eli5. How has marijuana gotten so much more potent over the years but the opposite for cocaine?

Question

80’s coke is often talked about in songs/movies/ tv as being pretty wild stuff, where as marijuana is now
~4x more potent.

In: 12138

Answer 1

Adding adulterants to marijuana is hard, it’s easy to spot. It’s extremely easy to “step on”
cocaine, or add adulterants, like baby powder or whatever else, to increase how much quantity you have to sell.

People do this simply because cocaine has waaay better profit margins than marijuana. It basically isn’t worth it to do that with weed. Plus marijuana is just a plant you grow, cocaine needs to be processed into the drug you snort.

So it’s not that the cocaine can’t be potent, it’s just it gets cut or stepped on so many times to increase how much money you can make.