I'm kind of surprised that the alcohol and tobacco industries don't lobby for legalization. They could potentially diversify in to marijuana manufacture and sale, and leverage their brands and experience in selling other recreational drugs. The pharmaceutical industry could similarly profit from manufacturing and selling medical marijuana.
The problem from the pharma companies point of view is that they have patents on a lot of their drugs, granting exclusivity on production. Marijuana is a plant which anyone can grow (and thus compete with them).
I don't think most marijuana smokers are going to want to bother growing their own marijuana any more than cigarette smokers bother to grow their own tobacco.
People are also very attracted to brands and swayed by marketing.
I don't doubt for an instant that the marijuana industry is going to be gigantic if it ever becomes fully legal in the US.
I don't think the economics are comparable at all. Given that cannabis is literally an invasive weed, getting started is really easy and takes very little (horizontal) space. A past neighbor in Northern California just randomly stuck a few seeds from a dispensary in the middle of her backyard garden, did a little research on how to take care of it, and four months later had more cannabis than the entire block could smoke before the next harvest was ready.
A single tobacco plant won't yield much more than 2 ounces and that would last a pack-a-day smoker less than a week, saving them about $40 (not including labor of actually making the class A cigarettes). 2 ounces for a single cannabis plant is a relatively poor yield but would still last an 8th-a-day smoker 2 weeks and save them at least $400 and there is up to a 10x difference between a poor yield and an excellent yield. The reward/effort ratio for these two plants is worlds apart so I don't think the comparison to tobacco is particularly helpful.
I think you really underestimate how lazy some people (like me) area. I live in New York, have no access to a garden, and the only room that gets much light in my apartment is my bedroom. Even if cannabis were legal, I would never bother to grow my own, because the plants smell quite strongly.
I also enjoy trying a wide variety strains, which wouldn't work out so well if I was cultivating only a few plants.
I think you underestimate how poor poor people are. Poor people also need pain relief. They also need to get high. Most non-poor people get high on opiates or alcohol. That's expensive. Growing a plant, in relative terms, is not.
So is tobacco and while I've known the occasional person who grew it, it's pretty uncommon. I've also been surprised that tobacco companies don't get in on the legalise marijuana thing. Possibly they are suffering so much from bad press they don't think they could withstand the backlash...
It is also a new market for them. They can sit on their current market share or help open up a new market and risk it cannibalising their existing market while they potentially may fail to get sufficient market share in the new market to offset the losses.
It seems like basically an industry on the defensive that see it as safer to just hole up and try to maintain status quo as much as possible.
I don't know why people attack Blockbuster's business model.
Blockbuster had a phenomenal business model, and effective leadership, that lasted 25 years and went through several re-conceptualizations. What happened to it wasn't a human failing.
The market simply got disrupted by Netflix. Businesses aren't people, they can't just turn the ship around at a moment's notice. What would you have had them do? Not have ever been in the video rental business in the first place and leave all that money on the table? Have the foresight to see Netflix coming?
I can understand why non-techies would use Blockbuster as a symbol for all things tech-disruption-related, but we can do a little better than that I hope.
As I understand it, growing tobacco takes a lot of time and effort. You need to bury it and store for some time before it gets good. If growing good quality tobacco was as easy as growing good quality marijuana, I suspect a lot more smokers would do so.
Growing your own MJ and have it taste like it does when you by from a pro, is a feat though. When you curate cannabis the right way, the flavors of cheese, berry, fruit, pine or other, comes through.
I think botanists or people who can read and have a habit of, you know, Google up on stuff, will do pretty good at growing their own stuff.
Why Big Cig is dodging this must purely be because of potential bad-will. I bet they feel like I do whenever I raise my voice on a cannabis-related topic at work: will this give me cred or back-lash like a MF?
If they tarnish themselves with yet another vice, the virtue zealots will descend on them. Too much risk. If they'll try to be heroes, sure, but I can't see it justified as a business decision. They seem big and powerful, but governments are more of both.
While trying to be vague, I can say the tobacco industry is ready to profit off of marijuana legalization. They have lots of stuff ready to go, but not public. In the meantime, however, they are more than happy to continue raking in their current profits and not rocking the boat.
They've made pretty clear that they are going to reverse the policy of deprioritizing prosecutions for at least recreational use in states that have legalized, medical use is less clear.
