My read on the situation is... Government wants to tax the weed and ensure its safe. So there are a ton of regulations which require you to do a lot of extra work and are expensive.
That, along with the taxes creates a huge price differential between legal and illegal weed.
I thought it was all about taxes at first, but I've come to understand that illegal growers often use toxic pesticides that further increase yield-- and thus it is important to know where your weed comes from.
A lot of illegal weed is from the same supply chain as the legal stuff, but unreported, similar to bootleg products that are sourced from the same factories as the authentic stuff.
I do agree that it's a problem not knowing where it came from, but it seems that legal weed has really raised the bar, and the street has to compete at some level. I've heard street weed is a lot higher quality now than pre-legal weed.
The illegal businesses are probably still evading personal income tax, payroll tax, corporate income tax, sales tax. In addition to the pesticide stuff you mention.
The rest is state regulations. The laws are as onerous as having to tag and register each plant, what happened to it, their weight at harvest, and sometimes genetic testing of those plants.
The idea is to create a paper trail such that illegally grown weed can't be laundered into being legal-- but my god is it a MESS.
I've always preferred to pay the higher prices for this reason, and the fact that I know exactly how potent something is.
So I'm going to work blue here for a bit...
Regarding contamination and unsafe drugs-- my best friend and I had a tradition. Once a year around the end of the year, we'd get a couple grams of cocaine and go to someplace fantastic like the Queen Mary, or Disneyland, or the Long Beach Aquarium, The San Diego Zoo, etc. We called this tradition "Merry Cokemass". We had an agreement to never do any drugs outside of these appointed 24 hours.
Anyways, we have both decided that this just isn't safe anymore.
Not the most sterling benchmark.
To help explain it...
I find what I need from friends and neighbors. I have built a system of trust that operates outside of the typical capitalistic reality that the rest of society runs on. Sometimes it means knowing where stuff was grown and who grew it. Sometimes the trust is more blind - it depends on the situation. Since cannabis is an organic compound (I only consume flower, not oil or edibles) I find it easy to "verify" that I am getting a legitimate product.
I don't mean to brag, but I have a situation where I mostly get it for free. It is all love, and to have people share the love makes it all the more special.
Another way to think of it like a CSA - would you want organic produce directly from the farm, or from Whole Foods?
I hope this helps, at the very least, humanizes the other side a little bit.
That kind of thing is an extreme minority in most places- weed culture is no less mercantile than any other. The la la stuff exists, to be sure, but so does my neighbor offering to share veggies from their garden. Either way, I don't think it's got much bearing on the illegal drug trade, or the crippled legal trade as the volume is just two completely different scales.
In my experience there's quite a bit of overlap between the kind of people who like to smoke weed and the kind of people who like to grow their own vegetables and sell them from their garden. Perhaps less so in cities. I think this is one of those stereotypes that has quite a bit of truth to it.
For example, my mom loves Whole Foods and would not prefer a CSA. There is comfort in the standard quality that McDonalds has to offer. Marketing labels and branding have become commonplace and widely celebrated amongst consumers.
To ask for these luxuries to be stripped away is preposterous to most people. “Your weed isn’t lab tested - but you could be killed!”
But yeah, I suppose if you're also picking up some illegal stuff, makes sense to make it a one-stop shopping trip.