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Pot referendum might not mean you can grow the stuff at home
By adamg on Tue, 03/08/2016 - 1:37pm
MassLive.com reports on a state-Senate proposal to control marijuana sales should voters approve recreational use in a referendum this fall. Among the prohibitions proposed: No celebrity endorsements and no home growing. Also, both the state and cities and towns would be allowed to tax sales, under the proposal.
Separately, the Boston city council is considering its own restriction: A ban on pot shops and medical dispensaries being closer than a half mile to each other.
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Comments
Wouldn't it be better to
Wouldn't it be better to allow people to grow their own but not sell anything but seeds commercially without being a licensed dispensary?
FWIW
The initiative we'll be voting on this fall would allow the home cultivation of up to 12 plants at a time, only 6 of which could actually be producing marijuana (ie mature and female. The others could be seedling or males, I guess).
Home growers would be limited to 10oz of cultivated marijuana and could not sell it - they could give up to an ounce away to someone 21 or older, but can't get any renumeration or compensation, and can't advertise. So, pretty similar to how you can give home brewed beer to friends/family, but can't start your own microbrewery.
Initiative Question: The Regulation and Taxation of Marijuana Act (the stuff I'm talking about above is in Section 7)
If the referendum passes and
Question: if the referendum passes and you grow weed in your backyard, would you be giving the DEA cause to swoop in and asset-forfeiture your house?
Even by not participating in interstate commerce, you are participating in interstate commerce.
Probably
In today's political climate, you certainly couldn't convince me to grow any hippy lettuce next to the cucumbers! (To say nothing of the potential "attractive nuisance' lawsuits one might open oneself up to).
Even if they made
growing perfectly legal in MA the DEA can still swoop in and cart you off to jail. Everyone forgets weed is still illegal federally. A simple MEMO from Obama is all that stands between all those Colorado "Businessmen" and the slammer. Wait to see what happens when King Trump takes his throne with VP/ AG Chis Christie standing behind him. Betting on sports will be legal though.
Yay?
You'd be opening yourself up
You'd be opening yourself up to robbery, that's for damned sure.
Unimpressive report
Wow. Just dl'ed and reviewed several sections of the report + the references at the end.
Lots of repetition, many paragraphs in different sections using nearly identical language. No footnotes. Many policy recommendations without supporting data or rationales.
If I were grading this as a college-level teacher, I would be sending it back with some serious red ink.
Btw, slightly misleading headline?
Nitpicky, but Adam's headline makes it sound like the initiative itself prohibits home growing, which is not the case at all. A more accurate title might be - "Senate report recommends preemptive restrictions on upcoming marijuana initiative."
Buzzkill politicians
What is with our politicians? Maybe patronage over democracy?
They've slow walked the medical marijuana referendum implementation. Now they're trying to kill recreational marijuana reform and/or strangle it before it gets started.
You'd think this was more important than fixing the T or funding schools. Really it seems more important to them to regulate personal behavior and thwart democracy than actually like deal with real problems and sclerotic bureaucracy.
YOU MAY HAVE HEARD OF THIS THING
used to facilitate trade. Is is a medium exchanged for labor, goods, and services....ummm...OH.....right! MONEY.
gubment can't get any when Johnny stoner is growing his own.
I been saying this for years, legalization makes no sense from a government point of view because if they allow growing then within ten years sales will plummet and shops will close because one person can grow a year's supply for ten peopl VERY EASILY. ^ budding [plants you say? With 6 seedlings behind it? Has anyone commenting on this thread ever seen a 15 foot tall pot plant? I have. In MA no less. It probably yielded half a pound. Now if you have SIX of those, none of your friends will be without for the whole year. Most people commenting on this subject and the politicians writing the laws have NO CLUE about the propogation of the plant, the varieties of the plant, the growing adaptations of the plant, etc etc.
The answer for them, as they are learning, is to BAN GROWING. I say, good luck with that fellas. THE US already grows about 75% of the pot consumed in this country. They will legalize pot and then criminalize people growing their own legal substance.
