Dopey dope-growing dope smoked out by own dope dope-growing vid A New Hampshire judge has jailed an Auburn dope-grower who inadvertently blew his cover in a series of YouTube vids of his marijuana cultivation operation. Police were alerted last year to Kyle Berry's handy online guides, but the cops did not require the services of Sherlock Holmes to lead them to his home's weed-packed …
> 4. Don't use lots of leccy
No electricity company in the world is going to go looking for what are probably their best customers and hand them over to the police. Much more likely that there will be approached by the police for the bills when they have other evidence.
4 years is the maximum I believe, but you'll only do that if you are stupid enoungh to plead not guilty. One reason why many are sent down is for their own safety because they typically grow the stuff to pay off debts to other drug dealers. Between 1 and 2 years is typical period of time in the clink both to serve as a deterrant to others and as a neat way of cancelling debts to the local kingpings without them losing face.
<Ahem>.............. apparently,
He was lucky he wasn't in Texas - they would have taken the weight of the entire plant, not just the drug-containing parts, the growing medium and even the plant pots, multiplied it by a massively exaggerated* "street" price for the pure product and claimed he was a billion dollar drug-lord and sent him to the chair.
* Ok, maybe I'm massively exaggerating too...
You're not exaggerating that much. They definitely DO use the entire weight of the plant in that part of the world. A plant that would produce around 6-10 oz of smokable material once dry weighs many times that at the point of seizure.
The method of exaggerating the street value is equally simple. At that level (ie the grower) the weed (if sold) is sold by the kilo and ounce. When seized they work out the "street value" as if you're the end-point, lowest of the low, street/housing estate dealer who will sell it a gram at a time. In this way (lets say) 30-odd ounces, or around a kilo which the grower would sell at , say, 120-150/oz so around 4 grand/kilo quickly becomes circa £8400 a kilo at a per-gram-street-price. (prices works on 35 oz and assuming £10/g street value)
There's money to be made in the USA when sending people to jail. The privatised jails are full to bursting with drug addicts who are then used as cheap labour to produce number plates and other crap in sweat shops operated by these private prison businesses. There were also accusations of judges taking commission when sending down delinquents.
Aside from that, just think of all the victims this nasty druggie must have hurt whilst growing a plant in his basement. Oh, the horror!
Problem with the US is that a lot of the prisons are private and the owners are paid per-head. Paid enough that they are a serious lobbying force; in addition to kicking back to the police forces/judges etc. Until that changes then people are going to continue to be sent to prison for silly shit. Rehabilitation has nothing to do with it...it's all about the cash.
Seems like one of owners of those prisons has downvoted you. Personally I think it's pretty disgusting that slavery is alive and well in the US, in the form of profit-making prisons using forced labour. 3 strikes and you're a slave for life. Seeing as a drug offence is a felony, 3 joints can potentially get you locked up for life.
Whereas next door in another state, it's legal! Fucking insane country!
"You need to filter for rhinos? Damn. Can you get a spray or something if it turns out you've got rhinos?"
I set myself up for that one, didn't I?
Ahem, just in case you don't know, Rhino-brand carbon filters (along with RVK-brand inline ventilation fans and ONA-brand smell-gel air freshening) are, erm, quite highly recommended by people who might wish to remove certain powerful odours from the immediate atmosphere.
So I hear, anyway. One moment, there's a police van outside and it looks like they're about to knock on the door. Excuse me!
Nearly sorry about that and thanks for the information. I'm in Spain and the police generally ignore one or two plants if the grower is reasonably circumspect about things, so most grow operations here are outside in a quiet bit of the garden. Unfortunately, there's no way of being circumspect where I live, so I haven't tried it.
All the filtering in the world doesn't help when the grow op keeps popping the fuse of a local distrribution transformer.
If you're dragging that much juice out of the grid, you're either doing it on an industrial scale, or doing it wrong.
There's people out there running grow tents for their own personal, on less than 150 watts. Why have a 400w or 1000w High Pressure Sodium bulb + ballast combo (and associated heat) when a 100w or 200w cluster of CFL grow-lamps does the job? You can even switch between high-K veg lamps and low-K bud lamps, if you're not just using feminized autos. Even the ventilation fan you'll typically run through an £80-£90 variac at 80-100 volts or so (assuming a 230v supply) to keep the noise level down. All it needs to do is slowly cycle the air out of your tent and through the filter, and you use negative pressure to keep the stink where it belongs.
