Abundance Is the True Gift of Cannabis Legalization

Alcohol is similar. Once alcohol became normalized, the market developed an enormous spectrum of products. The goal wasn’t simply to make everything stronger.

Wine didn’t lose to grain alcohol because grain alcohol had more ethanol. Quality became multidimensional. Cannabis deserves the same evolution.

We’re beginning to see it. Consumers are talking about terpenes, cultivation practices, genetics, flavor, effects, sun-grown flower, regenerative agriculture, and other attributes.

But THC percentage and extraction yield still dominate far too much of the conversation. Those are remnants of scarcity thinking. They prevent us from recognizing what I believe is the greatest gift legalization has given cannabis: abundance.

Abundance is the Gift of Cannabis Legalization

Cannabis wants to grow.

This plant is remarkably resilient. Put it through difficult conditions, and it will still fight to survive. There is a reason generations of people simply called it “weed.”

Today, legal markets are demonstrating just how abundant cannabis can be. In many mature markets, we can grow more cannabis than the market knows what to do with. Price compression has hit farmers brutally hard. And yet we continue behaving as though every milligram is precious.

That contradiction should make us stop and think.

For decades, outdoor cultivators couldn’t openly employ modern agricultural technology because they were hiding from law enforcement. The plant had to be concealed, and sometimes the quality suffered because of it. Indoor cultivation became a necessity. I know because I grew indoors when I was young.

I didn’t grow indoors because I believed putting plants under artificial lights inside buildings was inherently superior to growing them under the sun. I grew indoors because I had to. People were receiving life sentences for cultivation. Keeping cannabis literally undercover was a matter of survival.

Cannabis legalization changed that.

Today, cultivators can openly combine sunlight with sophisticated genetics, irrigation, soil science, regenerative practices, integrated pest management, agricultural technology, and generations of accumulated knowledge.

The result can be extraordinary sun-grown flowers produced abundantly. That changes the economics, and it should change our thinking.

Cannabis Legalization Should Change Extraction

As a young extractor in the 2010s, I measured success the way many extractors did: extraction rate.

How much could we recover? How efficient could we make the process? Those questions made sense when cannabis biomass was scarce, expensive, and legally dangerous. But are they still the right questions?

When quality biomass can be grown abundantly and sun-grown cannabis can provide an abundance of trichome heads, perhaps maximizing extraction efficiency shouldn’t be our highest priority anymore.

Maybe the question should become: how cleanly can we capture what the plant already gave us?

The trichome is right there on the exterior of the plant. Nature did the hard work. Mechanical separation. Water. Temperature. Pressure. We have remarkably simple tools available for harnessing the compounds contained in those trichomes without unnecessarily overprocessing the plant.

That matters because nearly every other consumer category is moving toward cleaner products.

• Cleaner food
• Cleaner water
• Cleaner medicine
• Cleaner ingredients

Why wouldn’t consumers eventually demand cleaner cannabis?

For me, clean cannabis means products created with minimal processing and, whenever possible, without petrochemical solvents.  Not because chemistry itself is inherently bad, but because abundance gives us the luxury of asking whether aggressive processing is necessary in the first place.

Abundance Changes the Equation

If farmers are already suffering from price compression because we have too much cannabis, why must we squeeze every possible percentage point of extraction efficiency out of every pound?

Do we really need the strongest flower? The strongest concentrate? The highest extraction rate? Or are those simply metrics inherited from prohibition?

There is an environmental question here as well.

Butane, for example, comes from the fossil-fuel industry. At a time when we’re having enormous conversations about drilling, fracking, carbon emissions, and our dependence on fossil fuels, it is reasonable for the cannabis industry to examine its own processes.

If the plant provides an abundance of trichomes that can be separated mechanically, shouldn’t that option receive serious consideration?

That is what abundance allows us to ask.

And Then There Is Hemp

The artificial separation between “hemp” and “cannabis” has created another strange distortion.

Botanically, we’re talking about the same plant. Legally, we created categories largely around the concentration of one cannabinoid: THC. But imagine looking at the plant differently.

What if biomass entered a system where its valuable trichomes were mechanically separated for medicine, wellness products, and adult use, and the remaining plant material continued through an agricultural supply chain?

• Fiber
• Paper
• Rope
• Textiles
• Bioplastics
• Building materials
• Biofuels
• Seed oil
• Protein

Instead of treating the rest of the plant as waste, we could treat cannabis as the extraordinary agricultural crop that it is.

Why grow enormous quantities of corn solely to produce ethanol if other crops can contribute? Why shouldn’t hemp seed oil become a larger part of our food system? Why shouldn’t hemp protein compete with resource-intensive protein sources?