Mom-and-pop pot growers cut cartels’ profits

[IDemo]

Mexican traffickers face economic battle as U.S. marijuana production rises

By Steve Fainaru and William Booth
Washington Post
updated 3:03 a.m. MT, Wed., Oct . 7, 2009

ARCATA, Calif. - Stiff competition from thousands of mom-and-pop marijuana farmers in the United States threatens the bottom line for powerful Mexican drug organizations in a way that decades of arrests and seizures have not, according to law enforcement officials and pot growers in the United States and Mexico.

Illicit pot production in the United States has been increasing steadily for decades. But recent changes in state laws that allow the use and cultivation of marijuana for medical purposes are giving U.S. growers a competitive advantage, challenging the traditional dominance of the Mexican traffickers, who once made brands such as Acapulco Gold the standard for quality.

Almost all of the marijuana consumed in the multibillion-dollar U.S. market once came from Mexico or Colombia. Now as much as half is produced domestically, often by small-scale operators who painstakingly tend greenhouses and indoor gardens to produce the more potent, and expensive, product that consumers now demand, according to authorities and marijuana dealers on both sides of the border.

The shifting economics of the marijuana trade have broad implications for Mexico's war against the drug cartels, suggesting that market forces, as much as law enforcement, can extract a heavy price from criminal organizations that have used the spectacular profits generated by pot sales to fuel the violence and corruption that plague the Mexican state.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33204195/ns/us_news-washington_post/

[hobbit709]

1. "Acapulco Gold the standard for quality.'

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:
The writer is about 35 years behind the times.

[LittleOne]

6. Best weed I ever smoked was...

Matanuska Thunder Fuck and that was grown in Alaska. And I remember the school year would start and the little sister of the best weed growers in town would come to school with her Adidas bag full of the summer crop of BC bud. Acapulco Gold was when you couldn't get anything else.

So legalize it and let economics do the rest.

[madokie]

7. First weed I smoked was acapulco gold

Man did I ever get high that first time

[piratefish08]

9. Acapulco Gold! That used to be a HUGE score in my area. In 1982.

[Captain Hilts]

2. Sometimes Capitalism works! nt

[Tansy_Gold]

3. Yesterday, bathtub gin; today, backyard marijuana

Just legalize it, for cryin' out loud. Prohibition didn't work for alcohol because it was too easily and cheaply made by individuals. Same is true of pot. Legalize it, remove (much of) the criminal element from its production and sale, and everyone's happier.

Hell, with legal marijuana, we'd probably ALL be happier, just pickin' up a whiff secondhand even!



Tansy Gold, who inhaled. . . . once

[madokie]

4. 30 years ago

I was right in the middle of the growers, but haven't put a seed in the ground now in years

[Tansy_Gold]

5. sig lines

Mr. Lincoln and Sr. Machado -- GMTA



:hi:




TG

[fasttense]

8. Well, some state and federal regulations on just selling vegetables are so

burdensome that you can't follow all of them. So, you end up growing and selling vegetables illegally, even though they are simply vegetables. The requirement to gas and refrigerate your tomatoes can not be met by most small farmers. There is no way I can keep my hundreds of tomatoes refrigerated for days or weeks until time for the market, so I simply pick them the night before the market. But technically I'm breaking the law. I should refrigerate and gas those beautiful, flavorful, healthy, natural, vine ripened tomatoes before I sell them according to state and national agriculture legislation.

So, if I'm going to go to jail for growing something, I might as well grow pot and make a hell of lot more money.