[chimeracoder]

> Follow the money. Pharma has a lot of it, and they're willing to invest in politics to keep what they have and get even more.

I don't think it's so simple. Big Tobacco also has a lot of money, and they have even more of an incentive for the federal ban on marijuana to be lifted. They can't really touch it while it's in this grey zone, but it's a huge amount of money that they're itching to get their hands on.

[digler999]

Dont forget alcohol either. A dose of Indica has little mentally-intoxicating effect but a similar muscle-relaxing effect as a pint or 2 of beer (at least for me ), just no calories or potential for dependency.

[Retric]

Tobacco is small compared to Pharma. The average american spends over 1,000$ per year on prescription drugs.

[chimeracoder]

> Tobacco is small compared to Pharma. The average american spends over 1,000$ per year on prescription drugs.

Yes, but medical marijuana is a lot less important to pharmaceutical companies than recreational marijuana is to tobacco companies. Pharmaceutical companies care less about medical marijuana these days than you might think.

And it's not so simple, because it's not so easy to see how money gets directed. For example, Altria is a massive, diversified company (albeit less so since Kraft Foods was split off). They likely see their investment in smokeless tobacco ("e-cigarettes") as a lateral move to help them corner the marijuana market once it's legalized. They also see it as a hedge against the decades-long drop in tobacco usage. But which is it? The answer is "both" - weighing those against each other is tough. And it gets even more tough when you try to consider how much they would have considered the loss of the tobacco business to be a threat back in 2006, when their business also included production of cookies and macaroni & cheese.

These incentives are oftentimes conflicting even within the same company, so from the outside, we can't just say "well, industry $X is larger than industry $Y, so they will get their way". They have to decide that the issue at hand is actually more important to them, which isn't so obvious, and that's even before you get into the fact that those industries may actually overlap.

[pmoriarty]

I really don't see why the alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceutical companies can't themselves move in to production and sale of marijuana, once it becomes legal.

In fact, I'd bet this is exactly what will happen. They're even likely to come to dominate the market, much like Google did the phone market once they came out with Android, and Microsoft did the console market once they came out with the Xbox.

[chimeracoder]

> I really don't see why the alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceutical companies can't themselves move in to production and sale of marijuana, once it becomes legal.

That's exactly what I'm saying. The tobacco industry would love to leverage their existing assets into a lateral move into the marijuana industry. But until it's legal, they have to sit by and watch their lunch get eaten by smaller firms with larger risk appetites because they have less to lose if things blow up in their faces. That's what's already happening.

[WalterSear]

Pharma can't make money on comoditized, public domain medicine. The alcohol industry doesn't have a relevant infrastructure or supply chain. Tobacco is the only industry that's in a position to pivot, but the profit margins on mass cannabis are much less than tobacco, since it consumption is inherently lower. That said, Philip Morris purchased a few hundred thousand acres of Humboldt county in the early ninties, in anticipation of legalization.