Toastrider made this comment on Are you effing kidding me? Pot Industry Bailout?
It has to do with California’s regulatory landscape, which could be compared to a vampire, or a huge blanket of strangling kudzu.
I find it darkly hilarious, myself. California was oh so proud of how forward thinking they were, and then they turned around and strangled the legal suppliers so badly it’s still more profitable to grow pot and sell it on the sly.
This reminded me of a story I believe I told already but bears repeating. I am not a fan of the European Union. It is what happens when you leave a bunch of mid level bureaucratic idiots with a low-level real life IQ have to much power controlling people.
In the early 90s IIRC, the EU went full blast regulating the production of grape-based alcoholic products. The old joke about you can only call it champagne if it comes from that region of France? Yup, that EU effort. So they decided in Brussels to control every single aspect and quantity of the production in order to preserve the quality and reputation of the wines and spirits, at least that is what they said.
Now wine in Spain is like soda in the US: Everybody drinks it in almost every meal and some in every meal, including breakfast. There are no Soda-like manufacturing industries, nor they could be done as we are talking different processes and basic products other than water. So what was done back in the day is that towns would depend on local vineyards for their regular supply of wine and a lot of times it would take several small vineyards to keep the equivalent of a county happy with the red liquid.
To make a long story short, the EU decided those mom & pop places could no longer operate “out of boundaries” and they had to follow the same procedures as they imposed on the big boys. One particular vineyard was owned by a family of a dear friend of mine. It had been in the family for almost a century and the owner at the time was the uncle of my buddy. He got the notification from the EU alongside a trio of 4 inch 3-ring binders full of rules and paperwork he had to follow so they would not be fined and shut down. After going through the binders, he decided that keeping the local county in wine was not worth his effort or patience in dealing with the EYU, so he retired and passed the torch to his three adult kids.
The kids, all grown ass adults with university degrees in real fields, had to hire “experts” to help them understand the reams of bureaucratic bullshit and what would financially take to comply. After several months of planning, they reached a decision with the father’s consent: They bulldozed the vineyard, sold some of the property to developers and used that money to create a landscaping farm to grow decorative bushes and flower plants and anything related to gardening which was unregulated by the EU.
As for the town’s wine supply? probably and as it happened with many other towns, they had to buy the less quality and more expensive stuff sold by mass producing facilities.
And to make it more identifiable for us, imagine DC regulating the BBQ industry to include your local family BBQ pits that has been source for pulled pork and ribs since your grandpa was a boy.
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