Go smoke a bowl and you’ll get over it.
That was EXACTLY what I was going to post. LOL
Bogarted again…
hahahahahahahaha
I must be getting better if I beat anyone to a comment. haha
Speaking of being high, a review of Howie Kurtz’s book from someone at Wonkette that hasn’t read it yet, just clips from WP.
This SNL clip is good enough to watch wo being high! Lucky for us not living in a pot legal state!
The law, which goes into effect July 1, allows adults to possess up to 1 ounce of marijuana, two mature and four immature plants.
A mature outdoor plant can easily yield several pounds at harvest time. So let’s say the two mature plants yield a total of 4 pounds of pot. 16 ounces per pound. 16x4=64. So the person growing the plants is supposed to throw away 63 ounces and keep just one?
It’s almost as if the people who write these pot laws don’t have a clue about the cultivation of the plant they’re regulating.
Nah, couldn’t be. 
If they’re not careful, the people of Vermont might all end up with calves the size of cantaloupes or something.
I am waiting for courts to struggle defining case law on what constitutes a mature versus an immature plant. Meanwhile, plant breeders are working on strains that retain immature phenotypical traits. Progress!
I’m one of those odd people who do not like the psychoactive effect that cannabis has on me. Never have. That said, I am thrilled there are so many wonderful cannabis products for people like me. I have been using CBD dominant strains such as Harlequin Tsunami and Charlott’s Web for some time now. I use tinctures, edibles, and topicals. I get the medicinal effect without the high. We really need to move away from the ideas promoted by Jeff Sessions that cannabis users are degenerates of society. Most of the people that go to my particular dispensary are well dressed and drive BMWs and Volvos. The days of the cheesy dime bag are over.
Helpful connection: Sessions with dime bag. Racism and Prohibition. Who are his straight people anyway?
Our views toward this largely unknown substance may change when the therapeutic benefits become more developed and widely applied. In the mean time,the antiquated sterotypes applied to cannebis will persist…the sessions generation and associated sterotypes are aging and the momentum toward a more enlightened approach progresses.
I’m assuming the 1 oz limit refers to daily walkin’ around reefer. If not, you can always say the big 63 oz bag belongs to your friend.
You must be one hell of a gardener to get anywhere near that much from a single plant. Even an outdoor plant. You must also live in a climate with a long enough growing season. That ain’t Vermont. It can be done, but not without years of experience. Your average Joe might expect 2-3 ounces of dried bud from a good sized plant
Your point is well taken, but since the law sets the limit at number of plants (not square footage of canopy) I have a feeling that at least some Vermonters are going to learn how to grow the largest plants they possibly can. In fact I bet some already are, they just haven’t been bragging about it, for obvious reasons. That may change with this legalization…so you may see prize-winning plants bragged about the same way people show off their prize-winning pumpkins.
In California’s “Emerald Triangle” (Humboldt, Trinity and Medocino counties), when the limit was number of plants, 2 lbs per outdoor plant would be considered small and amateurish, and 3 or 4 lb plants were more like the norm among reasonably skilled outdoor growers (and exceptional plants, which are real monsters, can be as much as 10 lbs or more). Now that they’ve gone to square footage as the limitation (acreage in the case of commercial grows!) there’s no longer a need to emphasize such large plants, and indeed as I understand it it’s more efficient to grow lots of small plants.
Still, some people continue to grow the big monsters, in part from habit and tradition, in part as a matter of pride, and in part because it’s still not legal federally, so there is still some risk (at least in theory) and number of plants affects both your risk of being targeted, and what the penalties are.
Vermont’s climate and growing season is, of course, quite different, but by starting them early indoors or in greenhouses before moving them outside, I bet you could get at least 1-2 pounders without much difficulty.
But again, your point is well taken, most people just growing for their own personal use won’t bother doing that, and will be lucky (and happy) to get quarter-pounders.
Really, my point is that square footage of canopy makes a lot more sense as a limit, because the amount that can be produced per plant varies widely by growing method, whereas the amount per square foot of canopy varies a lot less.
Agreed. Limiting space vs. number of plants makes much more sense.
I’ve seen YouTubes of those 10lb Humbolt County plants… makes my eyes water just thinking about it.
And appearing by their childhood family nicknames in racist rants by Gov. Le Page nearby.
I’ve never seen a 10 lb plant in person, but have certainly seen plenty of 3 and 4 pounders, and more than a few 5 or 6 pound monsters. Largest yield from a single plant that I know of from a reliable source (in other words a person I know) was about 12 pounds. Photo of the live plant didn’t look that impressive – until they showed me the second photo, with a person standing next to it to show the scale. Was at least 12 feet tall and probably twice that in diameter!
