In many states where marijuana is legal for medicinal use, personal use or both, state residents and qualifying medical users have the opportunity to cultivate their own marijuana supply in the comfort of their own home. But not all state legalization legislation includes home-grown provisions, which Jon Walker, author of “After Legalization: Understanding the future of marijuana policy,” warns is a huge mistake.

Part of the reason some states such as Colorado opted to add a provision allowing for the home cultivation of marijuana is largely twofold: to ease the demand for the plant, especially for medicinal purposes, and to ensure that users have access to the plant, since dispensaries are not located in every corner of the state, especially rural areas.

Home-grown marijuana is not only a cheaper option for some users, but it also allows patients to somewhat skirt state laws that dictate the maximum amount of marijuana a person can legally purchase. However, there are limits on how many plants a person can grow, as well as limits on how many plants can be flowering at any given time.

For example, in Oregon, a medical marijuana patient can legally have up to 24 plants, but only six can be mature or flowering at a time.

Though the number of plants a user can cultivate are limited and set by each state’s specific legalization legislation, which often includes other requirements such as ensuring that access to the plant is not available to the general public, many states have opted to not include a provision for home growing, including Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Washington, D.C.

By opting to not include this provision, states were able to generate as much support as possible for the legalization legislation, lessen the likelihood that the feds would conduct a raid in the state and generate as much tax revenue as possible.

In its attempt to legalize the personal use of marijuana, Washington state voters intentionally omitted a provision allowing home cultivation. The state even went so far as to take away the right of medical marijuana patients in the state to grow 15 plants, limiting the number now to only six plants.

But as Walker wrote in a recent blog post, Washington state’s personal use legalization legislation, Initiative 502, only garnered 0.4 percentage point more of the vote than Colorado’s legalization legislation, Amendment 64, during the November 2012 election.

According to a February 2014 poll from Quinnipiac University, 73 percent of Colorado voters said they wouldn’t be bothered if a neighbor grew marijuana at home. But the poll also found that 81 percent of the state’s residents opposed changing the law to allow residents to grow more than 12 marijuana plants in their homes, compared to the six plants per adult that can be legally grown currently.

Regarding threats of federal raids, Walker pointed out that the federal government has not specifically addressed home growing and has treated Colorado and Washington state the same.

He’s got a point. In the memo the Department of Justice issued in August on the personal use legalization legislation, Attorney General Eric Holder made no distinction between the standards each state would be held to when he announced that the federal government was deferring its legal right to sue the states for legalizing marijuana.

Another reason for omitting provisions allowing home-grown marijuana in legalization legislation is some people’s belief that doing so would undermine the regulated legal market and reduce the amount of tax revenue generated from legal marijuana sales.

However, even with its provision allowing people to cultivate their own marijuana, the state of Colorado isn’t hurting for tax revenue from marijuana sales. In March it was reported that Colorado’s licensed dispensaries raised around $3.5 million in tax revenue alone from legal marijuana sales during January — the first month of legal recreational marijuana sales. Similar to homebrewing, most people don’t have the time, skill or desire to make their own — they would rather just buy it.

Though some brushed off the high sales as the public’s infatuation with the novelty of being able to legally buy marijuana for the first time, Barbara Brohl, executive director of the Colorado state Department of Revenue, said those high revenue numbers are expected to continue, reinforcing Walker’s argument that all future marijuana legalization legislation should allow for home cultivation because it does more good than harm.

“How to treat home growing is one of the many policies (sic) decision that needs to be made when a state legalizes marijuana. While it is a modest provision that will effect (sic) a relatively small number of people that is exactly why it is important to get it right in the first place,” Walker wrote.

“Legislatures are busy and often slow to get around to fixing non-pressing issues. Because the end of alcohol prohibition didn’t legalize home brewing it took decades to earn that right. It was only a year ago that Alabama and Mississippi finally became the last two states to make it legal to brew beer at home. If it is not included from the start it could take years and possibly decades to get it added later.”