Perhaps Los Angeles city officials should tour the Costa Mesa home of Joanne Clarke, where her daughter’s old bedroom has been turned into a high-tech grow room that produces various strains of medical marijuana.
What city leaders hope to accomplish by forcing the closure of more than 400 medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles is uncertain. Certainly it will not end the use of medical marijuana. In all likelihood, the only tangible result will be to force the growth and sale of medicinal marijuana back underground, where the city will be unable to regulate it or tax it. In fact, by destroying marijuana’s retail infrastructure through the forced closure of collectives, the city stands to lose millions in tax revenue if Proposition 19 passes.
Many patients who need medical marijuana for legitimate medical purposes will be inconvenienced if not outright denied their medicine. Some will sue, and win or lose they will cost the city millions in legal fees. Others, like Joanne Clarke, will rely upon home-grown marijuana and the burgeoning business that teaches patients how to grow their own weed, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The Costa Mesa woman and her husband recently transformed their daughter’s old room into a grow room. Businesses like Otherside Farms and Golden State Greenery specialize in assisting residents in starting a grow room. As the legal marijuana industry has come under increasing fire, it has seen a quiet, steady growth in such small-scale growing operations.
Chadd McKeen, who started Otherside Farms in Orange County, told The Times that his clientele is the “embroidered-sweater-wearing, lighthouse-poster-hanging” pot smoker who is 50- to 60-years old. “That is what the marijuana users look like,” he says.
Most of the grow rooms are installed in spare bedrooms, which he typically divides in half to create “veg” room for growing and a “bloom room,” where a change in lighting and temperature encourage blooming. The rooms generally cost about $15,000.
Others are simply taking advantage of Southern California weather, which is conducive to growing marijuana — plant in the spring and harvest in the fall.
The CANNABIS LAW GROUP is a law firm dedicated to the rights of medical marijuana patients, collectives and growers and has built a reputation for high-powered, aggressive legal representation of the medical marijuana industry in Southern California. Call 949-375-4734 for a confidential consultation to discuss your rights.