What do you do with a billion grams of surplus weed?

https://thewalrus.ca/what-do-you-do-with-a-billion-grams-of-surplus-weed/

by pseudolus • 5 years ago

97 217 5 years ago

codevark• 5 years ago

Which is why there should never be a "cannabis industry". We created a food industry that produces sub-standard food and much of it goes to waste. Applying the same obviously flawed principles to cannabis is another mistake. Pot should be legal to grow/possess/use, but not to buy or sell. There's no point. It's so easy to grow. Just plant some in your backyard and smoke it. Or give it away. That's what it's for.

QuercusMax• 5 years ago

There needs to be SOME kind of market. Not everybody has the time, space, inclination, or knowhow to do a good job of cultivation, and not everybody has friends who grow.

You could make exactly the same arguments about alcohol. I'm an enthusiastic homebrewer, but I wouldn't say that everybody should brew their own.

standardUser• 5 years ago

I don't have a backyard.

newsclues• 5 years ago

Process it into commodity cannabis compounds (THC, CDB, etc) and lower the prices to fair and reasonable.

The Canadian cannabis market is regulated by idiots for the benefit of companies, and the consumers are taken advantage of.

mandmandam3• 5 years ago

It seems that they've managed to set things up in such a way that it's actually more profitable to destroy the cannabis than process it.

Reminds me of the neoliberal take on housing and healthcare.

fuzzfactor2• 5 years ago

Not just housing but even more so commercial and industrial facilities where property taxes give great incentive for scorched-earth demolition in response to only nominal downturns in occupancy or utilization.

Always with less than one-year deadlines before reassessment since these are recurring taxes, one of their most destructive features.

Regardless of how many nearby citizens are homeless, jobless, and/or capable of operating a prosperous small cannabis farm if they could freely grow & sell their fresh product at the local farmers' market with no different regulation or taxes than the other crops.

shawnz• 5 years ago

One problem with processing it is that there are very low limits on dosages of edibles in Canada (currently 10mg THC per serving). I think lifting this absurd restriction would help enable those ideas.

See here https://www.change.org/p/remove-the-10mg-thc-limit-on-edible...

mandmandam3• 5 years ago

So wait, they're holding (and destroying!) massive quantities to keep the price of medical marijuana "34% higher" than the black market price, then acting surprised that their product isn't moving?

Forced, in most cases, to sell to a provincial wholesaler along with everyone else in the sector

Okay I know nothing about Canada's cannabis market, but who thought that could possibly be a good idea?

jacquesm• 5 years ago

Canada has a ton of such cartels, the egg board, the milk board, the LCBO and so on.

monkeybutton• 5 years ago

Maple syrup too! https://www.vpr.org/vpr-news/2018-03-08/quebecs-legal-maple-...

Spooky23• 5 years ago

Onions too. They used some trade negotiations to put a northeast US farmers out of business for certain onions, which now sell for retail at less than production price.

WhyNotHugo2• 5 years ago

This is really the worst kind of shit. Destroy food so they can charge more, while so many starving people could use that food.

I've heard it a million times, but it'll never stop shocking me to here about this idea: Keeping market value up is more important than reducing starvation.

SECProto6• 5 years ago

And most of us are very happy to support supply management! "Cartel" has very negative connotations.

The issues in this article are also entirely different.

edit: you forgot to mention our nefarious healthcare cartel!

JeremyBanks• 5 years ago

You're misreading. They're not being ordered to destroy crops in order to support the medical marijuana price. They're destroying crops because there was a bubble and they've created way too much supply.

Cannabis stocks were a fad for a while, and I know lots of people who invested in them blindly. The number of legal cannabis retailers is exploding. I live in a mid sized town and there are three more opening this month, and the ones I see always have customers.

The system's hardly failing, some speculators just played themselves.

mandmandam3• 5 years ago

they're not being ordered to destroy crops in order to support the medical marijuana price.

I didn't say, or suggest, that anyone was ordered to destroy crops?

They created too much supply, yes. Follow the logic chain out a step. If they wanted to sell it, they could lower the price...

Instead they _choose_ to keep the price above the black market price. The black market price which is already inflated far above production cost, by virtue of it being illegal.

staticassertion2• 5 years ago

Weed 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. I went to an SF dispensary and it was so odd - had to give them an ID, sit there and fiddle with some ipad, etc. Presumably there's a lot of overhead with taxes, employees, property, etc.

And apparently artificially keeping prices high...

Also a somewhat damning case of "we have no idea how to value this"

I don't really smoke anymore, no time, but it was enough of a difference that the novelty of cutesy edibles wore off fairly quickly.

blamazon• 5 years ago

Once you learn the system, dispensaries are very convenient. At practically every location you can peruse the menu and place an order ahead of time. Then, at the dispensary, show ID, receive selected cannabis products.

