[420 Girl]

California's climate is perfect for growing almost anything, but the best marijuana 'grow' is a private world completely divorced from nature that produces a drug with 10 or 15 times the punch as your hippie grandparents' weed.

Mexican drug cartels grow good quality product in California national and state parks, which are the target of frequent police raids and less frequent arrests. Well-heeled consumers buy marijuana "medicine" grown indoors in an environment often devoid of dirt, sun or bugs. In about 10 weeks, a cutting from a mother plant can be grown into a bush of buds, harvested, and sealed in a turkey basting bag, known for its ability to contain the pungent smell of pot.

Big medical marijuana dispensaries offer dozens of types of marijuana, with a spectrum of colors from deep purple to tangerine orange and different tastes to boot. Years and decades of breeding marijuana has produced superior pot, growers say, and once they get a strain right, they stick with it, making cuttings of the perfect bush and then teasing them to the brink of horticultural bliss.

"What you are dealing with is frustrated sex for plants," says Wilcox, explaining how the goal is to grow female plants to the point they are yearning for fertilization, producing a sticky substance full of mind-bending chemical THC.

The process typically begins in a musky smelling basement dripping with tropical heat from high-powered grow lights, which have contributed greatly to fires in Oakland, city officials say. Clippings from the perfect mother plant, known as clones, are brushed in rooting compound. They are then set in a pot of rock wool in a tub that is regularly flooded with nutrient-enriched water.

Some growers pursue a Sea of Green strategy, raising an ocean of small plants, while others try to produce a few monsters. Farmers also may aim for a continuous harvest, putting plants of different maturity in different rooms or locations so that every week or so they can harvest a crop. Young pot plants start off with two weeks under grow lights shining 18 to 24 hours a day, helping the plants vegetate. When it's time to start flowering, lights are turned to 12-hour cycles for six weeks.

When the flowers are at peak maturity and look snowy, the plants are cut down. Leaves are stripped and turned into hash. Buds are dried and then put in mason jars and 'burped' -- given occasional breaths of fresh air -- in a regime that cures the pot, turning it sticky and stinky. Then it is put in the turkey basting bag and brought to a dispensary for sale.

The costs are minimal, falling as low as 20 cents in electricity and plant supplies for established growers whose pot would retail for as much as $20 a gram, a Los Angeles area law enforcement source estimated. That would take the cost of producing a pound of weed to under $100. The Rand Corporation puts the price a few times that, still offering plenty of room to drastically cut retail prices.

Wilcox's plan includes a 7-acre site with a 100,000-square-foot growing space, a bakery, a testing lab, job training and growing equipment production at the site -- which would need to win one of the four Oakland permits to go into business. If it did, it would produce 58 pounds of cannabis a day at wholesale prices of $2,500 to $3,000 per pound and send the city more than $2 million per year in taxes if a 3 percent growers' tax were initiated.

But Oakland could complicate his math. The city is considering an 8 percent tax on cannabis farms, more than double the top rate in Wilcox's economic analysis.

MARKET FORCES

The drive to legalize marijuana is based in the hardscrabble reality of California finances, and voters want to get paid. The invisible hand of the market also may act more like a fist on the price of marijuana. Once the Golden State, California is now the poster child for political dysfunction, tied for the lowest credit rating among the 50 states.

The prospect of a sin tax on a culturally acceptable drug has been gaining advocates for years. A bill in the state legislature would legalize pot, charge $50 an ounce tax and, according to state accountants, bring in $1.4 billion per year.

A more likely path to legalization, though, is Proposition 19, the brainchild of the Tax Cannabis movement, which would let local governments decide whether and how to regulate sales and cultivation of marijuana and would let anyone in the state 21 years or older use it.

A just-released study by the independent state Legislative Analyst's Office says that Proposition 19 could raise hundreds of millions of dollars over time.

California may be overly optimistic, according to a new Rand Corporation study. By the time taxes are high enough to produce the billions that California wants, they will have created a thriving black market. "So now you have the dual evils, lower prices and still a black market to deal with," researcher Rosalie Liccardo Pacula said, referring to the $50 an ounce charge.

If marijuana were legalized, Rand projects the price of high-quality marijuana to fall to as little as a tenth of current levels and says that usage could more than double as consumers respond to cheaper prices. A single joint, which at today's potency is enough to get a single person high a couple of times, would cost $1.50, even taxed at $50 per ounce.

More than half of that cost would be the tax, though, and as the novelty of legalized pot wore off, consumers who at first found a $1.50 joint a rock-bottom deal, might start to see it as a rip-off. The same joint could be had, untaxed, for half price on a street corner. "As time goes on, the black market prices will look more appealing," said Pacula.

But there is one way, Rand found, for California to boost tax revenue substantially: exports. "California could actually make a lot of money from taxing marijuana and then exporting it to other states," said study author Beau Kilmer.

Using publicly available prices of marijuana throughout the United States, researchers imputed the costs of smuggling and calculated that high-quality California marijuana, even at taxed prices, could undercut current prices of comparable pot in 42 of 48 continental U.S. states, even with the $50 per ounce tax that Pacula calculates would create a black market. Six times as many marijuana users are outside California as in the state, Rand quoted federal studies as showing.

One industry source, who is still involved in illicit drug circles and requested to remain anonymous, said he recalls prices falling in Los Angeles as medical marijuana dispensaries exploded there. Early on in his career, high quality marijuana went for $6,000 to $7,000 a pound. "Now you are getting $3,500. What's going to happen when you legalize? You are going to take it a couple of states (east)," he said. Growers and vendors with expensive taste would not be able to continue to lead the high life at legal prices, he said.

Also, not everyone buys the theory that California will become a rogue drug state that can undermine national efforts to put a lid on marijuana. The free market is pitting different cities eager for marijuana revenues against one another, and small growers at the Oakland council meeting threatened to leave the city if taxes were too high.

U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, in an interview cast cold water on California export potential. "I quite frankly don't see that," he said. "I just don't see it as being something that suddenly people in Kentucky say, 'Ah now marijuana can be shipped in from California."'


NewsHawk: Ganjarden: 420 MAGAZINE
Source: FOXBusiness.com
Author: Reuters
Contact: FOXBusiness.com
Copyright: 2010 FOX News Network, LLC
Website: High finance and corporate pot, California style

* Thanks to MedicalNeed for submitting this article


http://www.420magazine.com/forums/in...nia-style.html