The thing is, there are three categories of illicit drugs:
- relatively harmless / have established use: a lot of the "home grown" drugs fall under this category, they are usually low-price as they are mass products. Marijuana and diverted pharma pills, mostly.
- stuff that is extremely fucking dangerous, like fentanyl, its even more strong cousin carfentanyl, meth or self-made stuff like krokodil (gained from boiling codein cough medicine). Extremely simple to make in general, extremely potent, extremely hard to wean off.
- stuff that fuels organized crime, aka cocaine (almost exclusively grown/refined in Southern America) and heroin (which comes to an overwhelming degree from Afghanistan's poppy farms).
The large cartels almost exclusively focus on the latter, as there's a ton of money to be made smuggling that, which is a very real problem as the cartels can offer sums to corrupt officials even in Western countries that pay good money to border control staff. A boat full of cocaine can make hundreds of millions of dollars, while no one cares about a boat full of weed - not worth the effort.
It's easy to grow compared with cocaine. You can grow the plant in a tent or if need be just on your windowsill, pluck and trim it, dry it, then smoke it or bake it in an edible. And even a single plant is good for quite a number of joints. Hash oil extraction is more difficult but most stoners prefer to smoke pure or tobacco mix weed anyway.
Cocaine in contrast, you need 300-ish grams of leaves to make 1 gram of cocaine, and a ton of chemistry afterwards to extract and purify it.
For the level of processing involved, marijuana isn't that cheep when compared to any other bulk farming product. Hemp fiber for example is around $150 per ton. The markup is still very high comparatively for the drug product.
When you look at the production line of something like high fructose corn syurp, you could industrialize the process in to the range of $10000 per ton pretty easily.
Again, it's the black market that turns it into the million dollar range because of the risks involved.
The thing is, there are three categories of illicit drugs:
- relatively harmless / have established use: a lot of the "home grown" drugs fall under this category, they are usually low-price as they are mass products. Marijuana and diverted pharma pills, mostly.
- stuff that is extremely fucking dangerous, like fentanyl, its even more strong cousin carfentanyl, meth or self-made stuff like krokodil (gained from boiling codein cough medicine). Extremely simple to make in general, extremely potent, extremely hard to wean off.
- stuff that fuels organized crime, aka cocaine (almost exclusively grown/refined in Southern America) and heroin (which comes to an overwhelming degree from Afghanistan's poppy farms).
The large cartels almost exclusively focus on the latter, as there's a ton of money to be made smuggling that, which is a very real problem as the cartels can offer sums to corrupt officials even in Western countries that pay good money to border control staff. A boat full of cocaine can make hundreds of millions of dollars, while no one cares about a boat full of weed - not worth the effort.