
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

Reggie: Say the patient has a 20-gram a day prescription. This equals 21.5 ounces a month, totaling about 16 pounds annually. That's 7196 grams annually for that single person. The gold standard for growers is a pound per 1000w light, per crop. Longer strains can produce as much as 2+ pounds per light.So lets say I have 16 1000w lights to grow my 16 pounds for the year. In ONE crop, I can produce my annual prescription. Hydro would cost me roughly $3000 for that period. Plant-food: maybe $400. As in any endeavor there are many incidentals, which ultimately add up over the course of a crop, but lets keep this simple.So lets say $4000 to produce 16 pounds. That's $1.79 per gram cost. There's no way the cost will stay as low as $1.80 a gram under the new guidelines.How high will it go under the new legislation?
It's gonna go through the fucking roof. It's going to make the production, distribution, and sale of medical weed a free market run by corporate types, whose only involvement in the industry is directly associated and motivated by the almighty dollar. Who the fuck else is going to spend, conservatively, 300-grand, to abide by the governments new standards per security, location, employee standards etc.? Just to start up?Take a look at this place, I slapped this bitch together for under 30-grand. It produces product as good as any I've come across.
Advertisement
Of course these new producers will be competitive, and possibly try to under cut the competition in order to sell more of their own product. And this could drive prices down. But I don't see that happening. The overhead, payroll, and red tape costs under the new regime are guaranteed to be prohibitively more expensive than, for example, mine are now. I don't have to employ a quality control person, or have a $100 000 security system with triple vault doors between the outside world and my garden.

I think most small farmers who lose their licenses will quit altogether. Guys like me will split down the middle. The ones who had decent jobs and paychecks will go back to whatever they were doing before. Most small growers are simply augmenting their income with their gardens, and not living entirely off of them anyways. More people will be on welfare. There will be a push for the cost of filling a medical marijuana prescription to be subsidized be either the government, or medical services plans, as many people won't be able to afford it anymore.The people that do continue to produce illegally will have to downsize their operations considerably to stay under the radar. Or, instead of having one big garden, they could have multiple small ones, which would cost more to operate, as they'd be having to drive all over hells half acre just to tend to the plants which, previously, would have been under one roof in one location. Also, overhead would multiply, as they would be paying rent on more than one location.
Advertisement
Corporate types with no experience in this field are looking to recruit guys like me to run their farms. The reality is that as more investors with deep coffers start up legitimate large-scale farms, small producers won’t be able to compete. The prospect of having to be a bonded business, with armored cars, insurance, a chemist, plant biologist, and accounting department, makes the switch to running a legitimate operation under the new legislation too expensive for small farmers.How do you think patients will adjust in the coming year?
Conservative estimates from Health Canada anticipate a 3gm a day user to be paying over $1000 a month under the new guidelines. That’s more than twice what most patients currently pay. For patients that grow themselves, or use a designated grower, the price augmentation will make it impossible to afford. Most will likely begin buying illicit weed, or continue growing their own, and risk falling victim to the draconian laws set out in the new crime bill, in effect sentencing poor and sick people to prison terms.What will happen to the street price of pot?
Illicit pot will go up because of the additional risk associated with producing it, like mandatory minimums for production of as few as six plants. Therefore there will be less illegal growers, hence, less available illicit product. Less supply for same current demand equals higher prices.
Advertisement