If marijuana were legalized then pharmaceutical companies, alcohol, tobacco, prisons, the police would all be hurting economically due to reduced profits due to competition and reduced crime. Clearly society favors these kinds of companies and policies because we like to profit from minorities and the less fortunate as much as possible.
If we have any hope of moving past our current level of cultural stagnation, marijuana will need to be legalized.
Although I fall on the same side of the debate as you, I find this fallacious reasoning. I disagree with the notion that police are a profit seeking entity, and the judicial system is stepping all over itself these days to reduce overcrowding and reduce the EXPENSE of incarceration. It is an unfair picture to think of our judicial system as desirous of more inmates.
Pharma, alcohol, and tobacco companies would not be hurt at ALL by legalization. Do you realize these companies already have huge infrastructure and distribution chains in place to make MASSIVE profits of a new legalized vice like marijuana? They would quickly drive the people, your noble minorities and less fortunate people, out of the game where they currently make at least some money on the black market.
I was only half serious here, that post was a dig at the main reasons marijuana was made and kept illegal over the course of the last 60 years or so.
As for companies being in a good spot to profit from something, that never stopped them from fighting to keep competition illegal before (as an example the RIAA and MPAA fighting Apple and Napster in regards to the commercialization of the MP3 file, or VHS back in it's day). Of course these companies stand to make a solid profit from doing something new but they are entrenched in old business models and do not like to have to adapt. This is why they spend billions on lawyers to keep competition locked up in court battles, this is why they buy out patents on competing technology and bury it. These companies will only move forward when the momentum is nearly irreversible.
The most profitable business model is a rent seeking model, you design and create something once and get loads of people to pay for it on a recurring basis and never upgrade, never innovate. This is contrary to how a free market should work, which is why we do not have a free market, we have a frigid and biased market that works to keep entrenched and out dated business models profitable and free of competition.
Marijuana is just the latest thing to start breaking away from that entrenched model, which is a sign that younger people are getting old enough to be in positions to make reasonable decisions.
What would lead you to conclude that the police were NOT a profit-seeking entity? We've passed laws that allow the seizure of assets that are claimed (with an incredibly low burden of proof) to be the rewards of drug trafficking - and we've seen abuse of those laws in LA and TX, where motorists guilty of nothing but having a large quantity of cash on them have lost it. Not to the specific officers, but to the departments they work for.
The best way to avoid cuts to your department is to demonstrate both that you're doing a good job, and that there is an increasing need for your services. Failing to do so makes positions in the law enforcement sector harder to come by, and less benefits for those involved.
Plus, maintaining a lot of police officers is expensive: they don't normally actually produce anything, their only benefit is in preventing and recovering loss. You give them the means to generate some income for their city/county/state/country by zealously inflicting enforcement on people, and they'll do just that.
The default concept of the police does not lend itself immediately to generating income in devious manners like you describe (seizing money for literally no reason and never giving it back when proven wrong). The problem here is the police as we know it are now primarily an income generating sector based on narcotics busts.