That was when I was out that way for a visit some years back, when people were still trying to stay within the DA’s limit of 99 plants per person. Now they’re issuing commercial permits for multiple acres of canopy. Not surprisingly, the price to the farmer has now dropped to below $1,000 a pound…interestingly though, the prices at the first recreational pot shops that just opened, are as much as $300 per ounce (and higher prices in smaller quantities). Which means a lot of money going to the middlemen – and to the government for permits and taxes. Nowhere near as much of a price drop as predicted for the average person looking to buy a quarter ounce or something. But that may come with time and more competition at the retail level.
As had been predicted by many folks, the small “Mom and Pop” growers out there are disappearing fast, as the industry consolidates with larger, much more heavily capitalized and mechanized commercial grows that are better positioned to compete given these lower wholesale prices, and better equipped to deal with the mountain of regulations and documentation required for “fully legal” (at the state level) operations. But the highest quality still comes from the experienced old-school small(ish) growers, so some are hanging on by developing niche markets and value-added products and cooperatives and so on. And of course there’s still a huge black market crop serving states where it’s still totally illegal (for which the Emerald Triangle locals say “thanks dumb, backward states – including almost all the red states – for keeping it illegal in your states and sending so many billions of dollars to California each year!”)
From what I hear from friends out that way, the local economies are starting to feel the pinch as a much larger percentage of the profits are siphoned out of the counties to owners who live elsewhere, leaving less money in the pockets of local growers, who mostly spend that money locally. Not a full-scale economic crash yet, but everyone’s bracing for it…not just the growers, but all the local merchants and businesses. Kind of an inevitable effect of the end of “price supports” (in the form of law enforcement) and an economy overdependent for decades on a single crop. Sadly, this is not a new dynamic for these communities – they’ve been through the boom-and-bust cycle with logging a number of times.
On the bright side, it may be a great place to buy rural vacation / retirement property in a few years, as the hyper-inflated price for rural parcels not really suitable for competitive agriculture – or much of anything else – collapses, leaving many rural properties with wells and buildings and other infrastructure that never would have been built there if it had not been for the opportunity to make a living growing pot in remote areas where law enforcement pressure was low and the high number of neighbors doing the same thing created a “safety in numbers” dynamic.
The laws vary so much from state to state - and they’re changing all the time. I hope there’s room for the small, boutique growers out there. We’re seeing that in the beer industry right now. As the industrial brewers took over the market with low-cost product, they lobbied for laws to help them freeze-out the little guys. We’re now seeing a resurgence of craft beers - and all the industrial brewers are feeling the pinch. Every one of them are experiencing sales drops of 25% from 5-10 years ago. Big breweries are closing. Producers continue to consolidate. And craft brewers are popping up like mushrooms.
There’ll be opportunities out there. Just gotta be in the right place, at the right time, with the right skills.
Indeed. But as a way of life for entire rural counties in northern coastal California (where not everyone grows, but almost everyone is impacted by the economic ripples) that era is rapidly coming to a close. Which is a mixed blessing – people will miss all that extra cash circulating through the economy, but won’t miss the raids, home invasion robberies, and ecological damage from taking too much water from the rivers during the long dry summer seasons.
How quickly versus gradually this transition occurs will help determine whether it’s an all-out crash, with ghost towns like the gold-mining and logging booms left behind, or a more benign shift to other activities and opportunities.
A lot of people made out well over the past 20 years, and some of them saved and invested, so there’s seed money (pun intended!) to try lots of things. Some people got in late and foolishly went into debt to get up and running at a scale that was considered large a few years ago, but is now small and non-competitive with the multi-acre legal grows or even the larger blackmarket grows – those late-arriving people are going to get crushed, if they haven’t already. I’ve already heard of people abandoning their properties and mortgages (and most commonly, owner-financed sales) after losing money this past season as supply continued to skyrocket and prices continued to fall (welcome to the reality of farming, folks). Fortunately most of those are out-of-area would-be get-rich-quickers. Smarter locals have been bracing for this crash for a long time, squirreling away cash, investing in legal businesses, etc.
And I know parents out there that are quite relieved that their kids won’t come of age into a local economy where there was (relatively) easy money to be made in the pot industry, because one of the effects was to pull so many of these kids into “the biz” instead of college (or after college), with the result that a large part of the recent generation never tried their hand at other economic pursuits, at least until now.
So one effect of the end of the pot monoculture out there will be to release the creative and productive efforts of people who might otherwise have just continued in the business because it was fairly lucrative and was the path of least resistance. Kind of like coal mining families, where it was a way of life for so long – except that at least in the case of Northern California, there is better education and social services. And with the economic power of the not-too-distant big cities in the Bay Area there should (hopefully) be enough economic opportunities for these kids as the economy changes.