WhyNotHugo2• 5 years ago

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, and they hand it over. Very nice and friendly, not dissimilar to ordering at a cafe.

I don't look under 25, and they've NEVER asked me for an id at any of these places. It surprised me in the US that even to sell alcohol to someone clearly over 40, they still ask for an id.

[1]: Stores that sell weed here are called "coffeeshops".

remirk• 5 years ago

I'm not sure on the 50%. I didn't even know there was a separate tax. It seems unlikely to me as weed is still 'illegal'. The police won't look your way if you use it or sell it in shops. But everything that happens before the shop (growing and transport) is still very much illegal and you will get a big fine if you get caught. You are only allowed to have 5 grams or a small amount of plants.

The government together with a few selected municipalities is starting an experiment to grow it in selected growing facilities. As far as I know no municipality has started selling those yet.

ryanlol• 5 years ago

they've NEVER asked me for an id at any of these places

Nobody ever carded me in Amsterdam coffee shops when I was 14-15, I don’t think it’s a common practice.

bdjddd773• 5 years ago

It's fucking nuts, 40, looking 50, got IDs buying a pack of beers in Walgreens I think, just stopping two night usa back to Europe. She wasn't happy that she couldn't scan the EU driving license but eventually she relented, same next night, I was perplexed, do they not enpower their workers? Uk is over 18, but ask for id if you have any doubt less than 21, 3yr margin, common sense

fernandotakai2• 5 years ago

It surprised me in the US that even to sell alcohol to someone clearly over 40, they still ask for an id.

it's weird, some american states are like that, others are not. also, it depends on the bar.

seattle, for example, always asked for id. new york was suuuuper chill with ids.

sf was hit or miss, some bars would ask, some other wouldn't.

OJFord3• 5 years ago

But for those for whom it's more than merely recreational (e.g.: medicinal use), I wish they'd sell a tax-free version.

(I'm not Dutch but) Are you sure they don't? Obviously not claim tax back having bought on the street corner, but if it's medicinal as in actually prescribed, not just 'self-medicating', then surely it's tax free just like I assume anything else would be?

riekus• 5 years ago

There is no tax on weed in the Netherlands, and I always have to ID myself (mid 30, Rotterdam)

reissbaker3• 5 years ago

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.

rstuart4133• 5 years ago

To put that 50% into perspective. Approx price of tobacco per kilogram: USD$2 [0]. Australian excise on tobacco per kilogram: USD$1000 [1].

[0] https://staragritech.com/crop-report/

[1] https://www.ato.gov.au/Business/Excise-on-tobacco/Excise-obl...

reidjs• 5 years ago

Not everyone was lucky enough to have a chill dealer. It reminds me of joe Rogans bit about how in order to buy this harmless plant you have to interact with a criminal. Oh, and commit a crime. Legalization is 100% the right thing.

You can grow it yourself or get it delivered if you hate the dispensary so much.

dylan6048• 5 years ago

You can grow it yourself

Yes, you can legally do this where it is allowed, but other than that, it is pretty much a copout. Not everyone can grow things well. Not everyone has a green thumb. Also, weed is not the easiest plants to grow and takes a lot of time and effort to get quality flower. It's also not like you can just walk over to plant(s) whenever you want to smoke up. The plant has cycles of when it is making flower and when it's not. Now, you can trick it out with grow tents, lights, hydroponics, etc, but now you're a freaking grow house and most people definitely don't want that.

staticassertion2• 5 years ago

Very first sentence is me saying legalization is great and overdue. Feels like it shouldn't be a huge ask that people read the first sentence.

delusional• 5 years ago

It reminds me of Joe Rogans bit about how in order to buy this harmless plant you have to interact with a criminal. Oh, and commit a crime. Legalization is 100% the right thing.

I'm all for legalization but that's just a really bad take. The whole point with it being criminalized is that you SHOULDN'T buy the plant. Anyone pro criminalization would also probably not call it "harmless". Making it inconvenient and illegal is the point.

somehnacct3757• 5 years ago

The shops on the main roads in SF have a certain aesthetic to appeal to a new audience of smokers. If the new age guru / apple store thing isn't your vibe, look for shops off main roads, they tend to be somewhere btwn the LA medicinal alleyway shop and the apple shop. Bloom Room comes to mind. Small, focused on quality, had (? pre covid) a volcano you could use on premise. It's still a store, they aren't gonna smoke you out and be your friend. But SF weed scene is not yet a techy monoculture

slapfrog6• 5 years ago

I hated the 'dealers system'. I didn't want to give some lowlife drug-dealer my address, nor my phone number. Neither was the idea of meeting such a person in a parking lot somewhere appealling to me at all. Consequently, I virtually never smoked weed at all until it became legally available in stores, except at parties where somebody else had it. Two or three times I bought from a dealer, and each time it confirmed all my biases about the experience.

dcolkitt• 5 years ago

On a gram for gram basis, legal weed may be more expensive. But most people don’t appreciate that legal weed is significantly more potent. (Not to mention the health benefit of smoking less plant material.)

