What is the #1 cash crop in the United States? Guesses might be corn, wheat, tabacco. With all the news of ethanol lately, one might assume this question being posed now is a lead-in to corn being the answer. But according to a report issued in December, in terms of market value, something else beats both corn and wheat combined. Marijuana.
The report in question is
Marijuana Production in the United States 2006, by Jon Gettman, PhD. Gettman calculated the size and value of the U.S. marijuana crop based on reports from a variety of federal agencies, including the DEA, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, and the US State Dept. He deliberately chose conservative figures, rather than the sometimes higher ones commonly reported by enforcement agencies. The result is that Marijuana is America's #1 cash crop, with a value of $35.8 billion in 2006. Corn comes in at $23.3 billion, soybeans $17.6 billion, vegetables $11 billion, wheat $7.45 billion, and cotton $5.3 billion.
And while the government has spent a huge amount of tax-payer dollars on "eradication" programs, US marijuana production has incrased tenfold from 1981 to 2006, from 2.2 million pounds to 22 million pounds.
I learned of this from the
Spring 2007 issue of the Marijuana Policy Report, which finishes its write-up on this report as follows: "The report concludes that 'marijuana has become a pervasive and ineradicable part of our national economy.' Instead of wasting further resources on doomed eradication campaigns, Gettman argues, marijuana should be placed into a system of legal regulation."
This spring issue of the MPR had a few other interesting bits as well. On pg. 5 there is a report about two studies on the "gateway theory" of marijuana, one published in the Dec. 2006 issue of the
American Journal of Psychiatry, and another published in the journal
Psychological Medicine. The conclusion drawn in the MPR is that "the data don’t show that marijuana causes use of other drugs, but instead indicate that the same factors that make people likely to try marijuana also make them likely to try other substances. The researchers added that any gateway effect that does exist is 'more likely to be social than pharmacological,” occurring because marijuana “introduces users to aprovider (peer or black marketer) who eventually becomes the source for other illicit drugs.” In other words, if there is a gateway, it isn’t marijuana; it’s the laws that put marijuana into the same criminal underground with speed and heroin."
And on the education front, the consistent misinformation compaign in our schools continues to lead teenagers to be misinformed about the relative dangers of various drugs. Considering the following from pg. 5 of the MPR:
The 2006 Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey of teen drug use revealed some disturbing attitudes about drug use among young people. Funded by the federal
government and conducted by researchers at theUniversity of Michigan, the latest MTF results were released in late December.
Federal officials touted the survey as good news: "It's great to have one-quarter fewerkids using drugs than there were in 2001," Drug Czar John Walters told USA Today. But Walters neglected to mention that teen drug use rates are actually higher than they were 15 years ago -- not only for marijuana, but also for cocaine, barbiturates, and tranquilizers, among other substances.
The survey results also showed how badly America has misinformed its young people about drugs. More eighth graders, for example, said there was "great risk" in smoking marijuana occasionally (48.9%) than in taking LSD regularly (40.0%) or in trying crack cocaine (47.6%). While attitudes became more realistic with increasing age, even twelfth graders were more likely to see great risk in smoking marijuana regularly (77.8%) than in having four or five drinks nearly every day (70.9%) or taking barbiturates regularly (70.2%).
Marijuana misinformation has gone on for decades -- remember the infamous Reefer Madness anyone?
Labels: drug_war
