Editor’s Note: Florida “retail recreational marijuana” legalization did not get the 60% vote required in the November 2024 election, so possession of cannabis other than by medical card holders, and growing marijuana, still are VERY illegal in Florida, which its governor calls “the free state of Florida.”

If you live in Florida, you’ve likely seen advertisements for a “recreational marijuana legalization” ballot proposal (Amendment 3) to be voted on this November.

The advertisements are sponsored by corporations looking to profit from legalizing retail sales of recreational marijuana products. Craft marijuana growers want to give a stiff jab to the face of the liars in these commercials who say things like “black market marijuana is laced with heroin and will kill you.”

What a load of rubbish!

The ballot proposal is sponsored by Trulieve, a corporate marijuana profiteer and is a bait and switch typical of conservative states. The bait is the fear of being arrested for simply possessing marijuana is removed, and consumers are allowed to buy schwaggy corporate marijuana products without having to spend hundreds of dollars per year to qualify for Florida’s medical marijuana card.

The trick is that in return for not getting busted for having marijuana and being able to buy mediocre corporate cannabis, you still can’t grow your own marijuana, a few corporations get rich growing and selling mediocre legal marijuana, you still go to jail for growing your own.

The battle over marijuana “legalization” in Florida reveals how greed, regulation, and corporate interests control politics and attempt as always to stop you from growing your own marijuana.

Trulieve shills tout their ludicrous claim about heroin-laced marijuana. Of course, it’s always been true that a percentage of unethical, greedy marijuana growers use poisons like Avid and Eagle 20 on their bloom phase plants. These growers may also push out buds loaded with gray mold and other pathogens that harm people.

Unfortunately, even the most careful corporate, legal cannabis producers are also selling whole cannabis and cannabis products that aren’t safe. Government testing of legal retail cannabis often shows dangerous levels of molds, trace chemicals, pesticides, and other contaminants. Cartridge vape pens containing cannabis extracts also may contain substances so harmful that the Centers for Disease Control has issued formal warnings about them.

But the claim that most of the black market marijuana in Florida is dangerous, or at the very least inferior to legal marijuana sold in Florida medical marijuana retail stores, is false.

Our contacts in Florida assure us there are many connoisseur cannabis growers there, producing strains, quality, potency, and terps no retail store can match, even in the most legalized states like California, Colorado, Washington.

Connoisseur, craft cannabis growers aren’t into the massive bulk production of generic marijuana strains that Trulieve corporate growers favor. They’re not primarily growing cannabis to make money. Instead, they truly love the marijuana plant and are dedicated to producing the tastiest, most potent flowers that give consumers the cleanest, most fascinating effects. It’s not all about money. It’s about horticultural passion.

And while it’s true that black market growers are unable or unwilling to produce the high-powered and sometimes dangerous concentrates,  cartridge vapes, beverages, and a few other types of products sold in recreational marijuana stores in some legalized states, they are producing whole buds, live resin, dry sift, ice water hash, cannabis tinctures, and many other safe, whole-plant derived products that consumers love.

What’s more, black market growers provide these products at a far lower price and with much higher quality than corporate producers and sellers can ever achieve.

When you compare fresh, properly dried and cured homegrown premium buds with the dried out, shriveled resin glands, no-terp schwag selling for twice as much at legal stores, you see the difference.

Of course, greed and fascism are the major components of so-called Florida recreational marijuana legalization. The state’s governor, known as the Tallahassee Mussolini for his ultra-conservative policies that discriminate against women, LGBTQ, secularism, Nature, and progressives, is in bed with the hemp industry.

The hemp industry is yet another corrupt player, responsible for the atrocious Delta-8 THC scam , their bogus claims about Delta-9-THC derived from hemp, and other scams involving extraction of compounds from industrial hemp. So-called THC products derived from hemp suck. They make you feel lousy. They don’t give you the real marijuana high you love.

When hemp growing was legalized federally in 2018 and elsewhere, it was marketed as a way to use hemp for what it was used for until cannabis prohibition in 1937: fibers, fuel oil, seed oil, rope, and similar industrial products.

But that too was a bait and switch. Today, the hemp industry uses its low-potency ditchweed plants for extracting fake THC analogues, along with CBD.

Following federal hemp growing legalization in 2018, Florida lawmakers legalized hemp growing in Florida. But now they feel they were conned.

Rep. Tommy Gregory, a Republican from Lakewood Ranch who used to promote the Florida hemp industry, said he and his colleagues had been “duped” into believing the hemp market would be largely used for industrial purposes like making textiles.

Instead, Gregory said, “they’re using hemp products to make intoxicating substances.”

Even more fun is the fact that DeSatan and the Florida Republican party are opposing recreational marijuana legalization for ideological reasons, and due to big-money donations from the hemp and medical marijuana industries that would lose market share if recreational marijuana is legalized.

Amendment 3 will make “Florida the California of the east,” warns a multi-million dollar political group called Vote No on 3. The group claims it has the full support of DeSatan, and vows to wage war against Amendment 3 which would legalize purchase of corporate marijuana by adults 21 years old and older.

DeSantis’ Chief of Staff James Uthmeier and other DeSantis hacks lead the anti-3 effort.