The average THC content in illegal states is around 10%. High quality legal strains regularly clock in above 25%. So even if you’re paying twice as much per gram, you’re getting a better deal per mole of THC.

Talanes4• 5 years ago

I don't think that necessarily holds true if you're making the choice to buy from a dealer though, as having the choice implies you're already in a legal state.

At least in California, I'm under the impression the legal and illegal supply chains are still very intermixed, so the stuff from your dealer is as potent as dispensary. Though I'm not sure how true that holds as you get further from the major growing areas.

KMnO4• 5 years ago

When it was legalized in Canada, the legal prices were pretty bad. There were also restrictions on only allowing the sale of flower (ie no edibles or concentrates IIRC).

Since then, the government has pulled up their socks. The prices are competitive, the quality is fantastic, and the doses are accurate (as opposed to a “300mg edible” actually having anywhere from 50-500mg THC).

As a result, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t buy from legal dispensaries. There still exist some grey area mail order services, but the concept of “texting your dealer” is largely extinct.

k12sosse• 5 years ago

I've been kicking this idea around in my noodle since judgement Day passed: a business like a local wine u-brew, where you come rent a stall in my warehouse and we grow your weed for you, in your name. When it's time to harvest, you can either take it home damp and dry it yourself or pay for us to cure it for you. Secure, safe, convenient.

I can currently easily grow a (reasonable) year's supply for someone within the legal 2-plant limit, this just takes all the pains and theft-risk away from the end user (mom and pop Canadian backyard growers)

Pretty sure this would be highly illegal under the current laws, but I'm old enough to remember when homebrew was illegal in Canada, too.

sharken• 5 years ago

I wish more countries would pick up legalization of cannabis.

Anyhow, i suppose there is still a black market for other drugs, that would be curbed with legalization.

It would be quite a feat if Canada were to be the first, but it seems more time has to pass.

https://biv.com/article/2021/04/most-canadians-not-ready-exp...

handmodel• 5 years ago

In california. I only do edibles. For $1.50 (including tax) I get 5mg so I either spend 1.50 or 3.00 when getting high on a night. Its within walking distance of my house. They do check my ID - but seems easier than dealing with a person I have to meet on a random corner. And if you were a woman or old person - that option would seem even less safe.

My yearly budget for pot if probably about $100-150 which seems remarkable low compared to my food or alcohol budget.

mixmastamyk• 5 years ago

Check ID as in verify age >= 21, or put PII into a corp/govt database?

opinion-is-bad• 5 years ago

From my experience, there are huge differences between stores in terms of pricing and customer service. The industry is so new that just having your doors open is a license to print money, but it’ll start to standardize once banks are allowed to enter the field, permitting successful dispensary operations to scale storefronts. I just stopped at a dispensary in CA about and hour and half outside SF and picked up an ounce for $100, which is a better deal than I ever got from a dealer.

hncurious• 5 years ago

The regulators were way too aggressive. They overburdened farms and dispensaries to such a degree that legal sources are having a hard time competing with the black market even though dispensaries were considered essential businesses (able to stay open) through the pandemic.

Now California is bailing out the industry to the tune of $100M.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-06-14/californ...

travisjungroth2• 5 years ago

This is the consequence of the “regulate and tax the hell out of it!” policy that some Americans want to apply to all vices.

ashtonkem• 5 years ago

I’ll admit, the rapid turnaround from black market to corporate welfare within such a short timeframe is kind of shocking.

campground• 5 years ago

Weed is a bit more expensive now than when I bought from a dealer, but it’s still seems very cheap for what you get out of it. The amount of modern, high potency cannabis I can buy for the price of two beers would turn me into a complete zombie if I was even able to smoke it all in one sitting, and I’m a habitual user. Of course, I’ve noticed a large variance in how it affects different people.

serf• 5 years ago

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.

that was my experience with earlier weed delivery groups in SoCal as well, when recommendations were required.

A guy with a suitcase of samples would show up to your door, and offer you a sampling of everything he sold. That person would even help you light-up or vaporize the goods if you have a physical disability that prevented you from doing so yourself , or perhaps teach you how to in-case you're unfamiliar with equipment or technique.

They would sit there and smoke with you or bullshit for a few minutes about strains/strain-quality/benefits/whatever, make a sale with whatever was chosen during the sampling, and then head out the door.

