Chris Barnett, "Who'd Profit From Legal Marijuana?", Playboy, March 1980, pp. 202, 204.
Pop quiz: What would happen if marijuana were legalized? The usual answer: Tobacco companies would reap a multibillion-dollar harvest. They already have the expertise, the rolling machines, the trademarks, the distribution system -- and they're secretly buying up land, just waiting for the big day.
If that's what you think, you flunk. Although the black-market marijuana industry is probably half as big as the tobacco industry (bigger than that, if you believe the DEA figures), there isn't a shred of evidence that tobacco companies are ready to pounce on pot.
And no hints are to be gleaned from talking with the tobacco companies themselves -- they absolutely refuse to discuss the subject. [...]
Not surprisingly, such silence only fires up the often-repeated rumors that every tobacco company has a secret research-and-development marijuana lab buried somewhere deep in its corporate bowels or in some abandoned missile silo in New Mexico. [...]
[Industry experts] laugh at the one marijuana myth most often bandied about; namely, that tobacco companies have quietly trademarked the choicest brand names -- words like Maui Wowee and Colombian Gold -- that would have a familiar ring to heads and straights alike. It's a legal impossibility, they point out. Under Federal law, you cannot register a trademark for an illegal product. Nor can you reserve a trademark long before the product hits the market place. (Actually, Acapulco Gold has been registered as a legal trademark -- but not by a tobacco company. Charmer Industries of Long Island City, New York, owns the mark for an Acapulco Gold tequila it distributes primarily in the Northeast.)
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