Google "autoflowering" versus "photoperiod" if you're wondering what I mean by "feminized autos". If you're on this site and don't know what a variac is... oh just google it. Also known as a variable transformer. Think Steampunk Dimmer Switch, only minus the awful hum that dimmers induce in a circuit.
Me? Well, I'm quite legally clean, otherwise I wouldn't dare make comments like these on a web site. I just happen to know a thing or two.
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So basically the guy paid $500 to be introduced to a large number of potential clients and given 8 months to cultivate the contacts and relationships he'll need when he gets released, to distribute his crop and grow the business.
And the judge who gave him this opportunity said he wasn't smart.
At last someone sees it: the parting shot of the judge.
But I would go further.
Basically, what the judge said was this: You're going down, because you're dumb. It almost rhymes.
From this, future courts might perhaps infer the following rules of precedent:
- If you want to cultivate marijuana with utter impunity, you need to be clever
or:
- If you are clever, the Law will let you cultivate marijuana with utter impunity
And in the supreme court, the reasoning might run as follows:
- What the judge of the lower court inferred was that law enforcement should be tailored so as to encourage cleverness in America, with the differential in cleverness between the perpetrators and the law enforcers de facto enabling cleverer people to do things that would be impossible, i.e. prohibited, for idiots, such as grow marijuana.
Manufacturing
The process of converting raw materials, components, or parts into finished goods that meet a customer's expectations or specifications. Manufacturing commonly employs a man-machine setup with division of labor in a large scale production.
vs
growing
(of a living thing) Undergo natural development by increasing in size and changing physically; progress to maturity.
(of a plant) Germinate and develop.
In the state of growing it marijuana is considered a herb, and only a drug once it's been dried / cut up etc. So technically he pled guilty to something he didn't do. He was actually guilty of growing a herb that could be processed into a controlled drug.
I personally consider pot no more dangerous than alcohol.
Try starting a business and you'll see why growing cannabis is illegal - its so sodding easy that you dont have to pay management consultants, just pizza delivery people. Unless you earn enough to bribe politicians then you will have your pips squeezed at every opportunity.
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Prof. Nutt is a perfect example of politicians and governments - you higher the finest experts in the world to advise you, but if you don't like what they say, you sack them and find someone else.
It's about time this country woke up and smelt the coffee (caffeine's a drug) of acceptable "drugs" (alcohol, tobacco, dextromethorphan (Benylin)) and started making some tax from it. Legalised manufacture/growth and distribution should ensure a (comparatively) safe product is being used (well we seem to think the current legal lot is comparatively safe if the guidelines are followed, so why not others).
They're basically legalising marajuana in Colorado, unfortunately they have forgotten the bit where it's regulated.
I saw a documentary the other day where a business-man was gearing up to sell MJ products (mostly candy/sweets etc.) and was shocked when ONE small chocolate (or 500ml fruit flavour drink) was the strength of 10-15 joints!! Talk about reckless. That will just make things so much worse.
If you smoke, you can only smoke so much before you're comatose, there's no way, even in my youth, that I could smoke 10-15 joints in 1-2 hours, yet that's what they are going to be providing the public with. The warnings were also tiny or non-existent on the packaging.
If a child were to eat 2 or 3 of these (or an adult for that matter) in about 2 hours time they will be on a trip to the hospital and assuming their heart doesn't stop beating they'll be totally tripping for days and probably psychologically damaged.
I'm all for _educated_ legal use of MJ, but that is just going to make the whole situation worse. They should get the regs sorted first before it becomes available.
If a child were to eat 2 or 3 of these (or an adult for that matter) in about 2 hours time they will be on a trip to the hospital and assuming their heart doesn't stop beating they'll be totally tripping for days and probably psychologically damaged.
A slight exaggeration, perhaps? The LD50 lethal dose is significantly higher than you suppose - apparently 42mg per kilogram of body weight in rats. The more likely outcome would be hallucinations for several hours. It's not like people have never eaten cannabis before and documented the results. Whilst I'm not reccomending that people do this, you are being needlessly alarmist.
Eating 'raw' cannabis will do very very little, you need to dissolve the cannabinoids into an oil based solution so that it can be ingested, usually by grinding to a fine powder and heating in oil.
