Imagup General Magazine 2024
Just as dispensaries started to pop up on every street corner, a lot of people decided that it was time to access their weed in another way: by growing it from home. Medical patients in particular are starting small home grow ops more than anyone, which is actually pretty easy to do with the right licensing.
There’s a lot of speculation on why people with a range of medical ailments are ditching dispensary cannabis and growing their own from home instead. But it doesn’t just come down to one reason… There are actually many factors driving people’s newfound growing habits.
Confidentiality & Discretion
Confidentiality is a big deal in the world of healthcare, and we all deserve health information privacy. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to stay discreet about your treatment if you’re seen every week walking into your local dispensary and walking out with a bag of your weekly dose of medical marijuana in hand.
Of course, dispensaries and medical marijuana clinics value discretion as well and they package their products with non-descript labeling. But that’s not enough to stay confidential, which is the first reason why so many people are opting for the more discrete option of growing from home.
Get a marijuana growing license that’s issued from your government through a trustworthy provider and you never have to worry about confidentiality when it comes to your preferred “green” treatment method. You might even compare growing from home to HIPAA for medical marijuana patients.
Easier Access
Not only is it more discrete, but it’s also a lot easier and more convenient to access medical marijuana for those who choose to utilize a grow license. You literally never need to leave your home when your marijuana supply runs low. Just make a quick visit to your homegrown stash.
Access can be a big problem for any medical patient seeking treatment, but it’s a much bigger issue for cannabis patients than it is for most pharmaceutical drugs. For prescription pills, access is usually as simple as visiting a pharmacy with your prescription in hand, waiting 15 minutes or so for the pharmacist to refill, and heading home.
Today’s Problems with Marijuana Access
With marijuana as your treatment, it’s not quite as simple. The first issue comes down to legality, and even though a lot of countries, states, provinces, and territories are getting on board with the medical marijuana movement, many still have not.
Even if medical marijuana laws have been passed, the final issue on access comes down to supply and demand. The demand for medical marijuana is skyrocketing, but the supply doesn’t always match up with that.
That means even when a patient has a marijuana prescription in hand, there’s no guarantee that a dispensary or clinic will have a supply of medical-grade weed. Growing from home gives a patient complete control over his or her supply (more on that below).
It is worth noting that starting an at-home grow op isn’t always a cakewalk. For some people, it comes naturally, but for others, the green thumb just isn’t there. The difficulty of growing indoors depends a lot on the number of plants you decide to grow, so it’s always a good idea to start slow and add more plants after a few growth cycles.
More Control
Even if you don’t consider yourself a control freak, it’s nice to have the upper hand when it comes to your health and wellness. This doesn’t always happen for medical marijuana patients who decide to access their products from retail dispensaries and large cannabis producers.
When you buy from dispensaries, you’re at the mercy of someone else, and that someone else can’t always deliver. Even if a dispensary has great reviews and has been reliable so far, there’s no way of knowing when that retailer will experience shortages of your go-to strains. That’s exactly what happened to Canada after legalization.
Growing from home gives a medical patient complete control of every little detail, from deciding whether to grow hydroponically to specific strains. There’s no relying on anyone else to deliver your favorite cannabis products, you’re the one in control with a medical grow license.
Higher Quality
If you’re used to buying top-shelf cannabis for your medical needs, then this next reason for ditching dispensary weed and growing from home instead is for you. A lot of home growers claim to cultivate cannabis that’s higher in quality than even the highest-shelf dispensary products.
A big reason for this has to do with small-batch growth. Growing anything in a small batch usually means better quality because you’re able to give each plant more attention and care than you would in a massive commercial grow op. The stuff you’d buy at dispensaries is very rarely grown in small batches, it usually originates from warehouses with thousands of plants.
This doesn’t always happen for new growers, so don’t expect your first go-around to be perfect. Don’t even expect it to compare to the products you’re used to purchasing from dispensaries. But give it time, and you’ll get there eventually as you start to learn the ropes of growing.
Cost Savings
Whether it’s for medical reasons or recreational ones, most people who use cannabis regularly quickly come to realize something: it’s a very expensive habit. Cannabis costs can start adding up fast, especially for those who respect quality bud.
One solution to cost is to find a wholesale cannabis provider, but that means you have to buy in bulk. The overall price per gram or pound will be cheaper, but there’s a higher upfront cost since getting a wholesale price usually means having to buy a pound (if not more) at a time.
When you decide to grow from home instead of buying from dispensaries, you can compare it to making coffee at home instead of going to Starbucks every day (or multiple times per day for some of us). Just as there’s an initial investment for buying a decent coffee maker, there will be a small investment for starting an at-home grow op.
That initial investment is completely worth it, though, as you eliminate the need to buy “coffee” from a high-priced retailer. In the end, the cost of starting a garden is a small price to pay.
