Comment by chadgpt3
25 days ago
What if they were legal but hard to get? Say, we stop/arresting for possession or use in private, stop giving dealers and producers harsh sentences, but still give them moderate to weak sentences, stop proactively searching for dealers and producers, allow companies to produce with strict KYC, and don't allow retail sale in stores?
In California weed is legal but highly regulated. It's easy to buy weed in the legal market but very difficult to be licensed to sell or grow it.
The result is that the illegal market dwarfs the legal market. The legal suppliers simply can't compete with efficient and untaxed illegal or grey market sellers.
Note that the consumers who choose the illegal market are not in general socially excluded, habitual criminals or broken down addicts. Weed is widespread in almost all parts of society and probably less prevalent along dirt poor, mentally unwell or homeless drug users, who favour fent or meth.
People with jobs and houses choose illegal weed because it's both cheaper and easier to get hold of.
Isn't it illegal in the entire US? The question doesn't seem to be whether you can obtain it legally, but how many laws you'd rather break in the process, and how much trace you'd like to leave behind. I imagine the illegal vendors are less likely to leave a discoverable trace (that could affect your future background checks etc.) than the "legal" vendors, which itself is an incentive to obtain it illegally even when it's cheaper and safer and easier to obtain less-illegally right next door.
Which basically means the US hasn't really tried legalizing it at all.
(Not advocating for any position here, just commenting on the facts.)
Source for this? I mean consumer buying habits not illegal grow ops in general (which are selling a lot of their product out-of-state).
Even with California taxes an 1/8th of flower is often less than half what I’d typically pay back in 2008 or so, even without adjusting for inflation.
Also, I suspect middle class buying preference in the last decade or so has heavily shifted to gummies/edibles and vape carts which are much sketchier in the black market vs relatively interchangeable flower.
The idea of smoking a literal bowl to get high wouldn’t even be in the first like 5 methods among the people I know. It’s not super appealing in your 30s-40s while living in apartments/not wanting to reek of weed in the office. So buying off the black market just isn’t attractive even if possible cheaper.
California is probably the best example going of how not to "legalize" weed.
However, this also highlights the primary difference between weed and meth, opiates: ease of manufacturing. The only other common drugs that come close are things like mushrooms and fermented beverages, and I'd argue both of those are still riskier.
That’s not a feature of legalization, but convenience: illegal weed is easier to get hold of even in places where cannabis is not legalized at all.