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Comment by klyrs | Hacker News Reader

This is something pot activists have complained about from the get-go. Legalization was sold to politicians with the promise of high taxes. We knew that poor users would be priced out of the market, that legal weed would be a privilege enjoyed by the rich, that dealers with criminal records would be shut out of the legal market.

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> Legalization was sold to politicians with the promise of high taxes. We knew that poor users would be priced out of the market, that legal weed would be a privilege enjoyed by the rich

Poor users seem to enjoy a lot of legal alcohol. Taxes on that are high too, and it's even easier to make your own alcohol than to make your own weed.

Liquor licenses and marijuana licences are very different in availability and, due to how the products are consumed (alcohol being very central to social gatherings), the necessity of having a license is more important for alcohol.

> it's even easier to make your own alcohol than to make your own weed.

It sure as fuck isn't. There are parts of the world where putting some free seeds in the ground is sufficient.

People make alcohol in prison toilets. That’s not really far from “throw seeds in the ground”.

It's also not really safe to drink. Probably unlikely to kill you, but you're not going to get any assurances E. coli isn't in there.

It's pretty hard to mess up growing weed bad enough to hurt someone, unless you poison yourself with pesticides on accident (which aren't really necessary at least at the personal scale). If something bad happens, it's almost always to the plant.

Sure, you can make alcohol yourself. Then you discover some batteries increase the kick. Then you realize a drop of methanol just takes it to insane levels. Then 2 drops kill or blind you.

A high proportion of the booze consumed worldwide is what the bureaucrats call "unrecorded", and poisonings are exceptional.

"Two drops" of even pure methanol won't do anything to you. Not even close.

Of course I don’t know the LD50 of methanol, but I do know it’s quite close to whatever gives you the kick.

Alcohol has long shelf life, can be easily produced at large scale, etc.

Selling flower buds of a plant will hardly be accessible. But the industry will eventually find a way to make a viable cannabis product from waste.

And historically when even more alcohol was consumed there was a massive bootleg and moonshine industry. In the end, most likely the people running it have simply died of old age and the newer generations prefers other things.

The majority of poor people have neither the time, space, know-how, or desire to make their own alcohol or weed.

But it's an awful lot easier for a dealer to sell weed to a hundred people than for them to sell bottles of alcohol to a hundred people.

One will get you in severe trouble in a lot of states.

This isn't a terribly apt comparison. The competition for weed is not individuals growing their own weed (which, in fact, requires land which the urban poor do not have access to), but with (a) well-established growers who have been continually operating in the black market, and (b) new legal growers and their employees who can skim some of their product for "personal use".

Individuals can and do make their own alcohol -- and it's a really expensive hobby to get it right. In terms of price per unit volume, distribution of illicit alcohol is quite problematic. You can easily fit $500 of weed into 1 liter (local prices and densities vary). Retail booze is less than a tenth of that. Bad booze would be even lower. This is a substantial impediment to the risk/reward calculus for street-level sellers all the way up to producers.

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