Ahh..but you are forgetting one thing baldrick..Perhaps the most important... This is a cash cow for our broke ass States, they want their cut and need that dough to balance bloated budgets from pissing away money like drunken sailor on leave... They tax the dogshit out of these legal producers..that's why the prices are high..they would love to undercut us and freeze most out.. But with the thirsty ass government with one hand in their pocket they gotta charge a lot.
There is truth to what you say.
However, we have been in an economic crisis for most of your adult life. Local governments have been hit hard because they lack the ability to print money. Therefore the money that comes from marijuana tax is far more important than it would have been twenty years ago. I suspect that our economic circumstances will improve lessening the impact of marijuana money. It will still have power but not as much. Besides, as long as the tax is getting collected, the local government isn't going to care who it comes from. Making a monopoly just makes it easier for them to collect.
A couple days ago I spoke to a friend who just relocated from Chicago to Seattle. He said the best weed deals (this is recreational as they have no card yet) are from delivery places that you can see advertised all over. He said they give medicinal prices for top quality weed. I asked him if he thought that the better deal they give than a recreational dispensary was due to decreased overhead or the possibility that they aren't kicking back taxes, but he did not know. My guess is that these are gray market individuals who supplied the black market before the laws changed and that they are probably not paying taxes at all. Local government hates that type of thing the same way they hated bootleggers during Prohibition.
I don't know if you noticed it the first draft of the medicinal mj program in Illinois - but the first paragraph was that illegal cultivation penalties were to double. It was quickly taken from the bill, but I never forgot it. It showed where their hearts and minds were. Because of the war on drugs, marijuana markets tended to have a lot of criminal types in them. Now it was time to eliminate those types or at least make sure that they were very good at it. They did this by requiring legitimate resources in excess of several million dollars to enter the market..
But lets say that you were a small scale grower - under 200 plants. You could always go work for one of these large commercial operations - you might even find a decent career in it. However, I suspect that you are more likely to find a thankless low-paying job in which your immediate superiors are ignorant assholes and they work you like a dog. Or you could just keep growing and selling the same way you have always. But in that case, I think you are going to find, like Al Capone did, that the biggest crime you will be committing is not going to be illegal cultivation - it will be tax evasion.
