Mexifornia State Flower - Revisited
 

On the previous forum I had a running thread about the proliferation of Marijuana grows in my reletively quiet neck of the woods. It continues seemingly without abatement as this recent article from The Record-Searchlight illustrates.

I am not a consumer, but I will be voting in favor of legalization of pot for the sole purpose of stifling the growth of illicit Mexican cartel activity in the forest lands nearby.

http://www.redding.com/news/2010/jul...a-county-mont/

Strawberries are legal, and with that comes farmworkers who are still in cahoots with the cartels. The difference would end up being, when you catch the illegal growers of dope, you can charge them and deport them. Strawberry pickers though will be able to collect WIC, Welfare, Food Stamps, and free education for their offspring. Who will need it when they grow up too, because they will also be smoking weed

Yes. I too will be voting yes on Proposition 19.

The legalization of cannabis for adult personal use in California is going to turn a lot of things around. The drug cartels in Mexico will suffer the most from the resulting crash in the price of marijuana. The "medical marijuana" dispensaries they have been most certainly selling to will evaporate over night. Gone. Did you know that these dispensaries have been actually fighting Prop 19? They are saying all kinds of weird stuff like cannabis will be turned over to huge corporations and the variety of stuff that you get on the street -- oh, I mean at the clinic -- will fall and so will the quality.

Anyone who thinks they are opposed to the legalization of marijuana has got to confront the reality of the "medical marijuana" dispensaries. Everybody knows that for all effective purposes, "medical marijuana" is just a license to get high and the people who are selling it, got there because they were dealing it on the street at one time. If the stuff were medicine, then how come they are still selling it at black market prices? Where is the money going?

This is how rotten this country has gotten, and the Drug War has done too much to contribute to that rot. Victory for Proposition 19 is the beginning of the end of the Drug War. And the prospect must give every dope dealer a chill up and down his spine.

The flip side to arresting and deporting the Cartel MJ growers is that once the trade is legitimized, the price of the product is going to drop. If it is no longer cost effective to compete against legal grows, the Cartel will find other business for their MJ growers. If I had a guess, it would be manufacturing Meth.

Well that's a pleasant future to look for

You are not thinking very hard on this issue. You say you went to a cancer group meeting and just one person saying that they got their sole relief from marijuana was enough to convince you to vote for "medical marijuana"? It never occured to you, not even once, that nobody getting medical marijuana would be getting it just to get high?

We are not too weak or lazy to protect our citizens from drugs, we are just too stupid. The Drug War is the consequence of moral hysteria and has nothing to do with the actual problem of confronting drugs as a source of recreation and all the hazards associated with them. The prohibition of alcohol did not work. Criminalizing alcohol did not work and criminalizing the consumption of cannabis isn't working either. It has made the hazards associated with this plant worse.

Marijuana is a social hazard just like alcohol is a social hazard. But the way to confront them is not by criminalizing them. By making marijuana legal, we destroy the extremely volatile black market and reduce its distribution to community controlled outlets. Once legalized, fewer people will be distributing it and it will be harder to get. School kids say that it is easier to get then alcohol.

In California, the dispensaries are everywhere and everyone with some kind of medical services has got their license to get high. Notice that it's not the end of the world, at least on the consumption side. Nobody is reporting some kind of plague resulting from people smoking "medical marijuana".

The legalization of marijuana will be the beginning of the end of the problem. Once legalized, inside of just a few years, consumption will drop down to less than half of what it is now, especially among young users who will no longer find it as glamorous as it once was. It is the secretive, cult like association around marijuana as a criminal activity that excites their imagination and spikes the effects of being stoned.

Here's the 92,00-plant bust in Hayfork:
http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/20...laced-traveler

He's not an illegal Alien pot Farmer, He's a "displaced Traveller"...jeez...

From the sonoma county rag.

Man killed in Mendocino pot garden raid
Sheriff's officer shot man with rifle at large remote garden 4 miles west of Tehama County line.

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article...ot-garden-raid

Pot wars

You go to the country to escape all the shootings in the city, and look what happens.
People still think they can move away from it.

This is one touchy subject with me!!!!!!!!!!!!! Meth, pot, and everything else that goes with it. Has anyone taken a walk in a cemetery? Too bad they don't say on the tomb stone what the person died from. Addiction will keep many going, more messed up and violent homes, more stealing, regardless of the price, more torn up homes and broken hearts. Easier for our children to get. I have a 13 and 15 year old and I'm like a drug undercover. It's scares me to think that they will get into that world. So far, so good.
I've seen people say that their children have died of heart attacks, when in fact it was due to an overdose. Pills are into this equation also.
Make it all legal, I love getting beaten up by a drug freak! Yes, and I've buried a few do to alcohol also.

