SACRAMENTO -- For years, activists in the marijuana legalization movement have claimed that cannabis is America's biggest cash crop. Now they're citing government statistics to prove it.
A report to be released Monday by a marijuana public policy analyst contends that the market value of pot produced in the United States exceeds $35 billion -- far more than the crop value of such heartland staples as corn, soybeans and hay.
California is responsible for more than one-third of the cannabis harvest, with an estimated production of $13.8 billion that exceeds the value of the state's grapes, vegetables and hay combined -- and marijuana is the top cash crop in a dozen states, the report states.
The report estimates that marijuana production has increased tenfold in the past quarter-century despite an anti-drug effort by law enforcement.
Those numbers are shocking. Pot is worth $35 billion dollars a year? It's worth more than the value of grapes, vegetables and hay combined? It's amazing to think that the government is losing out on all that tax revenue due to the black market which they helped create. The economic impact of this misguided social policy is unconscionable.
Predictably, the propogandists at the White House Office of National Drug Control policy don't want to hear it.
Tom Riley, a spokesman for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, cited examples of foreign countries that have struggled with big crops used to produce cocaine and heroin.
"Coca is Colombia's largest cash crop, and that hasn't worked out for them, and opium poppies are Afghanistan's largest crop, and that has worked out disastrously for them," Riley said. "I don't know why we would venture down that road."
Riiiiight. Is that why opium production is sky-rocketing in Afghanistan?
"It's almost the devil's own problem," CIA Director Michael V. Hayden told Congress last month. "Right now the issue is stability. . . . Going in there in itself and attacking the drug trade actually feeds the instability that you want to overcome."
"Attacking the problem directly in terms of the drug trade . . . would undermine the attempt to gain popular support in the region," agreed Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. "There's a real conflict, I think."
Not only do I give you definitive proof that the War on Some drugs has had a huge and devestating impact on the economy, I give you one more reason why the Bush admin should get the hell out of Afghanistn. It's a two-for-one kind of deal.
But Mr. Riley also mentioned something about Columbia? The drug war has had a devestating impact on Columbia. What the US government has done to Columbia's people and the environment in the name of the War on Some Drugs is criminal.
Since early January, pilots from DynCorp, working under contract to the U.S. State Department and under the supervision of the Colombian National Police, have been spraying glyphosate over indigenous and Afro-Colombian villages in the fragile rainforests of Chocó on Colombia’s Pacific Coast. Ostensibly they are working to eradicate the coca crops that have sprung up in the region in recent years, as fumigations to the south in Putumayo, Guaviare, and Narino have pushed coca cultivation into new areas, and the utter destruction of local communities and economies has forced more and more people into the lower rungs of the cocaine economy. Rain recently forced a temporary halt to the fumigations, but they are slated to resume once the rain stops.
The reason why "it hasn't worked out for" Columbia is your government's insistence on using chemical warfare to fight the War on Some Drugs, among many other things.
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