The Legal Troubles of Bob the Cannabis Farmer in the Legal Marketplace Leave a comment
In the pre-legal days, times were simple. You sent a text to a buddy, spoke in code and met in a weird place to pick up a small zip plastic baggie full of dry cannabis flowers. Yep. How simple it was. You didn’t give much thought to what you got. You just laughed at the funny name you could only guess and giggle at the origin of. White Castle is probably named that because somebody got the mad munchies and pigged out at the restaurant – you thought.
A question we all used to ask was I wonder how Bob is doing with his crop this year? We kept this question in our head, but all of us asked it even if your grower pal’s name wasn’t Bob.
A few months later, Bob’s crop was harvested, cured, trimmed and ready to go. It was perfect. Just what you had come to expect from a man with so much experience under his hoe.
You knew and trusted that Bob cared about his plants and he knew how to grow marijuana. Bob had fair prices too, 1 gram of weed would usually be 8-10$, cheaper than the meal you’re going out from after you had a smoke of his craft cannabis .
That’s how it went. If Bob didn’t get busted, he could theoretically do this full time for the rest of his life as a passion project, and a low overhead income so long as his property was well suited to outdoor growing.
Laws, or Flaws?
In 2018, times changed. A version of what people wanted, a conditional Cannabis Act was signed into law. Some issues have come up for Bob with these new laws.
To grow marijuana legally, you now need a government issued license and hundreds of thousands of startup dollars to buy all the equipment government entities (most of which don’t know a thing about cannabis) tell Bob how he needs to start growing his plants if he doesn’t want to be charged as a criminal for being a part of the black market cannabis trade.
Bob can’t afford that. He’s a farmer, not a financial guru. So, he’s left with two choices. Go underground, or end his livelihood as he knows it and start looking for new sources of income, whatever they may be. Bob may have been a friend to some, but there’s no shortage of people who’ve frowned upon cannabis over the last several decades.
Stories like Bob’s are more common by the day. Large, government regulated indoor growing operations have started to take hold in order to fill a less educated consumer demand. Veteran growers like Bob, for the most part, couldn’t make the switch because of the laws that say they have to pay if they want to stay.
There’s a problem with that. If knowledgeable growers are forced out, we’ll lose medical diversity in the plants because large companies will get fixated on the consumer demand for more potent products.
Let’s face it, youth determine trends, and if the trend is high THC strains only, then the medicinal genetics of certain strains might vanish, and who knows what a succession of these vanishings could do for medicinal cannabis?
Conclusion
Like we said, Bob’s story is far from unique. Traditional craft growers like him and are being forced out right, left, and center. They can’t afford to bring their operations up to code, and if they want to keep growing without a license they can only keep 4 plants. To be fair that’s great for a single, but he wasn’t just doing this for himself.
We resonate with people like Bob and make small batch cannabis available, to support growers who decided to go the route of licensing themselves as small batch growers.
How does Bob’s story resonate with you? Let us know in the comments below.
Additional Resources
Cannabis Act Review: Medical Cannabis and Cannabis Health Products
Canadian Cannabis | Understanding Legal Cannabis Market Dynamics
