Quote:
Originally Posted by blankall
I really disagree. I also live in Vancouver and have met many people involved in the drug trade over the years. Lower level types tend to deal in Marijuana. The bigger guys all know where the real money is: cocaine, heroin, and meth.
I've never heard of a turf war over someone selling weed to his college buddies. All the violence in Vancouver is coming from the big time gangs involved in the sale of hard drugs.
Same thing with the violence in small town Alberta/Edmonton. These cities are acting as hubs for cocaine distrubution.
The money just isn't there in the grow ops. Lets say you've got a major grow op with 1000 plants. Your looking at an ouput of around 1000 lbs/ year under ideal conditions, which translates into a value of just over 1,000,000.00. You've put a lot of work into that both in terms of production and sales.
Meanwhile moving a few bricks of cocaine/meth/heroin can get you the same return. Takes a fraction of the time and effort.
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I agree with you and likely wasn't making myself very clear.
The currency is that weed is an easy cash crop to fund your other ventures. It's a tap that never turns off. Often, as you mention, it's far easier to muscle your way into an existing operation than start one from the ground up. There is inherent violence involved in this.
Obviously the money is in high level trafficking (hard drugs, sex, people), but you get the currency to buy into and finance things through the marijuana trade and the associated bribery, extortion, racketeering, embezzlement etc that go along with it.
The whole point is that weed isn't something that should be a cash crop for precisely the reason you state. The only thing making it profitable is it's illegality.