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Comment by arc_of_descent | Hacker News Reader

The problem with drug and tobacco companies is that marijuana is a garden weed. Anyone can grow it (if it becomes legal). Or rather, no large investment to start a weed farm.

Tobacco and drug manufacturing plants require a significant larger investment. So the lobby for anti-marijuana is strong and controlled by rich people.

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Tomatoes are a garden weed; most people still buy them from stores. Just because you can grow something yourself, doesn't mean most people will when it's much easier to simply buy it.

Eh, I dunno. Brand names are powerful. Standardization is powerful. If marijuana were legal I could see there being a lot of money in being the McDonald's of pot. Low price, universal availability, and lots of advertising can lift a mediocre product quite high.

The thing is, we are not talking about "brands" but "strains". You could get seeds for the best marijuana strain that is out there and grow it yourself. No need for "brands".

Strains are brands themselves, hence why they have catchy names. I think we'll see differentiation here too.

You can, but you can also make the value calculations in your head and decide that instead of learning how to properly cultivate it, keeping bad plants out, and the time/money consumed in a quality growing op, you'd rather just throw a bit of cash at someone else and use all that time for other things.

There are only so many hours in a day, and outsourcing those hours for a little money is a perfectly reasonable explanation for how a real industry will pop up around this.

If nothing else, branding certainly kicks in once you consider the market for edibles. We have brands for store-bought brownies right now; we'll have brands for store-bought pot brownies too.

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