Wilcox's plan includes a 7-acre site with a 100,000-square-foot growing space, a bakery, a testing lab, job training and growing equipment production at the site -- which would need to win one of the four Oakland permits to go into business. If it did, it would produce 58 pounds of cannabis a day at wholesale prices of $2,500 to $3,000 per pound and send the city more than $2 million per year in taxes if a 3 percent growers' tax were initiated.
But Oakland could complicate his math. The city is considering an 8 percent tax on cannabis farms, more than double the top rate in Wilcox's economic analysis.
...One industry source, who is still involved in illicit drug circles and requested to remain anonymous, said he recalls prices falling in Los Angeles as medical marijuana dispensaries exploded there. Early on in his career, high quality marijuana went for $6,000 to $7,000 a pound. "Now you are getting $3,500. What's going to happen when you legalize? You are going to take it a couple of states (east)," he said. Growers and vendors with expensive taste would not be able to continue to lead the high life at legal prices, he said.
Also, not everyone buys the theory that California will become a rogue drug state that can undermine national efforts to put a lid on marijuana. The free market is pitting different cities eager for marijuana revenues against one another, and small growers at the Oakland council meeting threatened to leave the city if taxes were too high.
U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, in an interview cast cold water on California export potential. "I quite frankly don't see that," he said. "I just don't see it as being something that suddenly people in Kentucky say, 'Ah now marijuana can be shipped in from California.'"
I'm not an expert in this field. I'm not a part of pot culture. But I do know a few people who have inhaled in their lifetimes. Kerlikowske is, imo, somewhat naive if he thinks that those folks in KY are not already interested in the sativa x indica hybrids that are the direct result of the Reagan-inspired war on drugs.
The history of marijuana over the past three decades is all about the move from someone finding WWII-era ditchweed and being content to that same hypothetical someone seeking out hybrid strains that were cultivated in response to and because of the crack down on outdoor cannabis production. When these hybrids are regulated and labeled with percentages of indica or sativa, those folks in KY can make more informed decisions in their purchases - and I would assume they will.
Most people outside of cannabis culture don't even bother to find out about the differences in effects from various strains. But those folks in KY who do know the differences are not the rubes the uneducated might assume them to be. I would imagine there are folks in KY who also enjoy beer from microbreweries rather than PBR - just as there are folks from every other state in this nation who make the same distinctions.
With more information available for consumers, producers and/or suppliers of cannabis in other parts of the country would, I assume, be under greater pressure to provide more information to their customers - who would know they could travel to another state to obtain the product they desire if their local retailers do not meet this desire.
Those who view the production of cannabis as part of a drug war do not understand those who view the production and use of cannabis as the horticultural equivalent of "foodies."
I assume, based upon the history of wine and beer consumption in the U.S., that it is also the "gourmanibis" aspect of cannabis cultivation that will create profit for the industry. But what do I know? I predicted that Ikea would be a big hit in the U.S. back in 1985 after a trip to one of the stores while visiting relatives in Europe.
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