I received this very interesting e-mail from CA NORML, and I thought others might be interested to see it:
California’s CAMP marijuana eradication reported 4,320,314 plant seizures in 2010, slightly less than last year’s all-time record of 4,463,917.
CAMP estimates the wholesale value of the destroyed crop at $17.2 billion – enough to qualify for agricultural disaster aid for any other crop. This works out to $4,000 per plant, or over 1 lb per plant. At this rate, the total amount of marijuana destroyed by CAMP works out to over four times the estimated consumption of the entire state of California (1 million lb/year). CAMP’s harvest has soared tenfold since 2002-3.
The leading counties this year were Mendocino (572,680), Tuolumne (411,004), Lake (374,958), Shasta (325,480), Tehama (312,574, Sonoma (311,147), Tulare (227,002), San Bernardino (171,258), Riverside (155,209) and Humboldt (140,911).
This week we’re going to check in with Jorge Cervantes; world-renowned expert on indoor, outdoor, and greenhouse cannabis cultivation. Jorge has over 30 years of expert cannabis growing knowledge and hands-on experience. He is also the author of several books and DVDs including the infamous Marijuana Horticulture: Indoor/Outdoor Medical Grower’s Bible. Jorge shows us the male cannabis plant dispersing pollen up close in this video. If you grow from seed or are curious about male plants and breeding, this video should be of particular interest to you. Check it out!
Miracle-Gro seems to have finally gotten hip to the fact that lots of people use its chemical fertilizer to grow marijuana — and that with a little marketing, that number could get a lot, well, higher.
In an unusual move for the head of such a large company, Scotts Miracle-Gro Company CEO Jim Hagedorn said he is “exploring” targeting medical marijuana cultivators to boost sales at his lawn and garden supply firm, reports Dana Mattioli at The Wall Street Journal.
“I want to target the pot market,” Hagedorn said in an interview. “There’s no good reason we haven’t.”
Sales at Scott’s aren’t exactly suffering. In fact, they rose five percent last year, to $2.9 billion. But the company, based in Marysville, Ohio, relies on sales at three mega-retailers — Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Wal-Mart — for almost two-thirds of its revenue. But with those big-box retailers not building new stores as quickly as they used to, it appears the CEO wants to “diversify.”
Scotts Miracle-Gro CEO Jim Hagedorn: “I want to target the pot market. There’s no good reason we haven’t.”
Hagedorn is pushing is regional sales presidents to look for smaller pockets of growth — such as, you guessed it, the marijuana market — that together could produce a noticeable boost in sales.
Sixteen states have legalized medical marijuana, and the market will reach $1.7 billion in sales this year, according to a report by See Change Strategy LLC, an information data services company.
While that report focuses on revenue from growers and dispensaries, the market for companies selling ancillary supplies such as hydroponic equipment and nutrients is also thriving, according to Kris Lotlikar, president of See Change.
“We see very good growth for these types of companies as the medical marijuana business grows,” Lotlikar said.
While Hagedorn’s upfront desire to enter the medical marijuana market may still be a little unusual for a major CEO, he has never been a typical sort of chief executive. A former F-16 fighter pilot, Hagedorn flies his personal Cessna to and from meetings in Port Washington, New York, where he grew up, and the company’s headquarters in Ohio, “much to the chagrin of his board,” the Journal reports.
He also has a propensity for swear words and military references, and reportedly showed up at the office at least one day this month in jeans and sneakers.
Hagedorn took over Miracle-Gro from his father, who co-founded the company. According to the Journal, he would likely buy niche companies that already exist, rather than trying to create Miracle-Gro’s own line of branded marijuana nutrient products.
The transition into a marijuana-friendly company could have some interesting and awkward moments, given the fact that many of Miracle-Gro’s products, such as “Shake ‘n Feed” are designed to prevent “weeds,” rather than nurture them.
Raids on marijuana growing operations have already turned up Miracle-Gro products. Hagedorn said he takes that as a good sign of brand awareness, but he fears some growers could be reluctant to use such a “mainstream” product — and something tells me he’s about to find out how strong the “organic” movement continues to be in cannabis cultivation.
Yes, lots of medical marijuana patients much prefer organically grown weed — and who can blame them? When I use my medicine, I want to taste plants, not chemicals.
The new colonel of the Rhode Island state police wants state health officials to provide law enforcement with information about medical marijuana caregivers if they are targets of criminal investigations.
