Drug Policy

RainDog

(28,784 posts) Mon Dec 12, 2011, 05:52 AM Dec 2011

Reagan's Greatest Economic Legacy: Indoor-Grown Hybrid Cannabis

Last edited Thu Jan 12, 2012, 01:43 AM - Edit history (2)

Ronald Reagan may have claimed that evolution is only a theory, but evolutionary genetics and the Reagan-ramped WoD created the new American cannabis and made the cannabis market more lucrative and professionally organized than would have seemed possible before the conservative mindset decided to "fix" it.

Life is full of ironies.

From Michael Pollan in The New York Times magazine, 1996:http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/how-pot-has-grown/

...in little more than a decade, marijuana growing in America had evolved from a hobby of aging hippies into a burgeoning high-tech industry with earnings that are estimated at $32 billion a year. That makes it easily the nation’s biggest cash crop. Unlike corn ($14 billion) or soybeans ($11 billion), however, modern marijuana farming depends less on soil and sunlight than technology, allowing it to thrive not only in the fields of the farm belt but in downtown apartments and lofts, in suburban basements and attics, even in closets.

Fewer than 20 years ago, virtually all the marijuana consumed in America was imported. “Home grown” was a term of opprobrium—”something you only smoked in an emergency,” as one grower old enough to remember put it. Today, thanks in no small part to the efforts of the people assembled in this hall—as well as to the Federal war on drugs, which gave the domestic industry a leg up by protecting it from foreign imports and providing a spur to innovation—American marijuana cultivation has developed to the point where the potency, quality and consistency of the domestic product are considered as good as, if not better than, any in the world.

In an era of global competition, the rise of a made-in-America marijuana industry is one of the more striking—if perhaps least welcome—economic success stories of the 1980s and 90s. Domestic growers now dominate the high end of a market consisting of at least 12 million occasional users; on Wall Street, in Hollywood, on colleges campuses, consumers pay $300 to $500 an ounce for the re-engineered home-grown product, and even more for the “connoisseur” varieties grown by the kind of small, sophisticated growers on hand for the Cannabis Cup. Peering through the haze at the conventioneers milling in the Pax Party House, Brian R. declared in a tone of deep reverence, “There are a lot of true pioneers in this room.”