Keeping tabs on Colorado’s newfangled marijuana industry isn’t an easy task:
Savvy business owners know that keeping an eye on the pot is about much more than merely complying with state law. Diligence discourages employee theft, pinpoints choke points in production procedures, and helps calibrate inventory to consumer demand. As [Pure Medical Dispensary owner Frank] Quattrone puts it, “You want to know where your assets are.”
Still, [Hank] Hasler [who enforces marijuana growing regulations] believes it’ll be a while before every Colorado marijuana business operates like Quattrone’s. “Right now, I am seeing less enforcement than I expected,” he says. He’s seen marijuana operations with no business records whatsoever other than a moldy stack of harvest sheets, a pot shop illicitly growing its product on the roof of a strip mall, and a grower who insisted all she had to list on her product labels for cultivation ingredients, as required by law, were “sunshine and love.”
Martin Lewis, who has a piece on the environmental problems with marijuana farming, wishes growers used more sunshine:
Growing sun-loving plants in buildings under artificial suns is the height of environmental and economic lunacy. Outdoors, the major inputs—light and air—are free. Why then do people pay vast amounts of money to grow cannabis indoors, regardless of the huge environmental toll and the major financial costs? The reasons are varied. Outdoor cultivation is climatically impossible or unfeasible over much of the country. Everywhere, the risk of detection is much reduced for indoor operations. Indoor crops can also be gathered year-round, whereas outdoor harvests are an annual event. But the bigger spur for artificially grown cannabis appears to be consumer demand. As noted in a Huffington Post article “indoor growers … produce the best-looking buds, which command the highest prices and win the top prizes in competitions.” In California’s legal (or quasi-legal) medical marijuana dispensaries, artificially grown cannabis enjoys a major price advantage, due largely to the more uniformly high quality of the product.
(Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)
The Dish 