Even if you take a massive quantity of cannabis like this, the effects aren't going to be noticeably different from having a large amount of cannabis, most effects will wear off within 2-3 hours. The idea that you can be totally tripping for days is comical.
"Eating 'raw' cannabis will do very very little"
Who said it was raw? It's been processed into an edible sweet.
I've made cookies in the past and each one had enough finely ground cannabis to be equivalent to to one joint.
Effects would arrive about an hour and half later, and last for 4-6 hours.
I can't actually imagine what it would be like to have the equivalent of 15 joints delivered in the same way.
I also smoked a camberwell carrot of my own at uni that contain 1/8 hash and 1/8 grass. I was stoned for 3 days.
"I also smoked a camberwell carrot of my own at uni that contain 1/8 hash and 1/8 grass. I was stoned for 3 days."
Wankered for 3 days on weed??? Methinks there was more than weed in your carrot...
I have stuffed an INORDINATE amount of thc into my self for the past 30 years, been to the 'dam and smoked the BEST cannabis the world has to offer and have NEVER been stoned for 3 days...
This one has got me thinking since I've ingested in the past (when I gave up smoking).
It's hard to get hard and fast figures, but averaging all the info out I think it would take around 15-30mg of THC to be considered a 'single' medical dose (of decent quality I presume). I would think that this would get a 'non toker' pretty stoned for around 2-3 hours. Again, hard to be precise but this sounds reasonable.
I've also looked up what is going to be available in Colorado as the poster above mentioned. Again, hard to get specific info, but it seems that products are being marketed as being anywhere between 50-250mg per item, even if it is just a chocolate sweet.
I found one online shop in colorado that apparently won some award in 2010 (@Kushcon)for strongest edible at around 48mg.
If sweets are being made that can be 250mg, then I think the risk of children eating them is quite real. I have no idea what effect it would have on a 5 year old to ingest enough THC to knock out a hardened stoner, but it does seem to be something the 'pro legalisation' people should take into account - otherwise it will be banned again as fast as you can say 'whinging mothers'.
Probably why they're doing it. Legalize on a trial basis and watch people go mad. Ban it again as dangerous because it was unregulated.
Personally I'd say they'd be better off legalising it in a similar way to cigs. Pre-rolled joints, not mixed with anything else behind a counter sold like cigars etc. Keeps quality high, risk low, and taxes rolling in. Make sure law is passed so it can only be used on your own premesis (not in public anywhere)
"Probably why they're doing it. Legalize on a trial basis and watch people go mad. Ban it again as dangerous because it was unregulated."
Legalize on a trial basis, watch the plan backfire as people fail to go mad and violent crime drops due to people being far too content to sit on the sofa munching pizza and cookies than go out, get leathered on cheap lager and start a riot.
The awesome thing about weed is it's not like you're going to accidentally brew methanol if you get it wrong. If it does get legalized more widely though, the thing to do is challenge the convention that "getting high on weed" == "smoking weed". The "smoking" part is the only dangerous bit, and it's entirely unnecessary.
That method of making cookies only works if you cook the cookies/brownies/whatever at a high enough temperature for long enough to release the active ingredients, with no guarantee you've released them all.
As others have mentioned this is generally done in advance by gently heating butter (etc) up with your active ingredients in. The plant matter can then be completely discarded, then you use your butter/oil/fat/whatever as an ingredient in the biscuits/cakes. All the bits you want have been cooked out into the butter which you then use to make cookies etc. Cooking with the plant itself and you risk just wasting good weed or not releasing its full potential. HTH.
High enough temperature? No. High temperatures ruin THC, breaking it down into CBN, CBD and other cannibinoids that may or may not have a medicinal use, but are pretty useless if you just want to get stoned. That's why you very gently heat your butter+bud concoction, rather than frying it.
So I've heard.
> Eating 'raw' cannabis will do very very little, you need to dissolve the cannabinoids into an oil based solution so that it can be ingested, usually by grinding to a fine powder and heating in oil.
bullshit
> Even if you take a massive quantity of cannabis like this, [...], most effects will wear off within 2-3 hours
moar bullshit
...what am I looking at with that picture? I can see some bits of paper taped onto some foil, and the "reflection" of what appears to be some kind of alien head or something on the left hand side. Is that the guy? Or is it one of those "stare long enough and you'll see it" things?
