If it is so easy to acquire, how will legalization result necessarily in regulation and taxation? I am sure some users would go the legal route, but I am aware of people in states that legalized who still grow and sell their own to avoid taxes.
> Recreational cannabis sales in Missouri generated $71.7 million in revenue during its first month of legalization.
> Medical marijuana sales generated an additional $31.2 million, resulting in a combined total of $102.9 million in sales since Feb. 3, according to data from the Department of Health and Senior Services.
https://www.komu.com/news/state/recreational-marijuana-sales...
I don't smoke weed, so my opinion may not be worth much, but if I did, I absolutely would prefer getting in from a somewhat regulated outfit and be sure that it's actually what I expect it to be. I don't know if adulterated weed is a thing, though.
Sure, if between taxes and whatnot you end up with a price 100 times higher than your local dealer's, my point is moot. But I doubt that's the case. So if I could avoid having to deal with sketchy characters, that'd be a plus.
I think growing your own is an entirely different question. My mom grows tomatoes, peppers and other stuff in her garden. I live in an apartment building, so I get mine from the local store. I do enjoy eating her home-grown produce when I visit, though. Maybe there's a market for "non-industrial-grown weed", too, as there is for farmers.
From conversations around purchasing a portable freezer (to store prepreg carbon fiber rolls for my shop), from someone who turned out to be in the legal weed business (processing & drying operations between growers and sales outlets), he told me that in the non-legal supply chain there is an insane amount of adultering weed with some really nasty stuff. Some of it is in the dealer chain to make make crappy weed "better", including adding Fentanyl, and some of it is from counter-drug operations spraying herbicides that are highly toxic but not necessarily 100% effective, so survive into the remaining harvest. Seems that is mostly filtered out for the legal supply chain.
It was enough of a caution that if I were to resume partaking (haven't in decades) I'd definitely want to use a proper store, and really just get some seeds and grow my own - the only true quality control.
Edit: clarity
~30-50% of people have constructive access to a firearm at home, which means you're subject to going to prison for 15 YEARS of federal prison if you have a single joint. State legal weed is a no go for me until I can hunt squirrels without going to jail for 15 years.
Hopefully someday the federal laws will be fixed to allow retail outfits to put money in the bank rather than get robbed by violent organized crime, and to remove pot users from the prohibited person list.
I'm not from the US, so don't know how all this works, but I assume that if weed is "generally legalized", then it should be at the federal level, too.
This was nullified in wickard v filburn, where they decided growing your own plant and consuming it on the spot is interstate commerce. Obviously this is nonsensical, but the courts don't want to shake the house of cards and you'd have people screaming about the "end of the civil rights acts" and various other popular laws that depend on an extremely fudged version of interstate commerce and the 10th.
You don't have to, though. You can just grow your own tomatoes. Easy to do, and can be done with the right setups all year. But you don't. You buy wheat, or tomatoes at the store because it's easier. Sometimes you can get them from your neighbor for free, or from a local farm stand (and lets be real that farmer probably isn't tracking VAT/GST).
The vast, vast majority of buyers are still buying their MJ from retailers, and the incredible tax surpluses the states are seeing reflects that. Most of your weed, like most of your tomatoes, is coming from a store.