Since those days medical prices have gone down significantly, but the process is now more sterile and 'mass-friendly'. Gone are the days of interactive sampling or someone teaching you how to use a bong or vaporizer -- it's now mostly all 'delivery-fied' : "give me my cash, here's your delivery that I know absolutely nothing about, and i'm gone ASAP."

It's a shame in some ways -- the earlier methods were a lot more compassionate towards actual medical patients and actual medical needs for this product -- the status in SoCal now feels more on-par with UberEats-profit-maximization than it does compassionate-care; a shame since 'weed products' have gotten way more complex with the addition of a million different tincture/extract/compound/etc and the various ways to imbibe them.

dpweb• 5 years ago

In Illinois, I felt the original medicinal stores were more warm and very friendly and helpful esp to first time users. Compassionate to first time users who are dealing with legit pain and medical issues.

Newer recreational stores have popped up everywhere with many many more to come, but the few I’ve visited are cold and the staff act like they could give a shit.

codetrotter• 5 years ago

A billion grams. A million kilograms. A thousand tonnes.

…one kilotonne?

_Microft2• 5 years ago

Isn’t that as much weed as the Dark Lord smoked per hour?

Edit: english subtitles say „hundreds“ while it is actually „thousand“ in the German version. ~1 minute into https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPVKaj9hVcY

grumple• 5 years ago

A gigagram?

skripp• 5 years ago

1 gigagram, for us Europeans. ;)

Edit: it would most likely be written as one thousand tonnes.

dluan• 5 years ago

conversely, in europe, do you hit up your dealer for 10 micro tonnes of weed?

NullPrefix• 5 years ago

A thousand tonnes is ambiguous because you cannot know if it's metric tonnes or not.

A billion grams is unambiguous, because a billion prefix for the regular reader would mean pretty much the same as infinity. The 0.0000001 as the multiplier after billion prefix doesn't discount that, because you still have to read the billion out loud.

Clewza313• 5 years ago

Oddly enough, "one billion" can mean different amounts in different countries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale

_Microft2• 5 years ago

Isn't a "tonne" always 1000kg, while they only would have to disambiguate if they had written "ton"?

Edit: yes, seems to be like that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonne

dylan6048• 5 years ago

Does it make your head go Boom like an H-Bomb? That would be one hell of a marketing campaign

OJFord3• 5 years ago

Tonne is the more common form for (but exactly equivalent to, assuming metric tonnes) the SI megagram (Mg).

Anyone that would use the hypothetical 'kilotonne' would use 'Gg' instead. Agriculture works in tonnes though, not SI prefixed grams, so it would just be 1000t.

(Source: from writing a lot of code for doing conversions and display and things with differently denominated quantities for ag users!)

R0b0t1• 5 years ago

There's no reason not to use kiloton.

gedy• 5 years ago

The business model at that time didn’t demand actual weed sales: selling hype, selling the potential of selling weed, was proving lucrative.

That's kind of everything these days.. Tech, stocks markets, housing, etc. is less about fundamentals as it is the "potential".

h2odragon2• 5 years ago

Many 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 that anyone who has a sales channel has been inundated with "buy my crop" offers. Ive heard one guy had grown and harvested several acres or so and had a couple truckloads in round wrapped bales he was looking to sell.

People didn't dive into cotton farming this way, when it became viable in the area again.

treis• 5 years ago

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 much pot.

Say that there's 260 million adults in the US and they all smoke 1 joint per day. Assuming:

1 joint = 1 g of marijuana

1 lb = 454g

1 acre can yield 600 lbs of marijuana

1 farm is 1000 acres

If you do the math, that means we need roughly 350 farms worth of marijuana. Or in terms of acreage, roughly 0.04% of all the acreage in the U.S. under cultivation. In other words, even if we assume a ridiculous level of smoking there's simply not a huge demand for pot. Using more realistic amounts, a handful of large farms could produce all the marijuana consumed in the country.

h2odragon2• 5 years ago

Tobacco is harder to grow and cure than good cannabis.

The tobacco industry consolidation bent the market to the point that "tobacco" as sold is the result of a large industrial process that happens to use nicotina plant matter as an input.

I think the cannabis industry is flying hellbent to that point just to have an excuse for spending all the investor money. As well as a literal distaste for burning plants as a social thing.

reissbaker3• 5 years ago

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.

PragmaticPulp• 5 years ago

A recent survey conducted by Abacus Data for Medical Cannabis Canada found that those who access medical cannabis legally pay on average 34 percent more for their medicine than if they bought from the unregulated market.

I’m unfamiliar with the weed market in general, but it seems like this problem is self-inflicted.

They’re simultaneously oversupplied and overpriced. Lower prices and both problems sort themselves out, plus they can slowly out-compete the illegal sellers by undercutting their pricing.

