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How the marijuana ‘green rush’ fell apart

washingtonpost.com

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Re: How the marijuana ‘green rush’ fell apart

#141

Post by GordonS »

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…

> and those are usually just proxies for the cannabinoid ratios (with sativa usually being higher THC etc and indica higher CBD etc.)

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.

Re: How the marijuana ‘green rush’ fell apart

#142

Post by Retric »

kybernetyk wrote: post #132
lelanthran wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Seems like it would fall under the same heading. Attraction to male sexual characteristics, female sexual characteristics, either, both, nothing, or neither?

I am not saying it fits, but the edge cases in biology get really strange and eventually you need new terms for clarity. Chimera for example can contain one set of male cells and one set of female cells. So you start off with clear separation XX, XY then notice an outlier XXY etc, and suddenly need a new notation XX:XY.

Re: How the marijuana ‘green rush’ fell apart

#143

Post by draw_down »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #96
latchkey wrote: post #3

I spent about 4 years actively growing weed before it was "legal." in San Francisco. 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…

And the revolution will be corporatized. 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 f…

[dead]

Re: How the marijuana ‘green rush’ fell apart

#145

Post by dieselgate »

jjulius wrote: post #109
pixl97 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>I mean $100 for 2 ounces of the marijuana plant in particular isn't cheap at all. Where are prices so low that $100 for 2 ounces "isn't cheap at all"?

It’s cheap but not that cheap depending on quality. “Cheap quality” deals around WA and OR can be as low as $35/oz

Re: How the marijuana ‘green rush’ fell apart

#146

Post by sethammons »

chupchap wrote: post #74
greazy wrote: post #2

This reminds me of the strawberry growers here in Australia, QLD. Many farmers switched to strawberries and the market was flooded for one season. They were literally selling them by the kilo when previously punnets (250g) were 3-5 dollars each. 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…

And that happened with avocados this year

Avocados take 10 years to start producing. Strawberries are available that growing season. Any wild drop in avocado prices I'd imagine would have to be something changing in the economic playing field (unless it is just a ten year delay from a jump in tree planting).

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.

Re: How the marijuana ‘green rush’ fell apart

#147

Post by hypertele-Xii »

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…

You can "sip" on a vape regardless of produce potency. Set the temperature to 185°C and suck gently, turning it off as soon as you taste it. Then vibe for a moment and get a feel. Increase temp by +2 degrees and repeat. This precisely avoids getting fucked up from one puff, and allows you to enjoy the gradual intoxication.

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.

Re: How the marijuana ‘green rush’ fell apart

#148

Post by DonHopkins »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #106
DonHopkins wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm in the wine world, so I suppose I have some sour grapes, so to speak. [...] $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.

Did you hear about the viticulturalist whose crop was lost in a drought? He said his whole reason for being was to pay off his raisin debt. (I'm still workshopping this one.)

Oh I heard it through the grape vine, oh and I'm just about to lose my mind.

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...

Re: How the marijuana ‘green rush’ fell apart

#149

Post by mumblemumble »

inDigiNeous wrote: post #134
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…

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…

I would guess that all this focus on strains speaks to the extent to the extent to which pot is just never going to be like wine.

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.

Re: How the marijuana ‘green rush’ fell apart

#150

Post by jefftk »

mind-blight wrote: post #139
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 mill…

On (1) I'm don't see how limiting the number of growers was, or should have been, within OLCC's role. When governments try to match supply to demand this way it generally goes very poorly in the best case (ex: certificate of need requirements for opening hospitals, federal marketing orders limiting production) and runs into regulatory capture in the worst case (ex: increasing the entry requirements for professions to boost wages).

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.

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