Land of the free blah blah blah
You make some good points
I bet most pot consumers would still just buy it. I can grow tomatoes, but I don't. I could brew beer, but I don't. Dorm-residing college kids, would find it challenging to grow their own, so they mostly won't.
You're right that home-growing takes tax money away from the state, but I don't think it would be enough to make it worth banning the practice.
There is one way to deal with that
Plant permits. You have to pay for a permit for each plant.
I would actually support this...
although it would be better to pay for the permit and then follow the regulations on how many plants you can have. if you have a permit then you are on file and they can spot check you to make sure there is no illegal activity going on and then could levy fines if you were over the limit and destroy whatever you are over by.
My main issue is that a private citizen should have the option, should marijuana become legal, of never paying for it again. It is a plant, and one that is very easily cultivated. The idea of paying market rate for a bag of pot and the state getting like 40% of that for doing nothing but sitting back and saying it's ok "we won't throw you in jail" just boils my blood.
Like another poster pointed out, if one is so inclined they can brew their own beer without any government interference so long as they are not profiting from it in any way. Pot should be treated the same way.
that's true
but has a neighbor evr given yyou tomatoes? I know I give TONS of tomatoes out every year. The thing with that though is this: the tomato right off the plant might last a week before it's no good. After you dry marijuana buds they are good until they turn into dust. A year or longer. Considering if you grow the right strain, one plant could yield a single person a 6 month supply, then having 6 plants could easily provide for some friends. The difference here is that it might take acres to supply a group of people with all the tomatoes they use in a year. To supply the same number of people with a years worth of pot can be done in a corner of a back yard.
As for your beer reference, brewing beer takes considerable time and effort, there are many steps to getting the final product. Here are the steps to growing weed: germinate seed , plant in dirt, water, cut down, dry, smoke. Thats literally it. I could teach a 6 year old to do it very successfully. There are no chemical processes, special tools, or supplies requires. You just watch a plant grow for a few months and then use it.
Your comment further illustrates my point that most people and politicians in particular have NO CLUE about the logistics of marijuana production. It's called "weed" for a reason. It takes effort to screw up growing it.
Many people WOULD still buy it. I cannot deny that. but after the initial phase of legalization sales will eventually plummet if growing is legal. There will simply be tons of supply and not enough demand.
So why doesn't it work that way with beer?
A citizen of the Commonwealth can brew up to 200 gallons of beer a year (capped at 300 gallons per household if there's more than one homebrewer). And so long as it's less than 3%abv, you can make *and* sell as much cider as you can grow apples.
Doesn't seem to have adversely affected retail alcohol sales.
because brewing
is infinitely more difficult and complicated than growing pot. If you don't understand that the process, time, and equipment required (plus the garage/basement space needed to do it in) is the hurdle keeping many many people from brewing. Then I couldn't have any kind of constructive debate with you on the topic. You can grow weed in a window box with nothing more than dirt, a seed from your last bag, and water that falls from the sky.
If i could walk into the woods, bury an empty keg and come back 2 months later and dig up a full one, i think you'sd see a dip in beer sales.
That's just baloney
I am an active homebrewer and a gardener (and grew up on a farm). I've grown all sorts of vegetables and herbs, and regularly dry and can plenty of my produce.
They're different skill sets, but one is not harder than the other - if anything, gardening takes more time and has greater potential for unexpected loss (due to weather, pests, disease or thieves).
If you think one can grow a high sun requirement plant like cannabis in the middle of the woods and get any sort of predictable and substantial harvest that would have an impact on retail sales, you're right - we can't have a constructive debate, because you're living in lala land. Might as well talk about how the ability to grow corn and wheat in your backyard garden means the end of the commerical cereal industry.
I have no doubt that there will be an increase in home growing if the initiative question passes. And that would be ok with me - I like making my own beer and growing my own tomatoes, and I understand why some green-thumbed folks who enjoy pot might want to do the same. But I also have no doubt that the amount of pot produced by home growers will remain a minor percentage compared to the commercial growers - the same way it has in states that have already passed recreational use.
when's the last time
you grew a crop of pot?