With legalization, the distribution to children and the illicit grows and all the things that gangsters use to make black market profits will vanish, just like the violence and criminal power that we saw during the prohibition of alcohol.

And meanwhile we have a plague of "medical marijuana" dispensaries. These are nothing but places that sell pot for black market profits at black market prices to people who have a pet doctor who gave them a license to get stoned. That's all they are and we got them from a proposition. If you supported "medical marijuana", then you have a responsibility to clean up after yourself.

Vote yes for Proposition 19. We will see a crash in the street price of marijuana and we will see that suck the life out of organized crime. Marijuana distribution is one of the most profitable trades in organized crime. As a drug it requires little to no processing. You just grow it, pick the flowers off and sell it. At $50 a gram. 50$ for one gram!. You know how much a Snicker's bar weighs? Almost 60 grams! (2 ounces) At $50 a gram, a Snicker's bar would cost $3,000. This is the black market and the black market is created by criminalization of the item being marketed. Decriminalize the market and black market prices crash hard.

Vote yes for Proposition 19 and take pot out of the schools and off the streets and kick the anti-establishment/gangster chic into the rubbish heap where it is long past due.

If you are opposed to Prop 19, what do you think should be done about the "medical marijuana" dispensaries?

I agree, legalizing it will drive the Cartel out of Our State Parks/National Parks-forrests.
But like AG noted, it will probably swing Them into more meth/heroin. trafficking.
I voted for medical cannabis back in '96, and saw every thing in the book on how to abuse the system, I knew plenty of Folks with absolutely nothing wrong with Them get a 'reccomendaion", and set-up lights, and make about $3600 a lb, some counties have extremely lax regulations on growing, my County does'nt, 6 plants, or You go to jail, no profit to be made.
But when the Cartels started up bussiness growing in Ca. the price dropped to about $2000-$2500, even the "Old-School" growers up in the Emerald triangle closed-up shop, and all of those Counties are doing really bad as far as roads, schools, etc.
You'll see tons of pregnant illegals, but not a male to be seen, untill harvest, then They're all- over the place, up in Mendo/Humboldt.
Even the high School in My ancestral homeTown of covelo was closed on opening week because of the rumor of major gang fights between locals, and anchor-babies.
the old Growers bought, and spent Their cash locally.
The cartel Growers get Their supplies at places like Granger, in Barstow, or Fresno, and ship it in...I've found tons of irrigation tubing, water bladders, and such just hiking in My neck of the woods, and I usually destroy it, or remove it, or report it.
From what I know, the "dispensaries" charge about $35-$60 and 1/8th of an ounce, more for certain specialty strains, but $50 a gram?..no.

I think that Cap&trade, and the smartmeters are going to put a major dent in indoor growing.

$35 for an eighth is still $560 for a Snicker's bar.

You missed the point about the profitability of black market marijuana. All the other drugs require some kind of elaborate processing which is time consuming and expensive and the stuff cannot move without it. Even heroin comes from opium, which is extremely simple to move. You just slice the poppy pods, collect it and move it. And opium has been a real misery as a black market drug. But the economics of drug distribution now require processing and you can't get raw opium any more, you get heroin which is a complicated chemical extract of opium. All this processing is a huge risk and cuts into the profits of organized crime, but they can't move it without it.

Marijuana has no such expense. You just grow it, pick it and ship it at $35 dollars for an eighth of an ounce.

Legalization will be a dramatic blow to the cartels. Where do you think the "dispensaries" are getting their drugs from? Seriously, do you really believe that local growers are growing it all themselves, that they sprung up like magic elves to help the poor sick stoners who couldn't make it without it? Sure, the stuff is being laundered through people dispensed to grow it. They knew who the cartels were long before the dispensaries came along.

Let the doctors who write the prescription, dispense it!

No, I don't believe that the local Ma & Pa Growers are selling it to the clubs, there's no, or little profit to the risk factor in that when the Cartel flooded the market with $2000lb pot, I actually agree with You on that post.
There is albiet rather simple, a correct proccess in the harvesting of cannabis, You do it wrong, You waste Your crop's value, just like the reason pot grown in Mexico is called "dirt weed"..they messed that up.
High-end pot has to be hung & dried to about 10% moisture content, then manicured properly, a very laborious task, if You've got tons of it.
The going rate for a illegal (usually women) manicurer is around $20/hr up north.
In most Countries they just rub the plant for it's resins, and toss the whole plant away.
From what I hear, most clubs won't even buy outdoor cannabis, indoor has much more potency, and the cartels even in on that as well, do a search for "diesle-doping"..the Cartel's been running 5KW-10KW diesle generators for lights in semi buried, or covered greenhouses, or Quanset huts for years now, and let's them get a crop, or two in before the weather gets nice enough to rape the parklands..
Counties up north have put dye-markers in batches of fuel, and have found remnants flowing into Eureka bay from rivers, that flow into creeks, and alot of times they do catch these guys.

