RE:Canopy way!over valued by Fund manager on BNN todayThe low cost is super important. All the valuations right now are based on selling around $5-$10/gram. What people don't realize is that those prices are based on the black market weed prices. Much like cocaine and other illegal drugs the price is very high because you are paying for the risk involved for an illegal enterprise.
Marijuana does not actually cost that much to grow.
To put prices into perspective corn is harder to grow than marijuana. Corn currently goes for about $3.50 per bushel. That would be equal to about 35kg of weed.
Of course, consumers aren't really interested in super cheap ditch weed. A better comparison would be craft beer grade hops. Growing hops is actually pretty similar to growing weed so it's a good analogue. You can buy decent grade hops at $2/oz.
Tobacco is much harder to grow than marijuana and goes for about $12/oz. Eventually, there will be shitty pre-packaged weed available similar to cigarettes. I would expect it to go for a similar price to cigarettes today.
During the initial stages of legalization weed will go for $5-$10/gram with taxes baked in. This will change dramatically in the following years though. There will always be a high-end market much like the craft beer world today, and there will be a premium for high-end weed.
I'd expect prices to hover around $12/oz for shitty mass produced weed and probably double that for the good stuff. At any rate that averages at about $0.75/gram. Any company that is building their business model on the artificially high prohibition prices will fail dramatically.