Hacker News Reader

Comment by drewmol | Hacker News Reader

I once had an economics professor who insisted the bigger hurdle to marijuana legalization was monetizing it. It's a quite unique cash crop in that it only takes a small area and small amout of labor to produce large supply. His words, paraphrased: "You can grow enough marijuana in your basement to meet the demands of your whole neighborhood! And it's a difficult thing to patent to use IP ownership as a revenue model..."

Looks like BioTech Institute LLC (and I'm sure lots of others) are trying to address the second point.

View on HN

It's also extremely simple to produce enough alcohol for your entire neighborhood in your basement with a home-made still.

That has not stopped the monetization of alcohol...

People who want to make billions from this will simply lobby until there are extremely strict laws in place to protect their profits, and then also lobby to make sure there are wars and extremely strict punishments for violators of those laws.

Distilling liquor is significantly more dangerous than growing a plant.

Also, it's much more labor and processing time intensive. It's not true that alcohol demand can be satifsfied in anywhere near similar space and labor requirements that marijuana demand can be.

Plus there's the risk factor. If you fuck up distillation of alcohol, even slightly, people may die.

You get the temperature control on your distillation wrong by 3 degrees, people will get sick from drinking it. 5 degrees, and it may kill kids who happen to get a hold of it, and starting at about 8 degrees it gets to the point where 2-3 glasses of your homebrew whiskey will kill a full blown adult.

My experiences of home brewed stuff from all over Latin America and West Africa disagree with your theory.

Drink it, you'll be fine!

In my experience with Latin America, much of that homebrew was produced by the local experts and most people don't make their own moonshine.

The most common liquor in West Africa is palm wine, which is not distilled and so methanol does not form. However, West African countries fairly regularly see cases of drinkers going blind from homemade distilled beverages, I would be very cautious about the provenance of any strong liquor offered to me.

I know that home distillation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C8%9Auic%C4%83 is still fairly common in Romania for example, and you don't see many people dieing. It can't be as hard you think.

In Romania, while many rural families leave a barrel of their own plums, apples, apricots, etc. to ferment, they usually take the fermented fruit to a central village distillery to distill it. The men working there have long years of experience and know how to run the equipment. I have always found copper stills to be "as hard as you think"; I couldn't imagine ever trying to set one up in my own home.

Even the easiest homebrewing requires more knowledge and skill than dumping some seeds in your garden, which is literally all you need to do to get an acceptable crop of weed

Acceptable certainly is relative. If you just "dumped some seeds in your garden", you would get seedy, low-grade crap weed, regardless of what strain you planted. Good weed requires proper attention and care.

Wont kill them or blind them. Will get them High. Wont taste that good.bad weed is More acceptable than Bad alcohol

At worst, any weed being sold today will make for fantastic edibles.

In my experience, as long as you select the right seeds/strain (feminized seeds are readily available) and harvest in time, you won't have "low grade crap weed"(obviously that description is subjective) but a very marketable product. Yeild is more difficult to optimize for.

Since other people are comparing rudimentary horticulture to consumable alcohol production for some reason, making market grade alcohol is not nearly as simple. Aside from maybe some parts of West Virginia, basement hooch is not in high demand.

Really http://allrecipes.com/recipe/58561/homemade-wine/

Similar to tobacco - which has a bunch of regulations associated with growing it for sale.

Similar, however the space requirement to produce enough tobacco to satisfy the demand of a typical cigarette/cigar smoker is drastically larger than for marijuana.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com