Not a partaker, but it is cool living in a state where I could.
My house was a “flip.” The previous occupants, reportedly the previous actual-owner’s brother-in-law, girlfriend, and kids, squatted there and had a hydroponic maryjane grow operation. My neighbor, who toured the place during renovations, said they’d ripped open the ground-floor garage walls to get at the pipes and electricity, and cut a hole between the garage and the living room, with a block and tackle.
I hope the guy has moved on to legal weed-a-culture.
And I’ve been paying attention to the political chatter around legalization in Canada. So far, the conversation is good. Like what is a safe age to start smoking? (It seems that neuroscientists tend to think mid-20s, but that would never fly with college kids.) How can police test for impaired driving? How do you ensure that local, small scale producers don’t get destroyed by corporate weed manufacturing?
These are all good questions, and they have been solved before, but at least this shows that there are grownups in charge of the country. I hope the conversation doesn’t devolve.
That’s how we got our house- it was a fixer-upper because the previous renter had a grow operation and I think the owners decided it would be too much hassle to fix the damage he did. He had even turned the driveway and backyard into a farm by just dumping a ton of soil on top of it. Walls had big holes punched out below all the power outlets. Back house had big holes in the walls and no floors- I suspect flooding because I don’t think he paid much attention to runoff from all the irrigation (which also causes problems for the landscape and some of the concrete slabs/sidewalks from all the erosion) Busted out the slab floor in the garage to put a fertilizer barrel into the ground, and the garage also had tons of electrical stuff for the high power grow lights. One closet had a security door installed. It was a ton of work.
I took that statement to mean “we should treat addiction to narcotics the same way we treat alcoholism” (which is obviously itself a form of drug addiction).
Keep your mind open, by which I mean don’t expect anything and accept whatever comes your way. Personally , I can’t stand cannabis. My already dilated/distorted sense of time and attention span is absolutely dashed on the stuff and I can’t stand it. That’s me, though. If others get their kicks from it over more hazardous alternatives (I’m looking at you, alcohol), I don’t see the problem. Legalize it already.
The company that fixed and flipped my townhouse did a good job. I did see lots of patches in the garage (ground floor) walls, but didn’t think much of it when I primed and painted.
Who cares what Jeff Sessions thinks on repeal of Federal marijuana prohibition? That is the job of Congress and Mr. Sessions is no longer a member of Congress.
Eh. That was mostly marijuana advocates trying to come up with some path towards legalization. Fact is, for every use of hemp that I’m aware of, we have a better alternative crop.
I just got my medical card today. Technically, Maine went fully legal as per ballot referendum, but they’re dragging their feet on the implementation. I was sick of waiting.
This is a bit of a tangent, but I think Massachusetts’ legalization offers up an interesting business opportunity; since growing your own is legal, someone could theoretically subdivide a piece of land in to 2’ x 2’ plots, and rent them out as an individual micro-grow areas, offering watering and pruning services, and then just calling people when it’s harvest time to come collect their weed. I suppose this could even be offered up to out-of-state customers (who would obviously have to figure out how to get it back to their home state and deal with the legal consequences of that).
Absolutely, that’d be a smart way to take advantage of things. Of course the problem is that you’re allowed to grow all you want, but can only be legally gifted seeds or plants for growing, so the first step is finding a benefactor…
Is there limit to the number of plants you can grow? I know many states limit the number - my birth state of AK (which was the first to legalize?) I think had a rule of 7 plants.
Personally I don’t smoke but I’m looking forward to when NY legalizes so I can grow some plants in my rooftop garden.
Right now, the limit is 12, but there’s a bunch of bills going through state legislature to limit it to 6, 4, or 2, depending on which bill you’re looking at. A lot of state Senators (the ones supported by the police unions, not shockingly) are deeply opposed to pot and are trying to delay or undo the law as much as possible. There’s hydroponics stores all over the place here; setting up a little nursery would be pretty easy.
One clever local guy was caught selling “artisanal ziploc bags” on Craigslist, personally customized, hand-sealed, and sold for $50-$100 apiece. As a thank-you, he’d include some pot inside the bag as a gift.
A quote I found useful: “If your drug use is causing you problems, you’ve got a drug problem.”
Of course that’s something you can’t implement in a nationwide policy, but maybe we shouldn’t be implementing any attitude towards drug use in a nationwide policy.
But a huge problem here is an antagonistic and punitive justice system. If we were dedicated to a restorative approach to justice then maybe we’d feel relieved or happy that the justice system was getting involved in the case of a person who is having problems with their drug use and causing problems for others. If we had a more positive approach to people with mental illnesses (instead of sorting them into you-need-to-be-locked-up or you’re-on-your-own buckets) maybe we’d be happy to see mental health professionals take a proactive approach when someone seemed to be causing problems for themselves.
