At least on some points.
Of course, a lot depends on where you live.

I live in a southern U.S. state where there are a LOT of dry spells of even shit weed, and KB is always way over priced and in short supply. If you are caught growing your own, you will spend at least 3 years in prison for just one seedling, mandatory minimum sentence (no probation, no parole, the judge has no choice).

If it were legalized, the price would drop not rise. The reason it can cost as much as gold is because it's illegal.

The government keeps the supply artificially lower than the demand. If legal, grow operations could be bigger and more numerous, thus increasing the supply to meet the demand and lowering the price. And instead of being lucky to find one dealer (my situation, at least), I would have a choice of vendors and a greater variety of weed and prices. Competition would not only create lower prices, but the availability of better pot.

Although greatly taxed, tobacco is still much cheaper than marijuana, even though they are both plants. That's because there are competing tobacco companies, and no limit on how much can be grown or transported because of the threat government confiscation.

Decrim makes things easier on the user as far as incarceration is concerned, but it keeps the constraints on supply, so availability remains low and prices remain high.

Pot testing in the workplace has already become common in the US, it's becoming more frequent in schools, and is soon coming to the highways. Legalization couldn't make this any worse, but could make things better by allowing people to openly demand tests that would show whether on not someone is acutely intoxicated on marijuana, rather than the tests today that only show whether someone might have smoked pot once in the last month.

Actually, I think people should be judged by their behavior, rather than what's in their urine, blood, breath, or hair. If you are in control of yourself, there's no problem no matter what you've ingested. If you're out of control, you're a problem even if it's because you're just sleepy or angry.

I think pot is a gateway drug, not from its effects, but because it is illegal. The person you buy pot from often has coke and pills for sale, too. The store where you buy cigs and beer doesn't sell crack and heroin. Plus, when people are told that pot is bad for you and then they discover it isn't, they often think what they've been told about truly dangerous drugs is a lie, too.
Finally, while cotton benefitted from hemp prohibition, the real instigators, at least in the U.S., were the timber and the petroleum based synthetics industries.

William Randolph Hearst, the biggest newspaper publisher in the U.S. before WWII, owned vast amounts of timber used to make pulp paper. The value of his timber was threatened by new technology to havest and process hemp into pulp for much less cost than timber. Hearst not only published the many lies about marijuana circulated in the 1920s and 30s, but wrote them himself and personally met with federal officials to encourage a national marijuana law.

Du Pont was the richest and most powerful company in the world by the 1920s, after supplying most of the arms to both sides in WWI, and was partners with Standard Oil. They were developing petroleum based synthetic materials such as Nylon, whose main competition would be natual hemp fiber and the synthetics that could be made from hemp's rich source of cellulose. They also developed chemicals used in the processing of timber into pulp paper and owned a lot of timber land. As if that wasn't enough, DuPont also owned General Motors, whose chief competitor, Ford, was developing cars made of hempen materials. DuPont was well aware of hemp's potential, because they had used a lot of it to manufacture dynamite. Politicians key in the passage of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 were connected to DuPont.