“Amendment 3 will have disastrous downstream consequences that will turn our state into an east coast version of California. It will threaten the health and safety of every community in Florida by allowing drug dealers to run rampant with zero consequences, creating a dangerous explosion in the black market, and forcing families to completely alter their lives to avoid exposure to secondhand smoke,” Vote No on 3 Spokeswoman Sarah Bascom said.

Opposition to Amendment 3 also comes from billionaire Ken Griffin, an ultra-conservative Floridian who in July committed to spending $12 million to defeat the amendment. Griffin is an international hedge fund magnate who benefits from lenient tax loopholes.

Earlier in 2024, DeSatan vetoed a bill that would have outlawed Delta-8 and other fake cannabinoids. The law DeSantis vetoed would have imposed a cap on delta-9 THC levels in hemp products, restricting them to 5 milligrams per serving and 50 milligrams per container. A last-minute amendment upped those limits from the original proposal of 2 milligrams per serving and 10 milligrams per package.

The vetoed bill would also have banned all delta-8 THC products, which would have been a blessing, since Delta-8 is a bad joke, and hemp-derived Delta-9 makes you feel sick, not high. Most insiders suspect the hemp industry bought DeSantis off with hefty “donations” to get his veto.

DeSantis is on record telling drug war lies about marijuana. saying he opposes recreational marijuana legalization because: “The problem with that is the entire state will smell like marijuana if that passed. This thing needs to go down. It needs to go down hard.”

Vladimir Putin’s favorite president, Donald Trump, despises DeSantis and punked him by endorsing Amendment 3, while at the same time slagging the smell of marijuana and Democrats. Trump has been totally opposed to all cannabis legalization, including medical, for most of his entire political career.

During his 2016 campaign, Trump trolled cannabis advocates by claiming he’d consider decriminalization, but his administration’s actual policy was the opposite.

In fact, Trump proposed that people selling marijuana and other drugs be quickly convicted and executed, praising countries like Singapore and China for doing so. Trump claimed that the only way to stop drug addiction is to use capital punishment.

Trump has been called out for his flip-flop on cannabis now, and no matter what he says, he is no friend to the cannabis community.

Also of note is that President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party have been pushing for federal marijuana decriminalization, with Trump and Republicans opposed to it. Biden pushed the DEA to reclassify marijuana, removing it from the “most-harmful, possibly fatal” category of “abused drugs,” which allows more state legalization and medical marijuana research.

It’s ironic that DeSantis promotes Florida as a state for “total freedom.” He even put up welcome signs at Florida borders saying “Welcome to The Free State of Florida.”

Yes, Florida is free–for some people. You have freedom to cut down endangered trees, freedom to rip people off as a landlord or business owner, freedom to drunkenly operate boats and jet skis (because the motorized watercraft and tourism industries are so rich and powerful), freedom to shoot most native animals when they haven’t done anything to deserve it, freedom to shoot harmless people dead and get away with it (thanks to the “stand your ground” law), freedom to walk around with concealed guns without having permits.

But DeSantis doesn’t want women free to control their own wombs (Florida has one of the worst abortion bans in the country), nor does he want Floridians to have the freedom to buy or grow recreational marijuana.

When DeSantis said if recreational cannabis is legalized the whole state will smell like weed, he inadvertently acknowledged what polls show—a majority of Floridians want legalized recreational marijuana.

Tens of thousands of Floridians are arrested for felony possession of small amounts of marijuana each year. Penalties for home marijuana growing are brutal. How free is that, governor?

At the same time, the main sponsor of recreational legalization is a greedy corporate entity called Trulieve, which has spent $50 million so far promoting retail legalization because they already dominate Florida’s legal medical marijuana market and would likely dominate the legalized recreational marijuana market.

As with Florida’s medical marijuana legalization, only a handful of politically-connected people would get to make massive profits growing legalized recreational cannabis. It’s not like other states where connoisseur growers can sell their cannabis to licensed retailers.

Trulieve is behind the lies in pro-Amendment 3 advertisements claiming homegrown marijuana is laced with opiates.

As we noted in the first article ever published by this magazine, growing your own marijuana is by far the least expensive way to procure the best marijuana possible that perfectly suits your needs. But that’s not going to be safe in Florida for a long time. Think about this:

In Florida, you probably don’t go to jail or even get arrested if you shoot someone dead and can convince police and prosecutors you were merely scared at the time you murdered your victim. You don’t have to prove that the person you shot was an actual threat to you, thanks to Florida’s “stand your ground” law, beloved by gun worshipers and people with hate and violence in their hearts, which are often the same people.

But if you grow even one marijuana plant in Florida, it’s a 3rd-degree felony, which carries a maximum jail sentence of 5 years and a $5000 fine. If you grow more than 25 cannabis plants, it’s a 2nd-degree felony, punishable by up to fifteen years in prison. If minors are residing where you’re growing cannabis, the cultivation offense may be classed as a 1st-degree felony, with extremely long prison sentences and other severe penalties.

In addition, cultivation of cannabis is a charge that cannot be judicially sealed or expunged.  While possession and even sale of cannabis can be sealed or expunged in some circumstances, cultivation cannot.

If Florida really was a “state of freedom” as DeSantis likes to claim, it would give Floridians the right to grow their own marijuana, so they don’t have to pay $500 an ounce for legal garbage weed sold by Trulieve and other greedy corporations!