It seems the real problem is that they are afraid to cut their margins because it would break their financial models and risk the stock price. It’s strange that they’d rather destroy excess product than try to move it at a steep discount.

I’m also afraid this could create other problems by giving them a huge incentive to try to push more and more weed consumption among the public. Whatever your thoughts about weed, I hope we can all agree that over-consumption is not good and that it could be a problem if multi-billion dollar companies are stuck in a situation where they need to greatly increase the public’s consumption of weed to become profitable.

Closi4• 5 years ago

those who access medical cannabis legally pay on average 34 percent more for their medicine than if they bought from the unregulated market.

I mean, that’s true with most things isn’t it? If you buy meat from the dodgy guy in a pub then it’s cheaper. Bloke selling televisions from a van? Cheaper. Cigarettes from a corner store that have been imported from a low tax country? Cheaper. Getting the electric/gas done in your house from someone who is unlicensed? Cheaper.

Not sure why we would expect this to be different.

slapfrog6• 5 years ago

Cigarettes from a corner store that have been imported from a low tax country?

Probably just smuggled across state lines. Bought in a state with low taxes, then sold in a state with high taxes. The store pockets the taxes instead of passing them along to the state, which it can do because the cigarettes being sold were smuggled so the high-tax state doesn't have any record of them existing.

asdfasgasdgasdg3• 5 years ago

If you buy meat from the dodgy guy in a pub then it’s cheaper.

I don't know about that. First of all, I've never had a dodgy guy in a pub try to sell me meat. Second of all, the market for meat, at least in the U.S., is relatively unconstrained and therefore the prices are pretty reflective of the cost to produce (including the costs for the various middlemen in the chain, etc.). So with meat, if some dodgy guy is selling it for cheaper, it's probably because it's subpar product in some way or another.

Televisions from a van? Stolen. Has nothing to do with economics -- the guy didn't pay the costs of producing those televisions, so his prices don't reflect them.

Among your selection of analogies, only the cigarette one seems comparable. But even with this it's a little different. In that case, the cigs are cheaper because the tax is not being paid. That might be a factor in the black market price difference for weed in Canada, but according to this article, price manipulation by producers is a big factor, which isn't reflected in the cigarette analogy.

psychonautLorax• 5 years ago

I’m unfamiliar with the weed market in general, but it seems like this problem is self-inflicted.
I hope we can all agree that over-consumption is not good.

The following is for the purpose of conversation only, food for thought if you will, and does not constitute any sort of condonement or endorsement, tacit or otherwise, of the use of cannabis products. Tread with extreme caution if you have any personal or family history of schizophrenia or schizotypical personality disorder as their is rather strong evidence that cannabis can have particularly profound effects on this group. Everybody reacts differently to different psychoactive substances, you only have one brain and one body, and treat them as your greatest asset:

What is the “over consumption” of weed? Unfortunately we really don’t have much reliable data on marijuana consumption, that I’m aware of anyway, and the longitudinal studies that do exist are from institutions with an obvious agenda, the National Institute on Drug Abuse being chief among them[1], and there was a ban on marijuana research until 2015 [2]. NORML has a pretty comprehensive overview of what data we do have with context of other substances.[3] Another good, more traditional take, is this review in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry[4]. The biggest problem I see with most of the data is that, for obvious ethical reasons, all the marijuana users are self-selected, I’m personally of the belief that many people who consume cannabis, especially into adulthood, are self medicating, and as [4] suggests this may have a lasting effect on their psychiatric outcomes.

I don’t know how much experience you (or other readers) have with weed or drugs in general, but I have decades of experience (with sometimes lengthy breaks) of what by most definitions is “heavy” use, and know some extremely heavy (i.e. nearly constant) users who are also extremely capable. Before I delve further, I’d like to stop (again) and point out that I’m not trying to focus on the exceptional here, but I feel in the context of recreational drug use, it is important to look at the whole spread of users.

Most of the following is anecdata: One interesting thing about cannabis use that I wanted to highlight for non-users in the context of “over-consumption” is that a very common sentiment among long-term chronic (pun intended) users, is that you develop a sort of “permanent tolerance”, even if such a user has a long period of abstinence, upon recommencing use they will rapidly return to their previous state of tolerance—-a (lower) level of efficacy that might have taken years of use to get too will return in a matter of days/weeks. This seems particularly pronounced in cannabis relative to other psychoactive compounds. I would, based on my experiences and those of all the (hundreds of) people I’ve met and had frank discussions with about their use, rate weed on a “problematicness scale” between coffee and alcohol, but much closer to coffee. Their is a component to cannabis use that it was[5] seen as something of an act of rebellion, and that people who are past the “teenage rebellion” stage tend to self moderate similarly to coffee drinkers—-many of whom have a cup in the morning with the spectrum going all the way to people who drink coffee all day. I say its closer to coffee than alcohol because if someone is an alcoholic, and drinks all day, it will absolutely be noticeable to most people around them, and have an obvious and severe effect on their health. Conversely, I’ve known near constant weed users who were able to keep their use a secret from their family, employer and colleagues, were in athletic clubs and in some case on the extreme end of physical fitness. I’ve yet to meet someone who drinks all day and is otherwise extremely healthy, but I definitely don’t feel I have enough data to make any claims one way or the other about physical fitness. Overall though, I think the jury is still out about how harmful cannabis consumption is, especially if taken independently from smoking, and one of the best things about legalization movement, in my opinion, is that its given users much healthier alternatives to smoking, gummies are great!

