This could be the first big step in finally destroying the ridiculously evil and massively expensive and destructive bureaucracy know as the War On Drugs. What a God-send that would be. Too bad it wasn't happening 20 years ago when I actually bothered to smoke the stuff...oh well. Viva la change...Doy la bienvenida el cambio.
High finance and corporate pot, California style
by Peter Henderson
Jeff Wilcox, a middle-aged, clean-cut man who dresses in the Bay Area casual business attire of clean jeans, collared shirt and running shoes, may be the face of Marijuana, Inc, the corporatization of cannabis.
He has just persuaded Oakland to legalize industrial-sized marijuana farms, touting a study that promised millions in city taxes and hundreds of high-paying union jobs.
The long-struggling city, which has failed spectacularly to capitalize on the high-tech boom, could be the Silicon Valley of pot, Wilcox told the City Council this week before its historic vote to grant four permits for urban, industrial-size marijuana farms.
But as Wilcox points out, his business model -- a nonprofit -- will be less Google or Apple and more Trader Joe's, a California cut rate gourmet grocery chain. The store's best-known product is $2 per bottle Charles Shaw wine, known affectionately as Two Buck Chuck and considered a great glass of wine for the price.
"The new Two Buck Chuck will be $40 an ounce pot," Wilcox said in an interview, looking forward to a day of full legalization. Boutique growers could produce the high-end stuff in their "gardens," he explained, while he supplied the masses with a clean, controlled, great-value product.
If California legalizes marijuana, the rest of the nation may well follow. One way or the other, cut rate, highly potent California weed is unlikely to stop at the state's borders.
The U.S. state that first allowed sales of medicinal marijuana, in 1996, may take away all restrictions on adult use of the drug in a November vote, giving local governments the option to regulate sales and growing of marijuana.
The magnitude of the experiment is difficult to fathom -- the world's eighth largest economy will tear down barriers to the most used illegal drug in the United States. The state that invented car culture will have open freeways to take the bounty to the rest of the nation, where higher prices -- and the risk of handcuffs -- beckon.
Even the cops who most hate it see legal California marijuana as a different breed of drug -- and a game changer for the country. "The stuff we are getting in California is fricking leading the world," said Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Senior Narcotics Detective Glenn Walsh. "We already send marijuana all over the States, presumably all over the world."
A drug of hippies and cartels, marijuana has become a cultural touchstone. To advocates, it symbolizes counterculture freedom and alternative medicine; to detractors, it is a drug that saps the resolve of hardworking Americans, draws children down a path to other more dangerous drugs and enriches ruthless Mexican cartels.
Economists see a different picture -- a multibillion dollar market about to be unfettered with little sense of how consumers will react. Two rules they expect to apply: competition will lower prices and expand the market; businesses will look for ways to get ahead of the pack.
One recent study predicted California marijuana would underprice high-quality Mexican imports in virtually every city in the United States, even including the costs of smuggling and state taxes.
The reaction of drug cartels behind vast imports into the United States is anybody's guess, from abandoning the field to doubling down in a legal market where they can plow profits into political campaigns for legitimate allies.
But fear of the effects of legal California 'bud' already has made its way to the streets of Tijuana, the Mexican sister city to San Diego and a major gateway of drugs into the United States. "We're screwed," said Juan V., a street dealer in the grimy border city of around 2 million people. "They are going to want us to lower prices," he said. "We'll just have to sell more here."
It's the economy
California's climate is perfect for growing almost anything, but the best marijuana 'grow' is a private world completely divorced from nature that produces a drug with 10 or 15 times the punch as your hippie grandparents' weed.
Mexican drug cartels grow good quality product in California national and state parks, which are the target of frequent police raids and less frequent arrests. Well-heeled consumers buy marijuana "medicine" grown indoors in an environment often devoid of dirt, sun or bugs. In about 10 weeks, a cutting from a mother plant can be grown into a bush of buds, harvested, and sealed in a turkey basting bag, known for its ability to contain the pungent smell of pot.
Big medical marijuana dispensaries offer dozens of types of marijuana, with a spectrum of colors from deep purple to tangerine orange and different tastes to boot. Years and decades of breeding marijuana has produced superior pot, growers say, and once they get a strain right, they stick with it, making cuttings of the perfect bush and then teasing them to the brink of horticultural bliss.
"What you are dealing with is frustrated sex for plants," says Wilcox, explaining how the goal is to grow female plants to the point they are yearning for fertilization, producing a sticky substance full of mind-bending chemical THC.
The process typically begins in a musky smelling basement dripping with tropical heat from high-powered grow lights, which have contributed greatly to fires in Oakland, city officials say. Clippings from the perfect mother plant, known as clones, are brushed in rooting compound. They are then set in a pot of rock wool in a tub that is regularly flooded with nutrient-enriched water.
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