I didn't say it would happen right away. I said eventually. Why else would they try and pass a measure banning home growing, out of curiosity? Theft? Why, if you can buy it at the store? Do people steal your homebrew? Safety? Again, why? Its not a meth lab, there is nothing combustible. Its a plant. Maybe your electric bill would go up if growing indoors, so maybe they want to conserve energy.
Seriously scratchin my head here as to why they would ban home growing if it was a legal substance.
Plenty of pot grows in the woods by the way. Hike through some private property in VT in September. Or through the National Parks in Northern California. The cheap bud all the college kids in Boston are smoking was grown there, rather predictably, by American farmers and cartels alike. And, depending on the strain, the stuff can grow ANYWHERE. Including just wherever seeds may fall in NYC. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/25/brooklyn-marijuana_n_4665886.html or along the roadside in Kentucky and other rural states http://norml.org/news/2006/09/07/98-percent-of-all-domestically-eradicat...
It is one of the most adaptable and hearty plants on the planet. If you know how to clone you can very easily put out 100-200 plants in the woods, lose 75% of it, and still pull in enough to buy yourself a new car in the fall. Commercial growers grow a lot because they can and have to- the states don't dole licences out to anyone/everyone, and if you have licence to grow in a warehouse you can get outstanding results. Demand is high because guess what? (whisper) pot grown in these legal states is going everywhere else at higher profits GASP! Your corn and wheat argument, again, does not hold up. One stalk of corn might give you 3-4 ears maybe? One pot plant can prouce months' worth of supply. Using the same square footage would yield infintely more useable product than almost any other plant you can throw out there.
We can have a pissing contest about this all day. And one could make the argument that growing REALLY good pot is labor intesive, which it is, but at the end of the day it is infinitely easier to produce than beer or vedetables. Less energy in gets you more out than other crops.
Hearst put pot out of business because you can grow a 15 foot tall plant with a 6 inch diameter trunk in one growing season, vs a tree that takes YEARS to get that big, and hemp would put his paper business under really fast when that caught on. It really wasn't about negros and their jazz music raping your white daughters even though that's how they sold it.
Celeb Endorsements
So would Willie Nelson be barred from selling his own brand ("Willie's Reserve") since his name is on the product, implying an endorsement?
Don't 100% of the proceeds
go to the IRS? If true, then I'm sure the state would grant him a waiver.
Usual Non-Sensical BS
Who will decide who qualifies as a celebrity? Are they actually going to hire someone to make and maintain a list? Fucking idiots.
Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com
Why can't we grow it at home?
So that rich white business owners can make money selling what they used to make money sending black people to jail for, and to close those same people out of the market.
All I hear is "wahhhh"
We gotta start voting these puritanical crybabies out of office. I mean seriously, legalizing pot without this scare theater would alleviate the boondoggle called the MBTA. It'd mellow the f*** out of commuters fed up with fare hikes!
I am so sick of the BS
I am so sick of the BS surrounding weed. The politicians, the "oh my children" folk, the "not in my backyard" folk; it's a fucking plant - legalize it already (or maybe I should say legalize it again b/c it was once legal). The ppl up in arms are the same ppl that are fine having bars, liquor stores and tobacco all around them. I'm.just.so.tired.of.it.all.
With all the revenue from sales we could probably fix the T very quickly! Maybe kids in school could actually have decent meals served to them instead of the processed food they get now due to revenue. Who knows.
I say I would like to just be able to grow my own but in all reality I'm too lazy and would probably just buy it. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
lets worry
about the BS scare tactics of how dangerous weed is and not worry about the heroin epidemic that is spiraling out of control.
Beacon Hill has no clue what's happening because their pockets are lined by the big pharma and biotech industries. Legalize it, tax it, and move on.
Let's try to keep up with the news, too
Legislature is doing something.