Manicuring buds is for when you are selling buds. I don't think street sales includes buds. And buds are pretty delicate. They don't move far without breaking up.

When you rub the flowers, this is rubbed hashish which is rare and expensive and does not represent the serious money in the marijuana black market. Seived hashish is more common and is still pretty rare on the street. Proposition 19 does not confront the issue of hashish -- an ommision if you ask me, especially since hashish is the more traditional way of distributing cannabis as a drug.

It remains. Marijuana is the easy money part of dope dealing for the cartels. Take it away with Proposition 19 and it will be a real blow to the economy driving the civil war down in Mexico and a good part of the economy of illegal immigration from the same place.

You are not paying attention.

The current problem is that the stuff is already in the schools. The reason it is in the schools is because criminalizing marijuana inflames the black market. By legalizing it, the black market is destroyed and the street traffic that brings it to the schools will go away.

Vote yes on Proposition 19 and we will take marijuana out of the schools. Kids will no longer be smoking pot in schools, just as they don't use alcohol in schools.

Details emerge about Mendocino pot garden victim
 

From the touchy-feely sanctuary County paper...He's a victim, hey, let's all forget that He attempted to shoot an Officer, right?
"Kalina described his former client as easy going, soft spoken and well mannered".
Former Client, busted for the same exact thing, but let's also toss-in the "hard-working Father" bit as well...this sickens Me to no end.
http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article...garden-victim-

The prohibition inflamation spreads
 

Article date: Wednesday, 7 May 2008

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7388036.stm

More prohibition crime, notice the "Mexican nationals"
 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-10811870

1.7 billion dollars for 499 pounds of marijuana and 432,000 plants. How much is that per Snicker's bar? Still an awful lot.

This happened over two years ago.

You are right. This is an old article. The article was linked at the bottom of the first article on the huge marijuana bust and I didn't look at the date.

Still, it is worth looking at again. It could have happened yesterday. It could happen again tomorrow. It is all due to our prohibition era approach to the drug problem.

From Fish and Game site today:



http://www.dfg.ca.gov/news/news10/20...a-MJ-Raid.html

More prohibition era crime and profits
 

Hmmm... Eight thousand marijuana plants at a black market value of 24-32 million dollars That's 24-32 million divided by 8 thousand for 3-4 thousand dollars a plant.

The more grows they find and bust, the more the black market prices go up. So the stuff they don't find is worth even more. And meanwhile, how much is it costing the taxpayers to have law enforcement running around looking for the stuff being grown mostly by illegal immigrants?

If we decriminalize marijuana, we will have more resources to hunt down illegals so they don't get comfortable enough to do this kind of crap. But of course we are obliged to wait around for them to commit a second crime before we can arrest them for being here illegally. And there are scumbags telling us we can't even do that.

Vote yes on Proposition 19. Destroy the black market in marijuana and watch the cockroaches scramble for crumbs.

In legalizing alcohol, we may have removed the crime syndicate from the mix, but the initial problems associated with it remained and grew. Alcoholism remains a big problem in America, and many people who don't use it are injured and killed by those who do each year. The way I see it, we negotiated with the users and got the bad end of the deal. The jails are now full of wife and child beaters, DUI arrestees, Drunk and disorderly arrests, Manslaughter, and many other manifestations of crime born out of the use and abuse of alcohol that when taken in aggregate, dwarf the magnitude of fighting the underworld.

But you are assuming that during the prohibition of alcohol that these problems went away. They didn't. And also you assume that just because alcohol was involved in a crime means that alcohol caused the criminal behavior. Furthermore, marijuana nowhere aggrevates behavior like alcohol does. Criminal activity follows marijuana only because of the criminal activity surrounding its black market distribution. Unless you have a "medical" license, the more you smoke, the more likely you are to be close to other criminal activity.

Again, remember the dispensaries. The "medical marijuana" dispensaries are nothing more than a place to sell pot to people with a license to get stoned. Does anyone dispute this? The "medical marijuana" dispensaries have been around for a long time now and we have a fixed population of regular pot smokers who buy as much as they want, any time they want and smoke as much as they want any time they want. If smoking marijuana was such a social hazard like alcohol, then we would be seeing a plague of problems that could easily be traced to the dispensary customers. If anything, the dispensaries have served to isolate users from criminal activity, even when their money goes into the pockets of organzed crime.

