Ah, remember the good old days? The ones where we used to complain that the prices of legal weed were too damn high? We'd drive by dispensaries on our way to Basement Dealer Dan's, flipping them off for so much as thinking they could price gouge us like that when we could get perfectly good bud from our buddy's bathtub for half the price.

Well, judging from the adorably modest total on our most recent dispensary receipt, those days are done. The prices of legal pot are indeed plummeting, and they're doing so at a rate that's about to make your Basement Dan's artisinal Sour Diesel science experiment woefully obsolete.

In Colorado, the average wholesale price of a pound of pot has dropped 48 percent since legal sales started in 2014 to about $1,300, according to Cannabase, operator of the state’s largest market. Gram-wise, average prices are down to $5.77 per gram, about 30 percent cheaper today than they were in 2014.

However, while this is titillating intel, it's actually why prices are plunging that caught our interest … it's because people are investing millions of dollars in state-of-the-art grow facilities.

Brand-new and fully decked out with the latest agricultural technology, these facilities are using farming innovations to increase their output by as much as 16 times in some cases. These improved growing methods have flooded the market with a surplus of skunky supply, but … it's being met with relatively static demand. People have just gotten used to not being able to afford dispensary weed, so they're not exactly clamoring to pay the higher price tag for the legal stuff, even with the recent price drop. Or at least, they aren't yet.

It's ironic, no? Weed cultivation is getting better and more weed is being grown, but it's not translating into profit for dispensaries. Not that we, the beloved consumer mind …

Meanwhile, grow houses are brimming with hyper-efficient innovations in watering systems, automated feeding, irrigation, energy-saving lighting, fertilizers and the world of hydroponics, all which have allowed grows to maximize their yield. In fact, weed agriculture's intensified focus on energy efficiency has cut production costs for some indoor growers to less than $300 a pound from more than $1,000, according to John Chandler, a vice president at Urban-Gro in Lafayette, Colorado. Urban-Gro slangs ultra-efficient machinery and high efficiency lighting to marijuana grows.

“If you want to compete on a price game, you have to use versions of our technology to do it,” Chandler told Bloomberg. “Everybody is putting in irrigation systems, so that’s good for us.”

… Good for agricultural companies, sure, but not so much for growers themselves. The efficiency-increasing technologiess being used nowadays to supercharge output is expensive as all hell.

Say you want to expand your grow-house and beef up your yield with a hybrid greenhouse featuring insulated walls, a glass ceiling and a well-designed climate control system. That'll run you a cool $25 million, or at least that's how much Brian Lade, owner of Smokey Point Productions in Arlington, Washington, had to raise. With the price of weed decreasing and the price of growing on a competitive level soaring, what's a weed whisperer to do?

One way to cut costs is to automate the process, another bizarre side effect of people's increasing willingness to invest cash money into the weed industry.

While the marijuana industry has relied on human hands to cultivate the crop for millennia, it's nothing the cool, steel grip of robots can't handle; robots that cut the costs of vertebrate labor. A machine can mix soil ingredients, pour the dirt into containers and then dig holes for young plants. A conveyor belt can then carry the container to an employee who does the delicate job of planting. But while a human does that, a machine can also trim the buds.

The latter option is actually something Lade is exploring with his own grow right now.

“If you want to provide cannabis to your people, you’ve got to adapt or die,” said Lade. “We are basically just going way bigger and then adding efficiencies like the machines and computer software.”

Yet, despite the lowering prices of pot and the rising cost of growing it, the regulated market in North America is still expected to generate more than $20 billion in five years, up from $6.7 billion last year, thanks to the four new states that just legalized recreational pot (California, Maine, Massachusetts and Nevada). Canada’s plan to legalize marijuana this year also won't hurt.

And just how does all this affect your weekend?

It doesn't, really. Unless you're a dispensary or grow-house owner who's having trouble scraping together the funds for a more technologically competitive grow, your forecast is basically just "Cheaper legal weed, in perpetuity."

Doesn't mean you can't still hang out with Basement Dan, but … he might finally have some (legal) competition.