“You say there was a big shift where pot growers all started cooking meth instead. I say that’s bs. There is no evidence of that. Meth use went up for a while in this country. It’s slowly but surely going down now according to government figures.”
I must admit that my statement about the shift from marijuana to meth was wrong and based upon a bad correlation between reduced marijuana production and increased meth before the OTC drugs crackdown.
The facts are that marijuana production in Oklahoma has gone down because of the improved interdiction methods developed there by law enforcement. They have teams that use Army “Air Assault” type tactics to get the remote fields. It has been quite effective. The fields are much fewer and smaller today than 10 years ago. The shift now has been to still use “Air Assault” tactics but to use herbicides on the small fields. This is information that can be obtained from the State of Oklahoma narcotics enforcement websites.
I believe you think this will drive the cultivation to greenhouses and indoor small crops. You are probably correct about this. The days of large cultivated fields are over. I don’t think that indoor cultivation will ever amount to much - a large scale operation would be interdicted.
Regarding meth labs. I believe they are also declining because of intensified interdiction and the drying up of OTC medications as a source for psueodofed. As as large source of drugs, you are correct that they only produce small quantities. They do present a horrible problem for those that have to clean up the HAZMAT left behind.
The comments about the recycling of urine for meth came from a “reliable” source of someone who works in the HAZMAT arena. However, it sounded “silly” to me also and I should not have repeated it. The cost to extract meth form urine seems to make this seem impractical.
It is obvious to me that any attempt to “convince” persons to stay out of the illicit drug use/production is wasted band width. I won’t attempt to do so anymore.
I will just close by saying that I agree with the current “Drug Czar” that those of you engaged in the illegal use, manufacture/cultivation, and distribution of “drugs” (to include marijuana) are in essence “terrorists” (to various degrees of culpability). To engage in these activities is open sedition against the legitimate U.S. Government and should be treated as such.
As for domestic cultivation of marijuana, airborne interdiction efforts have been in place for decades. Marijuana growers don’t tend to cultivate large open fields, but they can still grow a lot in several smaller plots. For the most part that’s how they’ve been doing it in Mexico for a long time now too. The feds estimate that several thousand tons of U.S. grown marijuana make it to the illicit market in this country every year. Interdiction efforts only result in seizures of a small portion of that grown in this country. I think a lot of it that makes it to market makes it because law enforcement turn a blind eye. Corruption is rampant in a lot of the sparsely populated areas where outdoor marijuana growing is prevalent.
As for the increase in indoor growing, that’s a trend likely to continue. Partly this is because of domestic interdiction efforts, but it might also be because of the tightening of our borders. Mexican marijuana is apparently cheaper in my area than it has been in decades, but that may just be because we’ve had a huge increase locally in our Mexican population in recent years opening our area to new distribution networks and flooding our local illicit drug market with Mexican product. I’ve been reading and hearing through the grapevine that Mexican organized crime are bringing more people up to grow marijuana in this country because border security tightening has been making smuggling more difficult. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but if it is expect to see a lot more indoor grown marijuana.
I don’t think these grows are as easy to stop as you think they are. Up in Canada I believe most marijuana is grown indoors. Police find a lot of the grows, but still only a tiny percentage of them. Our local law enforcement interdict a lot of huge loads of pot on the highway, but still only a tiny percentage of those going down the road. Organized crime can afford to lose a few several hundred pound loads from time to time because their investment in the product is only a small fraction of what they’ll be able to sell it for (and just a very tiny fraction of what law enforcement will claim it is worth when they seize a load). These guys could tap into utility lines and steal electricity at several locations and it won’t really hurt their bottom line if they lose a few locations every year. This is going on in Canada right now and from what I understand it’s happening more and more in this country.