Think of countries in the world who have outlawed alcohol, mostly Muslim countries. Would anyone describe these countries as temperate countries, where people live peacably and morally advanced lives. If anything the state has assumed the role of a gangster, imposing cruel and sick punishment on people for the most trivial of crimes.

But even acknowledging that alcohol is a hazardous drug does not impune marijuana. Marijuana is a relatively safe drug compared to alcohol, this is indisputable. If anything we should legalize marijuana, while at the same time further restrict the distributiion of alcohol. I would support this. In many ways, the end of the prohibition of alcohol is incomplete. We need a comprehensive reorganization of our whole strategy of combating all of the socially hazardous vices like alcohol, marijuana and tobacco too.

Saying yes, won't keep it out of the schools! Crap kids sneak in booze too. And cigarettes and porn at times. This would make it easier to sneak it from their parents, or what ever. I've buried several who died at an early age to this stuff, mixed with other stuff, so like Rimo, no one can budge me on this. I don't know what will be the outcome, but it will sure dumb down our children. Even adults. Pot can be addictive. Let the doctors give it out to those that need it, and that will control it.

Do you have teenagers in school?

Your right on Ayatolla.

If kids are sneaking cigarettes, alcohol and pornography into school, then criminalizing marijuana to keep it out of schools makes no sense. It doesn't work for alcohol, cigarettes and pornography, then why should anyone expect it to work for marijuana? Why should we create an entire legal system to do something that it never is going to do?

Get rid of the prohibition of marijuana. Put police back to work doing real police work and leave the policing of children where it belongs -- their parents.

I was a teenager in school. I saw marijuana in the schools. I saw people dealing it in school. And the whole lure of dealing the stuff was the black market prices. It was easy money made by people with no sense or brains.

Maybe we should legalize, guns, and all bad things so that the world will be a better place. There have been drugs in schools since I was in school and gangs also. I have witnessed the evil this stuff brings. Families detroyed. And even if it was cheaper, would that stop the addicts from stealing less money from their parents or family? I think not!

Yes, there are many lives ruined by drugs, and that includes marijuana. Marijuana is capable of ruining your life. I've seen people smoking marijuana who should not have been doing it. Not even a little bit, and they were doing it a lot. They would get up in the morning, get stoned, and then get stoned at lunch, then dinner and then go to bed stoned. It happens. Even though marijuana is not addictive, marijuana is capable of ruining your life.

But meanwhile, we have an entire population of users who get stoned legally because they have a license to get stoned from a medical doctor. If you are opposed to legalization, then you must be opposed to the so called "medical marijuana" dispensaries. Getting marijuana from the dispensaries is not medicine, even though doctors are involved. "Medical marijuana" is not a prescription. When you get a prescription, the doctor limits how much you get and how long you get it for. With a prescription, you can buy only so much and just once and when you run out, you have to go back to the doctor and get another prescription.

But with "medical marijuana", you have a life time license to buy it whenever you want for as much as the dispensary will sell you and you can use as much as you want, any time you want. Medical doctors have made this possible and the rot in our medical establishment that this represents deserves another discussion. But meanwhile, it is to marijuana's credit that as rotten as this is, it has not been a total disaster. There are millions of people out there getting stoned regularly and there is no evidence that it is doing anyone any medical or social harm.

But there is considerable evidence that the "medical marijuana" dispensaries are contributing to organized crime. There is no accountability from the dispensaries to the public about where the marijuana comes from and where the money goes. And the dispensaries are charging black market prices.

If you are opposed to the general legalization represented by Proposition 19, then you must be opposed to the "medical marijuana" dispensaries. Since you must be opposed to the dispensaries, then what do you propose to do about them? If there are so many people rationally opposed to Proposition 19, then where is the political movement to get rid of the dispensaries?

And finally guess who is also opposed to Proposition 19? Why the "medical marijuana" dispensaries themselves. That's right, they are opposed to Proposition 19. Why? Because they know that yes on Proposition 19 means the end of the "medical marijuana" dispensaries. With legalization, nobody will need some kind of bogus doctor's license to get stoned and nobody will need to pay black market prices for some stupid plant.

We need to take our country back from the gangsters who are polluting our society with black market profits. Vote yes on Proposition 19.

Whenever you post a quote from somebody else, out of respect for the source of the quote, you always need to at least explain where you got it from and, even better, provide a link.