Col. Steven G. O’Donnell told The Associated Press that being able to verify whether an individual is authorized to grow cannabis at home would prevent unnecessary police search warrants and raids.
O’Donnell claimed it would save money on investigations and protect participants in the state’s medical marijuana program.
Regulations prohibit the Rhode Island Department of Health from publicly disclosing who is authorized to grow medical marijuana, or to use it to treat illness.
Medical marijuana patient advocates said they are not ruling out the involvement of law enforcement, but they want medical information to be kept private.
Medical marijuana is currently grown privately in Rhode Island. Governor Lincoln Chafee put plans for state-licensed dispensaries on hold after receiving a letter from the U.S. Attorney for the state that threatened to prosecute dispensary operators and landlords.
San Francisco officials want to keep a record of all suppliers of medical marijuana dispensaries, an idea that has some members of the pot community fuming.
“If there is a list, it’s available to the public, and it’s available to the feds,” said Kevin Reed, a member of The City’s Medical Cannabis Task Force and owner of the Green Cross, a medical cannabis delivery service.
Reed said most members of cannabis collectives and cooperatives grow small amounts of pot in their homes, warning that a city record of their names and addresses could be accessible by anyone — including federal law enforcement officials or criminals who rob grow operations.
Despite statements by the Obama administration that it would not go after medical marijuana dispensaries that comply with state laws, cannabis supporters say such raids have continued, and Reed remained wary about a public record of growers.
“It just goes against everything that we’re doing,” Reed said. “What we do is federally illegal. As long as The City is offering patients no protection, it’s just absurd.”
According to a written statement from the San Francisco Department of Public Health, officials announced at a May 20 task force meeting that they “anticipated maintaining a record of all sources/cultivators for each [dispensary].”
Public health officials would only answer questions about this proposal in writing, and a spokeswoman did not respond to a question about whether the list would be publicly available.
The statement noted that the department, which issues permits for medical cannabis dispensaries, is tasked with ensuring that the cannabis such dispensaries cultivate and distribute is in compliance with state and local laws.
There currently are 26 permitted dispensaries in The City, and nine more have applied for permits.
Dr. Rajiv Bhatia, the director of environmental health, said such dispensaries get their products from “diverse sources” and that the department needs to ensure those sources are legal. California law requires that marijuana distributed by medical cannabis collectives or co-operatives be cultivated only by their members, and not for profit.
“Over the past few years, there has been a proliferation of cultivation in many San Francisco neighborhoods,” Bhatia said. Some of these sites violate city planning and building codes, and create fire or hazardous materials dangers, according to his statement.
“The department’s overarching aim is to steer [medical cannabis dispensary] practices towards conformity with California and San Francisco law,” Bhatia said. “In this way, we reduced the likelihood for MCDs of community concerns and criminal prosecution.”
The idea is apparently just in its formative stages, however, and no decision has been made.
“We are open to alternative ways to ensure the safety and legality of cultivation,” Bhatia said. “We will be discussing this with the dispensary community.”
Community activist and task force member Stephanie Tucker called a public list “a deal-breaker.”
“DPH historically has always been very good at protecting safe access, and balancing that with public safety,” Tucker said. “Obviously, as a community, we have concerns about that information becoming public.
The San Francisco Department of Public Health, which licenses and polices the city’s 26 storefront medical marijuana dispensaries, announced on Friday that it will ask every dispensary to provide a list — with names and addresses — of every grower with which it does business.
The result would be a disaster for the city’s burgeoning medical marijuana industry, according to Kevin Reed, president of the Green Cross medicinal cannabis delivery service, reports Chris Roberts at the S.F. Weekly.
“It’s unacceptable,” Reed told the Weekly. “It would be a disaster.”
The list of grower names and addresses is needed, claimed Rajiv Bhatia, head of DPH’s Occupational & Environmental Health, for safety and legality reasons.
“DPH is trying to ensure that permitted MCDs [medical cannabis dispensaries] comply with all state and local laws,” Bhatia said. “By ensuring this, the industry will be best situated to be protected from code enforcement and criminal prosecution.”
Kevin Reed: “It’s unacceptable. It would be a disaster.”
But that isn’t sitting so well with the city’s medical marijuana growers, who have noticed the increasingly threatening nature of letters of U.S. Attorneys in medical marijuana states. All that saber-rattling by drug warriors within the Obama
Administration doesn’t exactly make turning over a list of names and addresses seem like the best idea ever.
According to Reed, the list would push legal operators underground while doing nothing to change the habits of illegal cultivators.
