It works when Ash says it!
Mark
Posted on 12/24/2007 5:40:35 PM PST by SwinneySwitch
It works when Ash says it!
Mark
"Dave's not here, man"
Mark
I don’t like the ACLU but I have to admit this is funny and we’re well on our way, ironically with the help of the ACLU.
http://www.aclu.org/pizza/images/screen.swf
Too close to the truth—envision Hillarycare...YIKES!
That was before my time.
I’d like to try the 10 divisions of “devil dogs” first.
“$100 an oz maximum for Mexican weed in Texas has been a consistent price for almost two decades”
No, it’s getting cheaper. It used to cost a $100 an ounce where I live, but now it can be had for as little as $50 an ounce if you know where to look. If you are paying $100 an ounce in Houston for Mexican, you’re paying way more than the average price. Your supplier is making good money.
Wouldn’t call that ‘cheap.’ Tobacco’s a lot cheaper.”
You have to consider though that pot smokers don’t tend to smoke anywhere near as much pot as cigarettes smokers would smoke tobacco. According to SAMHSA, the average current pot smoker, or person who admits smoking marijuana in the last thirty days prior to taking their survey, smokes about 7 grams of marijuana per month. I’ve seen similar numbers from surveys in other countries where they are trying to determine the amount of pot the average pot smoker is smoking. A pack of tobacco cigarettes has around an ounce of tobacco in it. A lot of smokers smoke more than a pack a day. I know I was smoking close to two packs a day when I smoked. No doubt there are some pot smokers who smoke way more than 7 grams a month, but there are also those who smoke less than that amount. There are about 28.39 grams in an ounce, so the average pot smoker is smoking an ounce about every four months. I think that $60 to $80 an ounce is more expensive than it really is in Houston, but if it does cost that much then on average a pot smoker who buys Mexican by the ounce would be spending $15 or $20 a month. The average cigarette smoker will spend several times that much per month.
I've been away (thank God) from that scene for quite a while now so I know I'm not up to date on retail prices. I wouldn't doubt that it's getting cheaper. I saw average Mexican pot selling in North Texas for $75-$100 an ounce for years. It never seemed to change. Note: I never sold it, only bought it.
There are so many factors involved in how much Mexican pot can sell for. Quality, quantity, location and time of year are the biggest considerations.
Is it old, half-decayed Mexican crapweed or is it higher quality?
How much are you getting? There's usually a bulk discount but that's off the table if it's of a high quality.
Where are you located? Boise or Houston?
Houston's proximity to the border has made it known for cheap weed for years.
Time of year is also very important. Traditional Mexican pot grows during the summer so higher quantities and cheaper prices occur during the winter.
And finally there's whether or not the dealer can add value to the product by allowing discrete procurement.
If you have to drive into crack-town to visit Julio, it will probably be cheaper. If a dealer will discretely hand deliver it to your residence, the price goes up.
If you haven't seen the "Evil Dead Trilogy" of Evil Dead (optional), Evil Dead II, and Army of Darkness, you don't know what you're missing...
Mark
Equating to 3oz./year times what, $70/oz.? $210/yr.? Given that there are 15 million marijuana users, that works out to a $3B U.S. market.
LA spends that much.
But let's go with your numbers. Make marijuana legal and the price drops 90%, bringing it in line with the cost of cigarettes. Our $3B market dropped to $300 million. "Tax the hell out of it" at 100% and that brings in $300 million.
Peanuts.
I’m 52 now and in Texas in the day a lid was an ounce and it was 10 bucks and 1/2 full of stems and seeds
that vinyl lp still is the best sound.........
“All that would do is stimulate replacements. “
You are correct. Seen the articles of the growers moving into federal park lands to grow the stuff right under our noses?
Yes, growers move to Federal lands, after the Feds started confiscating the land marijuana was grown on. Action, reaction, people don’t stand still, when they are targeted. Once you realize, convicts in prisons can get all the drugs they can afford, the idea that drugs can be kept out or controlled sounds ridiculous.
“May I see your license?”
“My what?”
“Your license, where’s your license?”
“Uhhh, it’s on the bumper man, back there.”
Prices would no doubt drop as big corporate growers took over and bring production costs way down. The retail price wouldn’t drop to $7 an ounce though. People will pay a lot more than that so there is no reason why it would have to go that low. They’ll probably want a lot better quality product than the crappy Mexican most smoke now, even if it’s just smoother tasting product without the seeds and stems and not so much stronger. They’ll pay a reasonable price for this. Even at today’s prices it is cheaper to smoke pot than it is to drink beer. A few puffs, far less than a gram of even standard commercial grade Mexican is enough for most people. That’s less than 1/28 of an ounce. They those who smoke the really expensive indoor grown stuff rather than cheap Mexican tend to smoke a lot less when they smoke because the stuff they get is so expensive and because it’s a lot more powerful and takes a lot less to reach the desired effect. Hardly any buy the really expensive stuff by the ounce and most aren’t buying the cheap Mexican by the ounce either. They don’t need that much pot at a time. They buy much smaller amounts like what they might smoke in a weekend or during a week, or whatever. If they were buying it at a store they might just buy a gram or two and naturally the smaller the amount people buy the more it will cost per ounce or gram. In Holland the government set the max people can buy from retail outlets at 5 grams. We might very well see similar limits here. Even without limits like that, people would likely only buy a gram or a few grams at a time and m bet is that they would be willing to pay several dollars a gram even for the lower grade product. People who buy the super expensive stuff today might pay ridiculous amounts like $30 a gram at one of those medical marijuana coops in California or on the streets. It’s incredibly expensive compared to the cost of commercial grade and those who would spend that much today for it would no doubt pay a large premium in price for the "connoisseur" stuff when it is legal. Those producing and selling it will charge what the market will bear. Look what they do with bottled water for goodness sakes.
Taxing “the hell out of it” would probably mean flat excises sort of like what we see on tobacco and not just regular sales taxes that are assessed as a percentage of the purchase price. They might have to play with the taxes some to see what the optimal excises are, but I bet if they did something like tax commercial grade under 10% THC $2 a gram, 10% to 15% THC $4 a gram, and over 15% THC $8 a gram, or some kind of taxing scheme like that, they really would bring in a fortune in tax revenues. Producers would be producing on a large scale and making plenty of profits just because of the sheer volume they would be dealing in. The product would still be cheap for consumers compared to something like beer when you think of what it costs to get whatever level of buzz you are looking for. And even high taxes like that are not likely to encourage much of a black market because clandestine grows will never be able to come close to competing to large scale commercial grows in terms of production costs. The per pound or per ounce production costs for a closet grow under lights or even one done in a whole house under lights is always going to be a whole lot higher than production costs for high grade marijuana grown in row after row of greenhouses run by big corporate farmers. Taxing it too much would encourage a big black market, but most people aren’t going to want to buy pot off the street unless they can get it for substantially less than what they pay in the store. In the store they’ll have a wide selection of good quality product grown and handled in a regulated system with safety standards. On the streets the’d be buying God knows what from people who might have used dangerous pesticides unsafe for human consumption, who could say the product is “organic” when it’s not, who could sell inferior product claiming it is a lot stronger than it is and so on. People aren’t going to have a lot of incentive to stray from the nice clean stores with nice selections of high quality relatively safe product unless the price of the street marijuana is a whole lot less than what they can get in the store and unless retail prices of legal weed after taxes are as high as they are today or higher it’s going to be hard for clandestine producers to get product to end consumers that is substantially cheaper and still make enough money to justify the risks involved.
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