Quote:
Originally Posted by flamesfever
So Hoot, if we legalize marijuana, wouldn't most users just grow their own, and if they did, that ould surely eat into the government revenue. Comparing alcohol, it would be a lot easier to grow a plant than to distill alcohol.
And if users had marijuana plants sitting around the house, it would be easy for kids to grab the odd leaf and smoke it. I can even
remember trying to smoke burdock leaves as a kid. Luckly we only had cigarettes and booze when I was growing up in the 40's and 50's. The drug culture didn't really start until the 60's.
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First off you don't smoke the marijuana leaf, as much as it's the face of the drug war, you smoke the bud (flower) of the plant.
Second, I highly doubt a person would be growing where a kid or anyone would have access to it. It would most likely be in a locked area, not only for safety reasons (kids, criminals, etc) but so the cycle of the plant isn't screwed with while people go in and out. You can't just put them in your living room and water them daily, they need a certain cycle when flowering (12hr on/12hr off, for lights) so that can't be broken.
Third, it would need time to dry, smoking the bud right off the plant is not very potent, if not useless. Drying coverts the THC into it's psychoactive form and removes 3/4th of the water from the plant/bud. There is also a window someone would have to pull the bud off the plant for it to get you high.
TBQH if someone is that careless with their plants, then they are probably just as likely to leave their smoke-able marijuana laying around for kids to take so it won't change much. People will always be careless but that has nothing to do with legality of it.
And of course you are going to have people growing it, but I bet it would be a fraction of people just like those who brew their own beer/wine at home. It's not like people plant a seed and have marijuana to smoke in a week, it is a long process and how many people would have the patients, money, space and time?
Growing by seed you are looking at 17-18 weeks, clone 13-14 weeks, by the time it is smoke-able marijuana. Of course if someone had two rooms they could cut that cycle in half but then you are talking twice as much space, twice as much time (to work on them), and twice as much money for set up.
Assuming the government would sell under the current black market you would have to wonder how much money would someone save, even as a high end user, to make it worth the risk as it could still be illegal to grow, or grow enough to make it worth your while.
Why aren't we overly concerned with kids taking swigs of their parents home brew? My guess is because like a home marijuana grow parents would take the precautions to make sure their kids don't get into it.