When I fantasized about legal cannabis in college, I never thought about the possibilities of a bureaucratic nightmare besieging our state’s eventual legal weed program.
Instead, I would look at the photos of cannabis plants in high times magazine with a look of awe on our face and full of hope that I’d have access to the best weed in the world once it became legal in our area.
At the time the people I was with and I had no choice but to buy it from local growers on the black market. Very little of it at a single point was coming from out west where it was legal at the time. There were a lot of lake house growers who had hydroponic setups in their garages and spare family rooms while trying to evade police detections for a number of years. Some of the weed the people I was with and I obtained from these local black market growers is almost as superb as the legal cannabis that I buy from dispensaries nowadays. But this was not consistently the case, and often the people I was with and I were forced to smoke moldy marijuana or buds that were obviously grown with pesticides at a single point or another. I was so focused on cannabis legalization for the sake of it that I failed to consider possible negative side effects of the legalization process. Your marijuana industry’s success in your state is going to depend on how it is set up by your state government. Even the “best” marijuana industries out west are being stymied by too many state taxes that are leaving cannabis users more financially burdened than ever before. I should be ecstatic that the people I was with and I don’t have these cannabis taxes here, but the people I was with and I have rules that force us to keep products in original containers with their printed labels when the people I was with and I transfer our weed from our lake house to another.