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Why You Should Grow Marijuana Instead of Buying It From Legal Dispensaries [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-06-06

Marijuana legalization in America and Canada has mostly benefited corporate growers, sellers, and consumers who don’t mind paying high prices for generic cannabis products.

A minority of the states with so-called legalization allow you to grow your own marijuana. Most do not. The goal for government and the legal marijuana industry is to eliminate home growing and encourage consumers to purchase cannabis priced very high due to confiscatory taxes and greed.

That’s why Canada and some American states INCREASED penalties for home growing when enacting so-called marijuana legalization.

This is similar to how capitalism, bureaucracies, and industries have taken over things we used to do for ourselves individually, in family units, or as egalitarian collectives, such as growing our own food, building our own houses, making our own clothes, engaging in barter or other cashless economies.

The legalized marijuana industry and legalization itself has provided one true benefit: the creation of allegedly standardized, dose-verified cannabis products you don’t have to consume via combustion.

Inhaling smoke from any combustion, including combusted marijuana buds, deposits gaseous and particulate poisons into you.

The good news is, you can safely consume marijuana buds using a precision vaporizer such as the Storz & Bickel “Mighty +” set to vaporize cannabinoids and terpenoids at temperatures just below combustion.

But the really really really good news is you can grow your own marijuana that’s infinitely better than any buds you could buy from a legal retailer, at a fraction of the cost!

There are thousands of marijuana strains, each with its own unicorn suite of cannabinoids and terpenoids. Your body chemistry is also idiosyncratic. How a marijuana strain interacts with your internal chemistry determines subjective and objective medical and recreational effects.

Buying marijuana at cannabis dispensaries, you’re limited to whatever was grown for them by a commercial grower. You will not find a commercial strain that gives you all the positive effects you seek, without any negative effects.

For example, a specific Indica marijuana strain may make you feel relaxed and reduce pain, but also makes you too hungry, your mouth is dry, your vision goes blurry, and you end up locked to the couch by its sedative effects.

When you grow your own marijuana, you choose strains based on specific effects their breeder claims they have, and by effects those strains’ genetics are known to produce. You grow out the plants, harvest them, then carefully observe the effects.

If effects are 70% of what you do want and 30% of what you don’t want, you can experiment with other strains. But the true magic is you can breed your own strains to create the exact type of marijuana that works best for you.

For example, I started using marijuana after an injury and failed surgery turned me into a disabled opiates addict. I wanted marijuana to get me off opiates, reduce my pain, not interfere with my memory, cognition, physical rehabilitation, energy levels.

I sampled or grew several dozen strains and realized there was not yet an existing strain that did everything I wanted but had zero negative side effects.

So I looked at my cultivation records, chose the top five strains, and interbred them. Through continued sampling and breeding, I eventually created stabilized versions of three new strains that provide 90-95% of what I seek from marijuana with zero negative effects.

Of course, growing marijuana is an art and a science. It takes time, research, and experience before you get to the point where you’re designing your own strains. But growing marijuana is one of the most fascinating, rewarding, and heartening activities you can engage in. If you love gardening, nurturing, and self-designed pharmacological botany, you will love growing marijuana.

Yes, there’s the problem that growing marijuana is a felony in most places, lol.

Growing marijuana in states like Michigan, where you can legally grow 12 plants, is a wonderful endeavor. I used to wonder how bonsai and orchid growers could spend so much time caring for and loving their plants. When I started growing marijuana, I realized that gardening is one of the most spiritual, self-nurturing activities you can engage in.

In states where home growing isn’t legal, your marijuana garden will be like Anne Frank hiding from the Nazis—you do everything possible to ensure that nobody knows you’re growing cannabis. Concealment, camouflage, and lifestyle changes to create total privacy and security are required.

If you operate a small marijuana garden sufficient to supply you with stacks of premium connoisseur buds, initial start-up costs and ongoing costs will be about 70% less per ounce of marijuana than what you’d spend buying from a legal retailer.

Along with having more marijuana and spending less money to have it, your homegrown quality will always be higher than anything you can get legally.

That’s because you totally control the inputs, environment, harvest timing, and storage of your buds. Just like fruits and veggies bought from a local organic farmer are tastier, fresher, and safer than anything you can buy at a grocery store, your homegrown marijuana is absolutely superior to cannabis that dispensaries are selling for $500 an ounce.

Despite strict health and safety regulations built into legalization protocols, a lot of legal retail marijuana is overdried, contaminated, not potent or fresh, generic, boring, overpriced.

And when you factor in the benefits of growing marijuana specifically chosen or bred by you to give you exactly the effects you want without any deleterious effects, you see why growing your own marijuana is way better than buying it.

I write for an online magazine called Growing Marijuana Perfectly that contains exhaustive details about growing cannabis. Marijuana is not a weed; it will take a few seasons before you master marijuana cultivation. But when you do, and you’re enjoying the finest cannabis ever, you see why it’s worth doing it yourself.

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