Marijuana should be legalized as a spark for small business ownership

No, my suggestion that marijuana prices are high is absolutely true. You cite Amsterdam as if that's some fantastic gotcha. I didn't see any massive pot farms in Amsterdam. They aren't producing they are just legally selling. The price is however set by the market and, though legal in Amsterdam, is not legal elsewhere and thus worth more elsewhere. The black market prices in other parts of the world and Europe make the prices in the legal oasis of Amsterdam still reasonably high. Further, Amsterdam is overpopulated with high end marijuana whereas throughout the United States low end brick weed is consistent and common. You can't compare the prices of legalized marijuana in Amsterdam to that of the United States. If we grew one or two fields of marijuana rather than corn in the central part of the United States it would exceed demand by a large amount and flood the market causing the price to plummet. Regardless how much you think small business would profit from this, the infrastructure is already existing within agrabusiness and associated distribution networks. The resulting product would be higher grade and significantly cheaper than needed. The prices in that respect would actually drop to artificially low levels when demands for the hemp-fibers and other more useful products hit the market causing a glut of the buds. Further the rolling and production could easily be done by any number of cigarette manufacturing plants and others. Legalization would cause the black markets to collapse. This would deny income to unsavory people and certainly provide a good incentive to legalize, but your claim of small businesses cropping up all over the place is naive and wrong. Cigarette prices are kept high and regulated in a monopolistic fashion. Further, they are extremely addictive making the smoking of dozens of them a day a practical reality for millions of Americans. That's a clear and obvious winner as far as products go. They are deadly and so you lose 400,000 customers a year and need to replace them but they pretty much sell themselves. If you could buy a pack of 40 joints for 4 bucks how large do you think the profit margin would be? Moreso when you consider that if people want to stop smoking pot all it takes is a decision. I'm not saying that marijuana sales couldn't turn a profit but rather it would only turn a profit for those manufacturers who produce them in bulk and that is not small businesses. My opponent argues that small operations would produce quality products more than mass products do. I am inclined to agree that specialty operations could produce better products but take a look at Starbucks' drug distribution empire. They produce a very high quality product in a number of different areas with a high profit margin to the same base customers who probably also smoke marijuana. Don't you think that the operation could easily take over and add on the distribution and production of marijuana? Which isn't to suggest that you couldn't just get bulk product elsewhere for cheaper. In the distribution of the drug caffeine there are both low end and high end distribution operations and both are overwhelmed by corporate business. The fact of the matter is that in distribution and production of alcohol the large businesses dominate to an astounding extent and the only time small businesses did good work for good profit was during prohibition. There are a number of small operations and self-employed individuals in the current black market setting who would be completely wiped out if marijuana ever became legalized. Legalization would crush these small illegal businesses. Further, the cash-crop status of marijuana would be equally demolished. Only the consumers would really benefit. Hemp is highly profitable for those few farms in the United States who are given permission to grow it. It is taxed as a good and properly so. The plant fibers are certainly useful, but again after the market is flooded we'll find out again what we find out with farming time after time. It's hard work for nearly no profit and the only groups that seem to do well are large farming conglomerates and agrobusiness. Why should marijuana fibers of buds be any different than every other good in the world? Seriously, why? If not for government subsidies most products would be completely unprofitable to grow at all. Why is marijuana going to break that mold and suddenly lead to small grow operations providing products to small pot clubs and coffee houses and providing large profits for everybody involved and large tax revenues? Why are large corporations not going to spring from this or diversify their business into this field? Why is pot special? My opponent still fails to understand the basics of economic theory. He says "While this may seem very accurate the low cost of actual growth still makes profit margin high enough to be profitable and since maintaining a small amount of plants requires less effort than growing on a larger scale" -- Why would there still be any profit margin at all? Why not grow even more plants? There's a certain point where growing additional plants will cause a price decrease such that the added benefits of growing additional plants is canceled out by the costs of growth. For the small scale farming growing a couple dozen plants in his back yard this could be that it isn't worth it for him if he's only growing about five dollars worth of marijuana for six dollars worth of work. Why don't you grow tomatoes in your backyard? What is stopping people currently from having small scale farms? It isn't worth it. It's more labor than the plants are worth because market forces favor large scale operations. My opponent believes that the profit margins will always exist and that supply cannot ever satisfy demand but this isn't the case with a product like marijuana. Meeting demand is trivial as the actual amount of product used is actually quite small compared to any other agro-product. Just as growing tomatoes in your backyard isn't profitable or useful, growing pot won't be either if pot is a legal product you can pick up with at any corner store. My opponent suggests that regulations governing microbreweries would be similar but microbreweries are largely not-profitable and completely dwarfed by corporate outfits. I'm not arguing for a complete degregulation of the market as it pertains to a legal marijuana market but one should note that the regulations are easier for the larger operations to meet than smaller operations which again does not help out small businesses. Unless my opponent can give a salient reason why pot is different than every other good on the market today, he loses. He claims to not be completely ignorant of basic economics but holds that there will still be a massive profit margin for a plant you could legally grow in your back yard. He seems to suggest that people would be interested in creating grow areas in their own backyard to produce product which isn't worth the effort to grow (because the large operations would easily do more for less), and that there would be no market forces to encourage any corporate interests towards higher grade products. -- I'm sorry but no. There's a lot of good reasons to legalize pot, some hippy pipedream of everybody making infinite profits off a market traded good, you could grow in your backyard, and magically repel corporate interests in this perpetual profit machine, is not one of those reasons.