Guthrie said that the quasi-legal status of smaller growing arrangements, combined with consumers’ preference for potent, high-maintenance weed, has shifted the balance of the pot business away from large-scale farms. “There’s a lot more people doing little scenes,” he said. The welter of laws pertaining to medical marijuana in California has offered careful operators like Guthrie the best of both worlds: prosecution for growing and selling has become much less likely, while federal busts and seizures keep prices high.
Too bad David Samuels, the author of this well-reported article, doesn’t use the term artisanal marijuana. Artisanal cheesemakers, etc., might learn something helpful from this. For example, maybe it helps that raw milk is slightly illegal. After he wrote Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser wrote about underground economies. Maybe he’ll eventually write Slow Food Nation.
A friend of mine spent a year growing pot in her California basement in response to the economic trends described in Samuel’s article. She stopped when her business partner became too unreliable.
Hm, it seems like there’s a trend of expansion and contraction. People start off developing marketable ideas as autotelic hobbies, then they or someone else popularizes their product, and then the market evolves such that new hobbies can be supported, refining what exists. Someone who’s interested in plants discovered the drug-element of marijuana (or coffee to reference your previous post), a subculture develops of enthusiastic hobbiests, then the drug gets popularized and mass-produced, and then a demand for a more refined form of the product develops and new hobbiests breed newer forms of the drug. Are we, through this process, becoming more and more refined aesthetes?