"Why is marijuana banned and cigarettes legal? There are two reasons. They are the same two reasons why marijuana will never be legalized. Money and horticulture.
Approximately 20% of the population smokes, just over 40 million adults. That is tens of millions of dollars a day in local, state, and federal taxes.
The government has a captured cash cow in cigarette smokers. People cannot just grow tobacco and manufacture their own cigarettes. Tobacco is a land, labor, and time intensive crop. After it is harvested it must be cured, aged, and dried in a specific manner.
It would take a good sized plot of land, a lot of work, and about a year and a half for you to produce a few cartons of cigarettes. You need more than one plot of land as tobacco depletes soil and the crop must be rotated, or you must invest in expensive fertilizer and nutrient mixes. You cannot easily or economically grow tobacco to make cigarettes for personal consumption.
Marijuana, on the other hand, can be cultivated anyplace. You can grow enough in pots to continually supply you and your friends. If you have enough space you can turn it into a cash crop. All you need are seeds or plantings, and in a short time you can fly higher than a kite. Anyone, anyplace can grow marijuana. And they do.
The government cannot control, regulate, or easily tax pot. This is why marijuana will never be legalized. There is no way to make it a commercially viable and profitable product and no way to effectively tax it."
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http://taxfoundation.org/blog/monday-map-tobacco-tax-revenue...
Significant, but not huge. Federal seems to be around 0.6% (the way I rounded, should be somewhere close to but lower than that).
Missing 0.6% pretty much removes the entire bargaining platform.
There is more to marijuana then it being a recreational drug. It is also a very valuable material that can be used in a variety of other products. Search hemp products on google and you will find a variety of uses.
The fact that we have outlawed hemp in human society is insanity but it makes sense in the context of big business and competition. Do some research on what is takes to grow cotton vs growing hemp.
"The "fabric of our lives" needs approximately twice as much territory as hemp per ton of finished textile, the land-use miser of the bunch. Further complicating matters is the inverse relationship between chemical use and land requirements." - [1]
Hemp is a plant that is so valuable for its use in products, and it is really easy for anyone to grow. It's a weed, its grows like crazy! Doesn't sound very profitable from a big business perspective does it?
[1] - http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_green_l...
The use of the idiom in this situation would be something like "If industrial hemp production is allowed in the United States, I'll eat my hat.", meaning that you don't think it will ever happen.
So I was joking that if it did become legal, because of your appreciation for the material, at least the hat you would have to eat would be made out of hemp.
If there is enough public pressure and people start demanding that hemp production be legal, the laws will change.
As long as a large percentage of the population is fine with hemp being illegal it stands no chance. Most people really don't know what they are missing out on, its not just a drug, it is a very valuable plant that has documented use in human society for thousands of years.
That would certainly be better than what we have now. Big Tobacco does not kill people in turf wars over who gets to sell where, so I think Big Heroin would be an improvement over cartels and gangs. Maybe it is not the perfect solution, but Big Cocaine is likely going to be better than warring black market factions.
An issue with the government running it or taxing it like crazy is that behavior can still support a black market due to artificially high prices. There's a black market for cigarettes in NYC[0], driven by the high taxes. The government running things is not a silver bullet.
[0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/03/cigarette-smuggling...
Liquor taxes are still quite high though.