We’ve now entered the era of legalization where the underperformers who took big money to get the ball rolling need to explain the numbers on things to Dad or an even wider array of angry investors. The promises of big money have proven true for few while the landscape is riddled with the corpses of other companies that had similar conquest plans for the marketplace.
There are various reasons they might not have quality marijuana, but much of it will trace back to the points I noted in my last edition of WEIRDOS where I covered the finer points of The Croptober Crisis. The general premise there was a lot of great marijuana gets ruined after it’s chopped down, both indoor and outdoor. It’s just extra bad in October because so many people screw up their weed at once like a school of fish taking a left turn into a trash can.
But now we’re a couple of months removed from those hiccups and the excuses are drying up. By now, those in the worst shape realize it’s going to be tough. They need to start finding something to blame.
The first choice for many? The traditional market.
They argue that the market that has existed for 60 years is the reason their boof won’t sell. While in contrast, many of their most successful competitors came from that very market only to cut their piece of the pie in legal cannabis. The busters hate them the most due to the authenticity they see and know they’ll never need to buy.
But even then, you’d never hear the numerous legacy operators that couldn’t survive the perils of the California marketplace blame the traditional marketplace they had emerged from for their problems. They blame taxes, crime, and overregulation, not the box going to New York that was growing in Billy’s eight lighter.
The new faces have basically taken the exact opposite approach. It’s not the shortcomings of their efforts and the system that have led to their situation in their eyes but the consumer who wants better cannabis. Sure there are the companies that fill shelves instead of them with a quality product, but why blame those who have jumped through the same hoops and beat them fair and square?
It’s much easier to point to the scarier beast of the underground market that we’ve come to call the traditional one. One of the newest common practices is pointing to trace amounts of anything scary and using it to paint blanket pictures of the market. Much of the time, if the bar had been lower and burden lighter the people growing all the unregulated marijuana wouldn’t have been left behind to do what they did until the market crashed.
Following the crash of the market, currently you can find $100 pounds between San Francisco and Arcata, Humboldt County’s coastal population center. A lot of the people that live off that famed stretch of coastline grew cannabis for decades and didn’t plant this year. Many of those left love the land they live on. A big factor in the demise of the peers was the flood of legal cannabis that entered the traditional market after sales.
So when you hear the less than-successful corporate entity bashing the traditional market, it’s important to highlight that their peers are the ones growing a lot of the worst products that will find its way to the streets. They act like it’s these dangerous people flooding the streets with cannabis making it impossible for them to be an effective business model.
The worst offenders will point to the dangers of cannabis on the streets compared to theirs. But in reality, we haven’t seen any real danger in the traditional market since the vape crisis that emerged from underground producers using a cutting agent that decimated many people’s lungs; it was arguably the biggest PR nightmare in the short history of legal cannabis despite the fact that the products harming people weren’t regulated.
Trying to attach all the flowers on the street to that danger is trash. Are there nefarious operators growing cannabis without using the best practices we would prefer? Sure, on both sides of the market. But to claim that all the weed that’s grown without a permit is somehow guaranteed to be more dangerous than the mids you were able to produce is just obnoxious.
So if I could make one recommendation, don’t support those companies that blame the streets for their problems.
