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Everyone is talking about tradition and racism and everything
But there's one more point to note: alcohol prohibition is much harder to enforce. You can easily make simple alcoholic beverages out of what's already on your kitchen, and it's not that someone will constantly monitor whatcha doin' there (and even if you would, should you take someone accountable for grape juice going funny?)
As a result, home brewing emerges, creating much more dangerous products that are not subject to quality control standards enforced on factories. People still drink alcohol, but this time it gets bundled with a suite of dangerous chemicals produced in an uncontrolled brewing process.
I mean, it's pretty easy to grow a plant in your house too...easier, probably, than managing everything necessary to ensure safe brewing or distilling.
During prohibition grape (formerly wine) producers sold grape juice with the warning label "don't store in a cool dark place for multiple weeks or this product may become illegal". (or something to that effect) You can do much the same with any grain or fruit.
For Marijuana you have to at least get seeds/the plant first, which are now a controlled product. Yeah it'll grow anywhere (hence "weed"), but you still have to source it and plant it somewhere with sunlight.
Brewing at scale and/or for a specific product is difficult, making alcohol is easy.
If you know a guy to get weed from...you know a place to get a handful of seeds and stems ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
But I get what you're saying...I didn't know about the grape juice, that's a fascinating little nugget of history. Thanks for sharing it
easier, probably, than managing everything necessary to ensure safe brewing or distilling.
As someone who grows and homebrews, unless you live in a sunny part of the world and can grow weed with the sun/outside, brewing beer is easier than growing weed. For weed, you'll need actual equipment, whereas for homebrewing, you just need a bucket, basically. With a lid and an airlock if you wish to be reasonably safe about the drink. Pour in apple juice and let it sit for a few weeks, you got yourself some apple cider.
Distillation is more difficult, yeah, but not much more difficult than making simple extracts out of weed.
For that you need to get the seeds somehow, then set some illuminated place for growing (hard to hide), etc etc. For alcohol, it's enough to store something for a while in a dark place, and even then you can just say you forgot about it - a level of deniability you won't get while growing literal marijuana.
If you pick the right strain of weed it can pretty much grow anywhere outside. Your point still stands if we factor in that you don't need a warrant to search someone's house for weed in the back yard.
Indoors is also pretty easy but the main difference is that alcohol doesn't have a strong smell so it's much less risky.
And policing individual gardens, greenhouses and homes isn't difficult to enforce?
Much simpler, at least
I think you're overstating the dangers of homebrewing with an improvised setup. If you screw up, you get mold and it's very obvious.
I've never distilled before, but from what I've read, that's really hard to screw up too.
It's very easy to screw up distilation. If the temperture is not carefully controlled and you miss the points to discard the head and tails, you end up with lighter (like methanol) and heavier (like propanol or butanol) alcohols, all of them much more toxic than good old ethanol.
You don't control level of aldehydes, sulfur oxides, and cyanide, and you also cannot know in some cases if it got contaminated by something toxic - that's not always molds. Granted, it's relatively hard to brew something deadly, but it's possible to undermine your health in a bad way.