i would encourage all pot smokers to continue doing business with whoever you do it with now if that indeed turns out to be the case. keep it clandestine. keep it tax free.

…keep doing business as it’s being done now, no matter where it’s coming from or how it got there? Call me straight-laced, but I’d me much happier knowing that my pot was coming from some legal local farm than somewhere in Afghanistan or Columbia (two of the top-producing countries), and then smuggled into the country by god-knows-what means.

If you live and California and live next-door to your semi-legal growers, then maybe it’s different. Then again, if you live in California you’ve ruined you state’s finances so completely totally that I think you should be happy to pay some extra taxes to your state.

If a monopoly happens, and it will. I like to use the Major breweries to Microbreweries. Stone IPA is a perfect example, I love that IPA due to its quality. If major breweries kept up with quality and not quantity, I would buy it from them, but they dont, so i wont. The majority might support Buttwiper, I never will.

Bottom-line NorCal farmers are getting greedy if they dont support this. The dispensaries will buy their product. This allows their product to be out there for more people to try, unlike a taco truck that comes around only to certain areas. I see NorCal medication in SoCal all the time.

Its now widespread.

IIRC only something like 10% of all marijuana in the US is imported. The reason is that importing large amounts is difficult, and the quality you get from, say, South America is much lower than what’s made right here at home.

“Then again, if you live in California you’ve ruined you state’s finances so completely totally that I think you should be happy to pay some extra taxes to your state.”

I’VE ruined nothing – I vote no to every single initiative that will cost the state even one measly dollar. My neighbors and the effete assholes in charge bankrupted my state.

Yes, but producing alcohol is hazardous (if distilling) and time consuming. It requires special equipment (a bottleneck that makes it relatively easy to control) and the initial investment is rather large. Furthermore, the ubiquity of legitimate alcohol vendors makes doing so rather unprofitable.

Modern distilling is hardly hazardous if you take some basic precautions (you don’t need open flames anymore and ventilation isn’t a big deal), the equipment can be built easily and the initial investment in an unregulated market where you’re producing the small volumes of liquor comparable to a small pot grower is relatively small.

Heck, you can distill using nothing more than a freezer and some homebrew.

…

My trademark lawyer 20-odd years ago told me the tobacco industry has registered trademarks for pot brands all ready to go for the moment pot became legal.

If you want it to be illegal you are asking your customer base to risk jail for you.

Decriminalization can be an in between but when I lived in Vancouver is still bother me on some level that the cops could start handing out fines again. I could live with that though but the situation in the states in intolerable.

I also would not want to buy from Phillip Morris.

As for those consumers who are concerned about prices, taxes take place at the point of sale. Since there are so many legitimate uses for the equipment used to grow marijuana, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to start taxing potting soil. If I were an enterprising marijuana businessman, I’d be looking into what will inevitably be a lucrative market in selling supplies and plants to home growers, with a knowledgeable staff there to help you figure out the best way to get a crop of Northern Lights in before 4/20/2011.

Seriously, there are so many good reasons to legalize, and so few good reasons for it to remain illegal. These Humboldt County farmers are borrowing trouble from a probably-still-distant future in which national laws have changed. Their business model isn’t in trouble; pot smokers will largely be too lazy to grow their own (it’s easy to grow vegetables too, but most people prefer the grocery store) but informed enough to buy from their local farmers.

Legalize this stuff top to bottom: it’s harmless, and a waste of time to worry about.
And let the cops the preachers and the profit-driven hempsters wail: for wail they will.

Regulation drives up the price, and erects barriers to the entry of new participants in the Markets, and keeps prices higher than they would naturally be:
IMO Prohibition is like “high-proof” Regulation.
And as staggering to the body (politic).

(I’d add that freeing up our prisons/jails of soft-drug offenders is the other point.)

As for growers in Humboldt, Mendo, etc., they need to learn from the Wine and Cheese industries. There are industrial producers out there that make more daily that many countries do annually, yet we consumers still happily pay top-dollar for premium product. This is where they’d need to go. If you’ve had stuff from Humboldt, they’re not far off. :-)

The “reputation” argument is a joke. If a company with as family-friendly a reputation as Disney is willing to release films like “Kill Bill” under subsidiary Miramax then what makes you think that the people who sell “cancer sticks” are above dipping into the weed market once it becomes legal?

I wouldn’t worry- if you can still go to farmers markets to buy organic heirloom tomatoes in the age of the Monsanto corporation then specialty pot growers should be able to survive Philip Morris.

Oh Like does everyone buy their beer from Coors and Miller now that we dont have a prohibition? I guess we forget that there are always local brewers booming in their business for those who prefer a better hand crafted beer :)

It’s not bloody rocket science. When the times change, change your methods to seek your profit. Don’t give up and ruin it for everyone sheesh XD