You can make your own alcoholic drinks too, but it’s a royal pain to do. I’d wager in a non-prohibition environment that’s how the weed situation would end up as well - a relatively small community of microcrafters and an industry that puts out high volumes of product at a wide range of quality and price.
Except that the government can regulate the legal marijuana operation to death like they did tobacco.
But if you just grow a little patch of Weed next to the cucumbers, you can pull some serious change on the black market and the government will think it is grown for personal use. If government weed is $400 an oz and black market is $200 an oz, you can make $100 an oz.
Not only that, the legal sellers have to lawyer up just like the tobacco companies.
“You can make your own alcoholic drinks too, but it’s a royal pain to do.”
Fermenting different things to create alcoholic beverages has been going on a very long time. Some of the most basic are primitive tribes fermenting fruit. From a long term cultural perspective, is been the Muslims who have traditionally grown dope and westerners (Christians) who perfected alcohol production.