Guenny wrote:
You know, there's one guy left in Iowa who got grandfathered in to a short-lived government medicinal marijuana program, and the feds send him 300 free government grade marijuana joints a month. Now, even I think that 10 joints a day is a bit excessive, yet ridiculously awesome. While the pipe dream you reference about marijuana for recreational use may be wonderful, but it's still a decade or two off at least. I'm not talking about producing marijuana to rival the scales of alcohol and tobacco, I'm talking about medicinal and industrial uses. Specifically, as a safe and therapeutic drug for many people, and an eco-friendly alternative.
As far as genetics go, while groups like Monsanto may have the technology to create Frankenpot, people have been cross breeding strains to optimize efficacy for many years. Heck, in Tibet, they have strains of marijuana that are 5,000 years old. Good marijuana clubs have hundreds of different strains and intakes of marijuana, because different things work for different people. Smoking isn't the only way to get cannabis. And the fact of the matter is, that's the one problem with trying to produce synthetic pot: naturally, pot has nearly 100 different types of cannabinoids, and other chemicals beside, and different strains produce different blends. While someone taking Marinol may initially have relief, they quickly build up resistance to the one synthetic cannabinoid present.
I have no idea what you're trying to argue. If there's a market for hemp/marijuana large enough to financially impact the assorted big businesses, the big businesses will take it and do it larger, cheaper and faster. If it's a niche market too small to significantly impact them, they won't care. They simply have more money, more land and more resources. For every enterprising back barn pot grower, there's ten thousand college students whose idea of "work" is walking to the 7/11 and buying whatever is behind the counter and sold by Phillip Morris. You want 100 different cannabinoids in your Marinol and you think AstraZeneca can't pull this off? This is what these companies
do to make billions of dollars a year. Or, if it's easier to just grind up some "organic" weed, press it into a pill with some sawdust, and sell it that way then that's what they'll do. First they'll take your 5,000 year old Tibetan strain, tweak one of the genes and slap a patent on that before marketing it as the best possible 5,000 year old Tibetan weed on the market, bar none.
My point is merely that there's nothing in the legalization of pot that has big businesses terrified. That's like these people who say "Yeah, there's this type of gas where you can get, like, a thousand miles to the gallon but, like, the big oil companies won't let them make it..." when, in reality, any oil company would drive over a sack of babies with a dump truck to get that formula first because they'd be bajillionaires who could literally purchase the continent of Africa with the money they'd make. The barriers to marijuana being legalized or hemp produced commercially are social ones.
Edited, Feb 11th 2011 12:14pm by Jophiel