I don't like to get anywhere near the product personally, but I know it's an easy thing for people to produce at a trivial cost, and the street value is almost entirely 'risk money'. The more legal it gets, the less relevant the 'risk money' factors in, and the more people are just going to grow it themselves or buy the cheapest option, which will always be from the 'private sector'. I think there's misplaced optimism among legal recreational and medical marijuana enthusiasts that becoming legal will make it take over the illicit market, when in reality people are just going to grow it or buy it from backyard growers as the illicit market becomes less and less illicit.
One of the several elephants in this room is that there's a huge global push to make the private production of marijuana fully legal or at least turn a blind eye to it. This is one of the obvious reasons the commercial industry has been a big flop and so many investors have been burned. Comically, a lot of the MM investors I've spoken to have been weed smokers themselves, and they all buy illegally. Even someone like me who has as little to do with marijuana as possible knows plenty of people who use it, and comes across plenty more on my wanderings. I spent the last 6 years constantly travelling abroad (a lifestyle suddenly halted early this year unfortunately) and met thousands of people from all over the world, and of course many people love to smoke while they travel, (much to my annoyance of someone like me who hates the smallest whiff of the stuff! Haha!) and they all buy illegally. Only a very very few have even considered buying the legal stuff, I've barely met any who have actually purchased it from a legal source, but many express an interest in investing in it. That model has an obvious result.
