As long as you are selling a cheap product and the price is really just to cover the price of growing, I see nothing wrong with it. Only the greedy people are giving medical marijuana a bad name.
Actually, as long as it is to other MMJ patients, then it should hold up in court, as long as the donation is not too large. That is the grey area, they say we can recoup expenses besides labor, but they do not say how we can do that, or how much to take for donations.
more of my thoughts on the issue...
i agree the donation should not be large. i would say it should be SMALL, way below black prices no matter the locale (black market goes for about $10 per gram in portland, $250 an ounce or so).
my average donation offered to me willingly by patients is about $5 a gram and about $150 an ounce (i've never donated more than 1/2 an ounce though).
it has to be reasonable reimbursement.
so let's say you're a patient that wants 3 ounces per month...that is 6 ounces every two months...an ounce per plant on a 6 plant grow...two months worth of electric and ventilation alone costs $65, and to keep heat on during the winter costs another $75 a month or more (i can walk around in sweaters and blankets and i don't care, but my plants do). let's say i rent my house/apt for $800 a month and the grow takes up 10% of my space...add on another $80 per month in rent costs.
ignore ALL other costs.
using the estimate above, ($65 electric x 2 months) + ($75 heat x 2 months) + ($80 rent x 2 months) = $440 every two months. $73+ dollars per ounce.
when you add in all the other costs for supplies (like soil, perlite, nutrients, depreciation on fans, lights, etc, ) and utilities (like water bills, as well as aforementioned rent, heat, and electric), it gets WELL above $75 per ounce.
not to mention that ready-flower-plants are not free. you have to grow them yourself OR donate for them on the gray market. so throw in the cost of vegetation, cloning, seeding, etc. more lights, more fans, more electric, more water, greater portion of rent, etc.
luckily for most patients in my area, they only have to foot the aforementioned costs. if all my fellow growers like me did not have empathy, they would be donating for the fact that we made the initial investment in building the grow space....which can get costly. i bet those greedy, free-weed-wanting mooches would sing a different tune if we told them to reimburse us for the many hours of labor that goes into growing their medicine (not to mention the hours and hours spent building a grow space to do so).
my labor and expertise used to go for $20 an hour with full benefits and a 6% match on 401k, now i get a mere $10.50 an hour. i spend , on average, 1 - 2 hours a night tending to an ommp grow. let's say it's only 20 minutes day...that is 2.333 hours per week....that is 21 hours every two months, that is an extra $210 per 6 ounces....bump it up from $73 per ounce to $108 per ounce IF you include just a fraction of the labor costs...which we don't.
