News Reality of legal weed in California: Illegal grows, deaths

[thegreenhand]

Reality of legal weed in California: Illegal grows, deaths​

Paige St. John
LA Times
8 Sep 2022

Excerpt:

At sunset from atop Haystack Butte, the desert floor below shimmers with a thousand lights.

Illegal cannabis farms.

At this hour and distance, serene hues cloak the rugged enclave of Mount Shasta Vista, a tense collective of seasonal camps guarded by guns and dogs where the daily runs of water trucks are interrupted by police raids, armed robberies and, sometimes, death. So many hoop houses pack this valley near the Oregon border that last year it had the capacity to supply half of California’s entire legal cannabis market.

Proposition 64, California’s 2016 landmark cannabis initiative, sold voters on the promise a legal market would cripple the drug’s outlaw trade, with its associated violence and environmental wreckage.

Instead, a Los Angeles Times investigation finds, the law triggered a surge in illegal cannabis on a scale California has never before witnessed.

Rogue cultivation centers like Mount Shasta Vista now engulf rural communities scattered across the state, as far afield as the Mojave Desert, the steep mountains on the North Coast, and the high desert and timberlands of the Sierra Nevada.

 

[Delmonte421]

the prices for legal weed is fucking ridiculous in Cali. An oz can easy be 400+ with taxes or without at MedMen. On Colorado you can get 1 oz for like 50 bucks and the same in organ so what is cali taxing it so much and forcing people to go to the illegal market and not revising a cheaper alternative.

 

[Felonious Monk]

Comparing MedMen to reality isn't fair. They're dying and barely hanging on, they'll be out of business soon because no one shops there, especially in California. You can get ounces of good herb below $200 if you shop at the right places. $20-30/g for oil.

 

[Delmonte421]

Comparing MedMen to reality isn't fair. They're dying and barely hanging on, they'll be out of business soon because no one shops there, especially in California. You can get ounces of good herb below $200 if you shop at the right places. $20-30/g for oil.

thats good news, it was fun as a tourist for the first time but as someone who goes to LA a lot its stupid expensive compared to the delivery services that also deliver mushrooms too.

 

[Felonious Monk]

thats good news, it was fun as a tourist for the first time but as someone who goes to LA a lot its stupid expensive compared to the delivery services that also deliver mushrooms too.

Yeah it's unfortunate people don't know better and get ripped off there, there's lots better legit shops in LA. Though a lot are in the Valley because the rent is cheaper, or at least that's where I lived.