[1] https://www.drugabuse.gov/news-events/nida-notes/2018/02/lon...

[2] https://www.marijuanatimes.org/medical-marijuana-research-ba...

[3] https://norml.org/marijuana/library/cannabis-mental-health-a...

[4]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3221171/#ref47

[5] https://archives.drugabuse.gov/news-events/news-releases/201...

jbuhbjlnjbn• 5 years ago

I hope we can all agree that over-consumption is not good and that it could be a problem if multi-billion dollar companies are stuck in a situation where they need to greatly increase the public’s consumption of weed to become profitable.

First, this is semantics, "over-comsumption" is bad no matter the substance, but who is able to define it generally? But this is an experiemnt I would love to see, big companies pushing weed the same way then, say, the tobacco or alcohol industry before them. I have a hunch from all the information I have, it would be not nearly as problematic as the former, possibly even have generally a more positive impact on society.

atatatat2• 5 years ago

I know two dozen pain patients under consuming right now, and for decades.

kevmo• 5 years ago

Unprofitable growers should maybe turn to growing food.

cushychicken• 5 years ago

Ali G always had the best answer to this question: "Why doesn't you give it to charity?"

latchkey4• 5 years ago

This was easy to predict.

Anyone who's been in the industry knows that there is not only not enough demand, but it is also seasonal. Other than the heaviest users, people don't consume 365 days out of the year, they go through phases.

If you grow weed year round in high tech facilities that maximize production, you're going to just have massive piles of it that you cannot unload.

Making it legal didn't really create that much more demand because it was already easy enough to get in most places where there were enough consumers.

I drove through Oregon not too long ago. There is literally miles of weed shops right next door to each other. There are more weed shops than gas stations... and the gas stations usually have one right next door anyway. I have no idea how they all stay in business, but it couldn't be good.

Now this is the comparison to tulip mania that kind of works.

slapfrog6• 5 years ago

There are more weed shops than gas stations... and the gas stations usually have one right next door anyway.

In Washington state [or just Seattle? I'm not sure], there are laws restricting how many square feet the signage for a weed store is allowed to have. In response to this, weed stores devised a trick where they buy up neighboring businesses and run them under the same brand name as the weed store, with very large signs. So next to "Bubba's weed store" with small signs, you have "Bubba's Car Wash" with very large signs. Anybody looking for Bubba's weed will see the huge sign for Bubba's car wash, and know they found the right spot.

latchkey4• 5 years ago

It'll be interesting to see what happens to the secondary business when the primary fails and Bubba realizes he doesn't want to run a car wash...

asdfasgasdgasdg3• 5 years ago

I sort of question the framing here? Not yours, but the article's. There is exactly enough demand, because however much people want of a mostly harmless plant is how much people should want of that plant. Nobody turning a profit should be no surprise: farmers barely turn a profit either, because selling commodities is not a means of getting rich quick. Considering how low-risk buying pot was before legalization, it boggles the mind why anyone thought there would be a huge growth in consumption, especially when the legal product is priced so much higher that it might as well still be illegal.

As far as why such a low fraction of transactions are in the legal market: the only way to move pot transactions out off the black market would be to either make it substantially as convenient to buy it legally, or to dramatically increase enforcement against black market transactions at the same time that weed was legalized. It seems Canada did neither.

ghaff• 5 years ago

Considering how low-risk buying pot was before legalization, it boggles the mind why anyone thought there would be a huge growth in consumption, especially when the legal product is priced so much higher that it might as well still be illegal.

I have no idea how much consumption has changed. But for a casual/occasional user seeking out a dealer seems like a fairly high bar. And even if legal prices are higher, again for a casual user, the total incremental amount seems pretty trivial.

latchkey4• 5 years ago

As a culture, we over produce, under consume and just throw the rest away. Ever looked into the dumpsters behind super markets?

I may have known a grower who would always struggle with the seasons. Indoor growing is year round, but the outdoor stuff is what everyone wants. So every time the outdoor harvests would happen, it was nearly impossible to sell the indoor stuff.

