenders", etc that can support lots of boutique farms and retailers. 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…

Great observation. I think people without a ton of experience with weed fail to appreciate just how different it is compared to alcohol. Back when weed was illegal I used to have a joke I would make with dealers. I would ask them what the strain of the weed I was buying, and usually they would tell me it was some Sour Diesel Purple Hurple Haze Hybrid or whatever (they were making it up on the spot most of the time, I…

Maybe it takes some time to get to know the different strains and how they feel. I mean, I cannot tell the difference between different wines because I am not experienced in that, I can mostly say that this is shit wine and this is good wine.

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.

Re: How the marijuana ‘green rush’ fell apart

#135

Post by automatic6131 » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 9:35 AM UTC

ehnto wrote: post #120

rippercushions wrote: post #16

The cannabis boom seems to have been predicated largely on the assumption that it would resemble the high-end wine market, with expensive vintages, "budtenders", etc that can support lots of boutique farms and retailers. 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…

That's what the venture capital involved seemed to expect anyway. There was a VC bubble for the industry, and some really crazy brands were showing up. Brands where you could buy your weed along side an order for a $15,000 dollar leather horse saddle, golden glassware, crystal ash trays or other expensive trinkets. Farm tours and taste testings emulated the wine industry to a tee. They were 100% banking on a premium…

>Surely there was market research showing it might?

Yeah of course, it was done along side the crypto due-diligence

Re: How the marijuana ‘green rush’ fell apart

#136

Post by automatic6131 » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 9:45 AM UTC

asdff wrote: post #50

Animats wrote: post #37

So even in a supply glut, demand doesn't go up much. The supply of potential druggies is limited. That's good news.

I think if people were more open to it culturally it would be used a lot more. I know plenty of my elderly relatives who would benefit switching from opioids to this for their chronic pain, but they grew up being fed lies about the drug that precludes them ever experimenting. 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…

>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

Do you expect them to have a selection of cigars and cigarettes too?

Re: How the marijuana ‘green rush’ fell apart

#137

Post by extr » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 9:46 AM UTC

shlant wrote: post #112

extr wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great observation. I think people without a ton of experience with weed fail to appreciate just how different it is compared to alcohol. Back when weed was illegal I used to have a joke I would make with dealers. I would ask them what the strain of the weed I was buying, and usually they would tell me it was some Sour Diesel Purple Hurple Haze Hybrid or whatever (they were making it up on the spot most of the time, I…

> I personally have never even been able to detect a real difference between sativa and indica, let alone individual strains 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…

It's a great point that the cannabinoid ratio has a dramatic effect on the high. Ever since high CBD:THC oils became available in cartridge form, I personally switched ratios in the 15-25:1 range. This is like 2% THC, but likewise I find I get all the benefits of smoking "regular" weed or high potency carts without feeling uncomfortably high or anxious at any point. You can "sip" it. I think finding your preference along this product dimension will definitely become more of a thing, because the difference is real. And while I don't have a favorite terpene or anything, more differentiation there feels plausible too.

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?

Re: How the marijuana ‘green rush’ fell apart

#138

Post by encryptluks2 » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 9:50 AM UTC

raspberry1337 wrote: post #126

hilbertseries wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are now college professors floating the idea that pedophilia ought to be socially acceptable - they are just misunderstood people that see beyond age or something like that There have been people floating these ideas for decades. It’s not catching on now.

[flagged]

I'd be willing to bet there are a lot more pedo preachers saying this than drag/trans child strip parties.

Re: How the marijuana ‘green rush’ fell apart

#139

Post by mind-blight » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 9:52 AM UTC

alexose wrote: post #11

I live on the Oregon/California border, where a lot of growers spilled over from Humboldt County and elsewhere. I've seen a few ups and downs in the market, but nothing like what happened over the last two years. There was a moment in 2020 when more acres of weed were being grown than alfalfa . Neighbors were signing multi-year contracts to rent out their water rights. And oh, all of the terrible behavior that the ru…

I grew up in Ashland (visiting there right now, in fact) and have family who funded one of the first marijuana companies in the state.

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.

Re: How the marijuana ‘green rush’ fell apart

#140

Post by nibbleshifter » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 9:54 AM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #19

a2tech wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Michigan now that its legal the prices have plummeted. I just saw a place advertising $100 for 2 full ounces for new recreation customers. Thats an insane deal. I'm sure its not the best stuff but its a shocking amount.

I mean $100 for 2 ounces of the marijuana plant in particular isn't cheap at all. There are some 'mild' complications in growing it, but in theory it should end up more like a bulk farming product where we talk about dollars per pound on the retail side, and dollars per ton on the wholesale side.

Where I live 2 ounces would be around 750-900$ (converted roughly to usd).

Its also illegal.