Indoor grown marijuana is very expensive compared to outdoor grown product. Regular compressed Mexican marijuana, the brickweed local law enforcement are always seizing, costs maybe five or six hundred a pound where I live, sometimes more, sometimes less. I was talking to a drug task force officer recently who told me he’s able to find pounds for $400 all the time now. Indoor grown marijuana is likely to cost thousands of dollars a pound. It costs a lot more to produce, but it retails for several times the price of regular commercial grade Mexican. It’s the fancy single malt Scotch of marijuana, and commercial grade Mexican is low priced beer in comparison. The fancy indoor grown stuff has “snob appeal” like an expensive bottle of liquor. It’s a lot more powerful than commercial grade marijuana, and a whole lot more expensive, but then again people don’t have to smoke nearly as much of it to achieve the desired effect so while it may costs several times what the cheap stuff costs those who use it aren’t necessarily going to be spending several times as much on what they’ll consume in a given period.
Most the indoor grows we see now in my area are tiny little operations by college kids or other rather benign types, but my bet is that we’re going to see a lot more involvement by organized crime in the future like they are seeing in Canada and in some parts of this country. And we’ll also see a lot more of the small grows. Two or three thousand watts worth of grow lights can be enough to produce several pounds of super expensive marijuana every eight or ten weeks or so, product worth thousands of dollars, and the electric bill probably won’t go up a hundred bucks a month. Most of the lights are devoted to flowering and they’re only on 12 hours out of the day. These smaller grows can be quite profitable for people and for the most part they are relatively undetectable and not likely to be discovered by law enforcement. Meth labs were a lot easier to find because there were always so many screw up tweakers involved with all of them who were likely to get arrested and lead police back to labs in hopes of keeping themselves out of prison. That and people involved with these labs were constantly on the prowl for more pseudoephedrine tablets and controlled chemicals and so on so they could keep batch after batch going and this suspicious activity was always leading police to labs. The guy with a little grow in his walk in closet or his basement or an extra bedroom isn’t likely to come under police radar unless he has a big mouth and tells a lot of people about his grow.
We are spinning our wheels fighting against the marijuana trade. Guys like our drug czar complain about all the new super potent marijuana on the market these days, when in fact it’s our policies that are encouraging people to grow indoors where they’ll have to focus on higher potency product so they can get a higher price to cover their much higher costs in producing the product. It’s not unlike Prohibition where hard liquor was much more prominent in the market than beer and wine than it was before or after the ban on alcohol. The more we drive marijuana production indoors, the higher average potency of seized marijuana will go. Prices may go up, but before long the market will be saturated with indoor grown product and prices will go down, which is exactly what happened in Canada when indoor growing really took off there.
I’m not one of those guys who wants to legalize all drugs. I think it would be a really bad idea to legalize the hard stuff like cocaine, meth, and heroin. Those super expensive drugs are just too addictive and those addicted cause a lot of serious harm to innocent people and society in general. The prohibition against these drugs does cause us problems, as some here complain, but I think we’d have worse problems if we made these substances cheaper and more available. The fight against pot though I think is not worth the trouble. It’s not harmless, but it’s nothing like these other drugs and it’s already relatively cheap and widely available. We’re just spinning our wheels trying to make it go away. Millions of people in this country smoke it. It’s everywhere. It’s far and away the most commonly used of all the illicit drugs. The last time the feds did a supply estimate they estimated that between 12,000 and 25,000 metric tons were available in this country in a year after law enforcement seized all they were going to seize. Feds and local law enforcement may seize a couple of thousand tons or more a year but they really aren’t even putting a dent in the overall supply. We’re filling up prisons, wasting a fortune, wasting a lot of man hours and valuable resources, all for naught. Pot is cheap enough that just about anyone can afford to do it, even to be a fairly regular user, and it’s so available that anyone who wants to do it would have no real trouble finding suppliers who can get it for him anytime he wants it. I really think that most people who want to smoke pot probably already do. What we have now is a thriving multibillion dollar marijuana industry that is entirely unregulated and run largely by organized crime who profit handsomely from it. The government would have a lot more control over marijuana if they just regulated the industry and taxed it similar to the way we do with alcohol now. It would create hundreds of thousands of legitimate tax paying jobs, generate tax revenues, and channel all these billions of dollars in profits to tax paying law abiding citizens rather than criminals.