So now you combine massive indoor with massive outdoor and year round production... and a customer base that is also trained to be seasonal (wait to stock up on the best stuff when it is available)... total recipe for failure.

Needless to say, my grower friend saw the writing on the wall and exited the business before things became legal. It was really too bad, their multi-year cultured strain was excellent and no longer exists now.

stef25• 5 years ago

What's the advantage of handing out these licenses to companies that will then be run like a Silicon Valley start-up?

Why not just allow dispensaries to grow a small amount of their own stuff on premise, say 20Kg / month? Limit each customer to a 5g purchase. You just need a proper space and half a dozen staff (if that). No need for massive investments and all this maxed-out capitalist accounting trickery.

Legalisation should put dealers out of business on day 1. There's no way I'm going to engage in criminal activity, texting a dealer and waiting on a street corner if I can just walk over to a bar and buy what I need, super chill like it is in Holland.

Unbelievably sad they managed to screw it up so badly.

voisin2• 5 years ago

A 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.

anglicanchurch• 5 years ago

Vaping is quite substantially healthier than joints/bongs. You aren't burning the material but baking it at oven temps.

I tried to get my stoner buddies into vaping and everyone's switched except the guys that are culturally infected to give up being the "joint smoking guys".

tayo42• 5 years ago

I switched from bongs to dabs and felt better cardio wise. Live resin extracts are suppsedly pretty minimal in extra stuff. I think the vape oils have a lot of extra crap. I went back to smoking for a bit though I think the dabs are to potent and I was getting panic attacks

Maursault• 5 years ago

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.

[1] https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/tobacco/nnbbmq.pdf

KingMachiavelli• 5 years ago

I am a bit skeptical of that studies findings. However, it is quite absurd that the US anti-smoking legislation (taxes, advertising bans, etc.) completely ignore the different forms of tobacco. Pure tobacco is probably better, and chewing tobacco is considerably better, and vaping is not even tobacco. Yet the US treats most the same way and many states are even adding tobacco taxes on vaping.

The reasons I can come up with: 1. The anti-smoking movement became very classist. 2. Big tobacco certainly prefers that cigerettes remain the most common form of tobacco since they are more profitable. 3. States like collecting taxes and don't care about the actual effect on public health.

blacksqr• 5 years ago

Don't bogart it!

forkLding• 5 years ago

I've bought edibles and weed in Canada, mainly in Toronto. It used to be a lot stricter but now a lot less people check my ID or whatever. Overall the process feels more informal than before and less go through all these checks etc. Could be I look a bit older although I was able to buy weed at different places when I was much younger without showing my ID either back when it was stricter.

Also I've stopped calling them dispensaries because the places that sell weed have diversified, specialized or started marketing themselves with different products that it isn't just a buy weed location anymore so it's hard to put them in one category.

grawprog• 5 years ago

Barely more than half of all pot sales today are conducted through the legal market

When the government won't pay more than $850/lb no matter the quality of the weed, what do you expect?

The weed in legal dispensaries is straight trash. It's dry, usually packaged months before in containers or bags, costs more than the old medical dispensaries or literally anyone else selling weed.

There is zero reason to go into a legal dispensary, spend between $25-$40 for 3.5g of weed that's going to be pure garbage when I could get high quality weed for $15-$20/3.5g from pretty much any street dealer or delivery service.

Why would I spend more money on 10mg edibles when I can spend less money on 100mg + edibles.

It's completely mindboggling how badly the government fucked this up. It's hard to believe it wasn't intentional.

rubatuga• 5 years ago

n=1

Animats2• 5 years ago

"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?

taurath• 5 years ago

This is a new era though where companies can survive for over a decade on hype and the promise of future profits. In fact present profits make it seem like you’re running out of room to grow.

Not that any of the companies anyone here works for work the same way.

derefr• 5 years ago

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."

Animats2• 5 years ago

Monetization of Fear Of Missing Out has become an industry.

d--b• 5 years ago

A billion gram? You mean a thousand ton?

tartoran• 5 years ago

Same thing but tons are hard to gauge when consumption of weed is closer to grams.

14• 5 years ago

People buy weed in grams, eighths, quarters, ounces, and pounds typically. Not tons. I assume they went with grams because that is the most common purchase amount and people can possible get a sense of quantity.

tenfourwookie14• 5 years ago

We've been hearing about surplus for several years now, and yet the price of weed is going up, not down. I regularly see $400 retail ounces in Oregon for top shelf.

Supply/demand should push the price to the floor with this Surplus gargantus, and yet prices continue to climb.

It's like ECON 101 doesn't apply to pot. What are they going to do? Dump it in ocean?

