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Comment by tareqak | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: How many drug companies' bottom lines would be affected if marijuana was legalized right now?

Reminds me of the quote: If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem.

Drug companies would be affected positively by MJ legalization. Look at how drugs are developed and marketed, at how drug companies compete with generics over marginal improvements in outcomes (or, sometimes, no improvement at all), and look at the conditions from which drug companies derive most of their profits. It's hard to see much of a threat from cannabis.

For that matter, look at Abbott Labs, one of the largest pharma companies in the world; a huge portion of their revenues come from consumable products that aren't the product of a drug research pipeline (for instance, Abbott owns the Ensure meal replacement product).

Stipulating full MJ legalization, cannabis and its active ingredients will simply become a new vector for productization by existing major health care companies.

Agreed. They've already been doing their own research and if they haven't they're ramping up now because of Colorado and Washington.

History shows that the major pharmaceutical companies will try every dirty trick in the book to position themselves as the exclusive producers of medical cannabis if and when the plant is descheduled at the federal level.

Could you please point me to the part of history that shows that?

http://www.clear-uk.org/gw-pharmaceuticals-and-the-uk-home-o...

They won't necessarily call it cannabis, it will be a "cannabis product" flying under some other name. Also, does the history of generic meds policy not tell you something? These companies are fiercely anti-competitive. Another case study in a separate market is how alcohol distillation, for instance, is kept illegal.

Aspirin. Bayer. People used to chew willow.

That said they did isolate it, so it's not parity, but at least peripheral.

I was under the impression that the primary anti-marijuana lobbies were funded by tobacco companies along with the beer/liquor industry. Medical use aside, marijuana would primarily be competing with those other recreational substances.

Tobacco companies have no problems with marijuana - that's a new product line for them! They already have the machinery in place to roll cigarettes, so it's probably easy enough to change the substance inside of it.

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.

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.

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.

Drug companies would be able to profit by selling marijuana and trivial derivatives.

I think the more persistent lobbies will be other "sin" industries - tobacco, alcohol, etc.

I don't think legalized marijuana will negatively affect the alcohol or tobacco industries in the slightest. We've reached the point where if you want to smoke weed, the law is not going to stop you. Alcohol and tobacco are by no means "replacements" or "substitutes" for weed; they are often consumed together.

drug companies, alcohol companies, and the law enforcement industry would all take a hit

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