I can understand the Royal Mail package giving clues (or downright identification), but not sure of the relevance of the image.
The elephant in the room regarding legalisation is the increased availability to minors.
I know it's fairly easy for them to get it now, but you need to make at least a token effort, and since it's illegal there is the added argument that de-criminalising it would make it less attractive, but there is *some* evidence that suggests taking THC when your brain pathways are still forming can have permanent detrimental effects for the rest of your life.
If they can sort out the problem with young people taking too much (and the stuff these days imho is way too strong - I have no idea why people want stronger and stronger dope) then I think it could be legalised and dealt with in an adult fashion.
The first answer that springs to mind is education. Not facts and figures and the shite they teach kids these days, but real education where they teach the children to question, to inquire and the think for themselves.
This isn't going to happen any time soon so I think legalising it would lead to a massive problem that would be very hard to fix retrospecitively.
"I have no idea why people want stronger and stronger dope"
For the same reason people wanted stronger and stronger moonshine in the US around the turn of the 20th Century. Easier to conceal a truly mind-blowing amount.
Though honestly, I see no more problem with "stronger dope" than I do with say, whisk(e)y versus beer. You don't chug a single malt by the pint unless you're a highly trained Glaswegian.
I home brew my own booze. It's easy, ludicrously so. I's fun, the results taste great and I churn out real ale at circa 1.10/pint (that's REAL all-grain brewing, kit brewing comes in at around 50p a pint).
The alcohol industry still does ok last I checked.
Legalizing it would bring weed dealers down to the level of the people selling dodgy Baku, i.e. they'd be selling a cheaper, substandard product allowing those who can't afford to smoke to continue to do so (ie exactly the same role filled by the "doing a tobacco run" crowd now.
Think amsterdam. No increase in drug related problems, thriving industry paying staff, wages, taxes, health insurance, rent etc etc.
The reason there are those gangs "making a fortune out of smuggling cigarettes and alcohol" is because successive British governments have been stupidly greedy and keep putting up the tax on these products (IIRC something like 75% of the price of a pack of cigarettes is tax) to avoid having to put up other taxes.
I had a visit from Plod a few years back. When I say a visit I mean had my door stoved in at early o'clock and was rather rudely awoken. Apparently the police helicopter had spoken a large amount of heat and they thought I may be growing weed. I casually explained that they had indeed spotted a farm, or ancient servers all doing there thing. They were happy with impromptu inspection of my loft, they sent a carpenter out for the door. They even joked about the huge amount of porn on my servers.
Oh how I laughed, knowing full well that the dope plants were in the secret part of my shed......
Opium is an opiate derived from a plant.
A plant that is perfectly legal to grow in the UK, no less.
No, not the red ones. The blue ones. Yes really. Perfectly legal. Maybe the plant doesn't have quite the same amount of industrial uses and wasn't a threat to the US paper industry way back when?
Opium isn't a plant.
Opium is an opiate derived from a plant.
Opium is the natural dried resin collected much like natural rubber from slicing the seed-heads of papaver somiferens.
The principal opiate in it is morphine. Opium is not an opiate, it contains opiates.
Opium is NOT a plant. It's a chemical derived (at considerable effort) from a plant. "opium" is not more a plant than processed cocaine.
The sap (is that the right word?) produced when each poppy head is (labouriously, individually) sliced at exactly the right moment in its life cycle is a TINY amount per plant. This liquid happens to be a naturally occuring source of opiates like codeine and morphine. So yes, once the plant is treated correctly, then the resulting product is treated correctly you produce opium. But to say "opium is a plant" is very, very wrong.
Further processes are then carried out to turn it onto heroin if desired (easier to move around for export etc). In short, no, opium is not a plant. If I wanted to produce enough opium for personal consumption i'd need acres and acres of poppies, not four or five plants in a loft/shed/garage.
"If I wanted to produce enough opium for personal consumption i'd need acres and acres of poppies, not four or five plants in a loft/shed/garage."
You would be surprised.
The people growing acres, are the ones in Afghanistan going for industrial production. A patch of poppies in your garden would make enough opium to get you very, very high for quite a while. Or dead. Opium's a bit more dangerous than marijuana's 1:40,000 high-to-dead ratio. Rather more addictive, too.
(Alcohol is something like 1:6 to 1:10 for high-to-alcohol-poisoning depending on your constitution)
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