What I want to know is how retail is maintaining these obviously, artificially high prices in a crazy-lopsided buyer's market?

Collusion is the only explanation I have. They're all just colluding to prevent price collapse.

josefresco• 5 years ago

Collusion

It's either straight up illegal collusion or a "natural" side effect of allowing only "big business" to enter the market. Combined with sky high taxes and "community impact" fees and there's not much room for price differentiation,.

I live in a state that is just now seeing recreational shops open and miraculously all their pricing is exactly aligned.

ohyeshedid• 5 years ago

Collusion doesn't need to happen at the point of sale, it could be wholesalers or the growers setting a price structure.

iaw• 5 years ago

I regularly see $400 retail ounces in Oregon for top shelf.

I think because this article refers to Canada, not the US, we can't infer things about the market in the US due to the low likelihood of smuggling occurring.

What has the quality and the cost of 'low-grade' weed done? I suspect the quality of the bottom shelf has increased drastically at the same cost.

tenfourwookie14• 5 years ago

Yes, but the same is true in Oregon. Massive surplus. It was some silly number like enough weed to make 1 billion joints. I'll find the number.

kriskrunch3• 5 years ago

Several reasons prices stay high:

The dispensaries are limited regionally by law, so it's not truly a free market.

There are often taxes on the weed as well. Gray and black market prices are significantly cheaper.

A lot of the excess stuff is sold to regions where it's still illegal, although those hold outs are dwindling.

Production cost per pound is expensive, and going up across the board: labor, electricity, water, commercial leases, equipment, fertilizers, and grow media.

Top shelf is mostly grown indoors under artificial lights instead of in greenhouses.

Further, the farmer's and dispensary's regulations are complex and daunting.

Grow your own if you want it cheap. You'll quickly learn how challenging it is to produce top shelf.

I'm in the States, but much of this applies to Canada as well.

tenfourwookie14• 5 years ago

Can you explain to me then why there is such a surplus?

All of above sound rational to me, and yet, massive and growing surplus while retail prices are increasing. There is bullshit somewhere. Is this what you mean by not quite a free market, that these surpluses are a function of market barriers? They have no one to sell it too?

That might explain why concentrates are dropping in price. If you can't sell it, make something with it you can sell. Conjecture, that.

wombat-man• 5 years ago

if demand is inelastic, then there's actually no reason for dispensaries to lower the price. They might even be buying the weed for less and taking the profit for themselves.

It could be collusion, but maybe dispensaries have tried sales and found themselves making less.

bsder2• 5 years ago

Because these aren't really competitive systems.

In the US, since cannabis/CBD/marijuana/etc. are still nominally illegal at the federal level, none of the "legal" operators can avail themselves of the financial system. This prevents things like shuffling product between states, for example, or taking out big loans for expansions that would allow flattening of the market.

And, if I remember correctly, Canada's "legalization" has been one disaster after another because the big players keep buying off and sabotaging the system until they can corner it.

tenfourwookie14• 5 years ago

Would like to read something on the cannibalization phenomena re: your last paragraph. Link me if you can.

randyrand• 5 years ago

Location.

Weed is sold in stores at local prices. Theres lack of competition.

tenfourwookie14• 5 years ago

Some areas maybe, but I'm seeing brisk competition across the product board without the related price competition you would expect. Prices are not going down in a surplus market. That's greed.

0xdeadb00f• 5 years ago

$400 is about how much an (illegal) ounce is where I am

gumby• 5 years ago

What's wrong with saying "tonne" instead of "billion grams"

kleene_op• 5 years ago

It's harder to smoke

hollerith• 5 years ago

A metric tonne is a million grams, but yeah "1000 metric tonnes".

reissbaker3• 5 years ago

It 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.

openthc• 5 years ago

Data 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.

throwaway984393• 5 years ago

What I have heard anecdotally from people who grow is that regulations have stymied their ability to profit. In many places there are limits on how much you can grow, or how you can sell, or how much, or to whom. Illegal sales do not have any of those problems. It's like we've tied the legal producers' hands behind their backs and then wonder what all the struggling is about.

gwbas1c• 5 years ago

(Joke)

What do you do with a billion grams of surplus weed?

Burn it in bonfires at festivals like Coachella and Burning Man.

kriskrunch3• 5 years ago

Or the Canadian festival, Shambhala near Nelson!

But they already give the stuff away at many festivals..

advertising• 5 years ago

Know a few “pot lawyers” and retail operators. The real money is in gaining a license for a dispensary. Growing is a race to the bottom. From humboldt era $5k lbs to $800 lbs

8bitsrule• 5 years ago

One thing businesses across the US do to keep surplus from cutting into profits is to destroy it before trashing it.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/07/new-york-cit...

What do you do with a billion grams of surplus weed?

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