And if the list were publicly available, it could be used as a “shopping list” by rip-off artists, thieves, and, of course, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), since the feds still consider cannabis illegal, even for medicinal purposes, regardless of state laws.
“There’s no way anyone on the city or state level can provide us protection from the federal government,” Reed said.
Theories regarding why the S.F. Health Department is suddenly concerned about whether dispensaries comply with state and local law — more than a decade after the City By The Bay passed its Medicinal Cannabis Dispensary Act — include taxes, police, and in industry takeover, reports Roberts at the Weekly.
Reed said he believes the DPH wants a list of all the city’s legal growers so that it can eventually tax them. But the city also wants addresses of grow sites located outside San Francisco.
Some growers believe the DPH is being strong-armed by the S.F. Police Department.
And then there are the conspiracy theorists who say the stricter regulations would make it easier for a few mega-operators to take over the medical marijuana industry.
“I understand DPH’s frustration of being thrust into the middle of this confusing and contradictory system, but there is way too much risk to force full transparency in cultivation,” said Brendan Hallinan, an attorney handling permitting for medical marijuana dispensaries.
“After the federal government specifically told Oakland ‘no way’ on their permitted-cultivation sites, it is ridiculous to ask SF MCDs to go right ahead and do the same thing,” Hallinan said.
Turns out, looking only at electric usage from a residence, the consumption for bitcoin mining won’t look much different from a marijuana grow-op. Cue clueless cops.
You don’t have to be growing marijuana to get raided for it. At least one Bitcoin miner has been raided by police because unusually high power usage led them to suspect he was growing marijuana, according to unconfirmed reports on Monday.
The tip comes from an IRC chat captured by blogger Mike Esspe, though there are no corroborating details, reports Jerry Brito of Techland.
Bitcoin is the anonymous virtual currency that uses distributed computing power to validate online coins. “It’s like gold mining, except that instead of digging, a miner uses cryptographic math,” reports Techland.
Does this mean, that with the growing number of bitcoin miners, courts will stop issuing warrants based on energy bills? Not bloody likely.
Like clandestine indoor marijuana growing operations, Bitcoin mining uses large amounts of electricity and runs up big power bills. It does this because it employs super-fast computers.
High power consumption has often alerted police to marijuana growing operations and has thus led to busts.
“The Canadian town of Mission, B.C. has a bylaw that allows the town’s Public Safety Inspection Team to search people’s homes for grow ops if they are using more than 93 kWh of electricity per day,” according to the blog Bitcoin Miner.
Though a typical mining rig will consume only a fraction of that amount, Bitcoin miners are adding capacity, and with multiple rigs, more and more miners are exceeding the level which triggers police interest, according to the blog.
Residents have been charged a $5,200 inspection fee – even if no marijuana or signs of a grow operation are found, reports Cam Tucker at the Delta Optimist.
Some Mission residents who feel their rights have been violated by the arbitrary searches, and have begun a class-action lawsuit against the District of Mission in B.C. Supreme Court.
There had already been speculation that mining Bitcoins will bring unwanted and misdirected attention from the police.
“I’m still waiting for the first bitcoin grow-op raid,” a Bitcoin mining pioneer had commented on an IRC channel back in January.
Increasingly ubiquitous supercomputing could lead to more and more false positives, not just for Bitcoin miners, but for hardcore gamers too, as well as anyone running video rendering farms or web servers from home, according to Techland.
“It will be interesting to see how courts will adapt to such uses when interpreting reasonable suspicion standards,” Brito writes.
Does this mean, that with the growing number of Bitcoin miners, courts will stop issuing warrants based on energy bills? Not bloody likely.
The operation was being run by a man named Joseph Hsu, a suspected member of a Chinese gang known as Wah Ching. Of course, without marijuana prohibition, this operation doesn’t exist, and a violent Chinese street gang wouldn’t be reaping the profits.
Prohibition causes a restriction in supply, raising prices, making it more profitable for gangs to enter the market. And these gangs will often use any means necessary to protect those profits. Without the massive profits to draw them in, these gangs aren’t going to bother with marijuana growing.
True, they will move onto to other drugs and illicit products; that’s why prohibition never works, no matter what it is you ban. Banning something just makes sure that violent criminals can make a lot of money off of it.
But at least the Sheriff’s Department gets some publicity for making a slight dent in the cannabis black market; a dent that is already filled by someone else who was drawn in by prohibition profits. The police create their own job security.
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