Stoners issue report on weed
From Newsmax...
U.S. growers produce nearly $35 billion worth of marijuana annually, making the illegal drug the country's largest cash crop, bigger than corn and wheat combined, an advocate of medical marijuana use said in a study released on Monday.
Not being a pot user myself, I had to go look up the price per pound for marijuana. What I could piece together is that the street value ranges from $2,000 to $5,000 per pound. Where as the "street value" for corn would be about $1 a pound. Wheat goes for around $5 a bushel, so at 60 pounds a bushel that would make it a little more that eight cents a pound. Wow, marijuana cost a whole lot more that corn or wheat. Who'da thunk?!?
In 2004 the US produced about 11 million bushels (616 million pounds at 56 pounds per bushel) of corn. So in order to match that based on cost, we'd have to produce just 308,000 pounds of marijuana at the $2,000/pound price or 13,200 pounds at the $5,000/pound price. Since these are "Hey! Uh...like...legalize, like, marijuana, dude, okay?" types who are obviously cooking the figures to try to make their case, my bet is that they used the $5,000 price or something close. So ultimately we have the conclusion, not that the US produces more marijuana, but that marijuana prices are high enough (or at least the prices they used for their report) to make it more expensive than the cost for the corn and wheat we grow. That speaks more toward the stupidity of marijuana users than anything else.
So that $35 billion amounts to a mere 7 million pounds of wacky weed, and there's no way in the world they can have anywhere near accurate estimates on the actual production of weed in the US, so it's just a guess. Yeah, we need to alter US policy based on the guesses of pot-heads.
The report, conducted by Jon Gettman, a public policy analyst and former head of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, also concluded that five U.S. states produce more than $1 billion worth of marijuana apiece: California, Tennessee, Kentucky, Hawaii and Washington.
Okay, seriously. They want us to take the word of the former head of the "National Organization for the ... uh ... dude is there like something to eat around here?"
California's production alone was about $13.8 billion, according to Gettman, who waged an unsuccessful six-year legal battle to force the government to remove marijuana from a list of drugs deemed to have no medical value.
Does California even count, though, since more than likely they use even more than that in two weekends of raves or one Cheech and Chong movie (whichever comes first)?
Posted by Danny Carlton at December 19, 2006 5:55 AM