Pot is America's biggest cash crop

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My grandfather was an Iowa farmer and the reality of farming is in my DNA. Long on food, short on cash. When I first heard the economics of modern American cannabis, I imagined him driving his Model-T into town one Saturday, doing his shopping and while drinking a cup of coffee having the following dialog with a neighbor.

Neighbor: 'Lo Frank
Granddad: 'Lo.
N: Hows things?
GD: Can't complain.
N: 'You heard about this maryjeewanna stuff them hippies smoke.
GD: Nope. Not very much. Nothing good.
N: City fellow came around here the other day and told me all about it. Seemed like a nice fellow. Interesting conversation.
GD: Yeah?
N: Yup. Fellow said it grows like a weed, don't even need to water 'em. Thousand dollars cash, per plant, in the field, no taxes. He'll take all you can grow, cash in your hand, give y' the seed free. Y' hide ten of 'em in the middle of 20 acres of corn, nobody but you'd know where they were. Thousand dollars a plant'd, pay the mortgage on my place. Damn.
GD: (Gulp).

I don't know what my grandfather would have finally done, but I'm sure he would have lost some sleep wrestling with his conscience... Family to feed, bank loans to pay back. Farming in Iowa, farming in Afghanistan or Colombia... Farming is farming. DS
Pot is called biggest cash crop - Los Angeles Times Abstract: 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 released today by a marijuana public policy analyst contends that the market value of pot produced in the U.S. exceeds $35 billion — far more than the crop value of such heartland staples as corn, soybeans and hay, which are the top three legal cash crops. California is responsible for more than a 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 exhaustive anti-drug effort by law enforcement. READ IT ALL

War on drugs: tilting at windmills

David Seaton's News Links

Living in a country like Spain, where possession of drugs for personal use is not a crime and taking drugs (not selling them) is treated as a health problem, it is hard for me to understand why the American prisons are filled to the top with users. Is it a form of racial repression? In one of Milton Friedman's last interviews, quoted in the article from the Seattle Times that I'm featuring below, the Nobel prize winning economist said, "Should we allow the killing to go on in the ghettos? 10,000 additional murders a year? ... Should we continue to destroy Colombia and Afghanistan?". He was in favor of legalizing drugs. So am I. I don't see how things could be worse than they are now. This is a problem of social exclusion. The question that should be asked in the USA is: why does it seem impossible for so many of its citizens to live in the United States without being stoned out of their minds? DS

Drugs: the other war we can't win - Seattle Times
Abstract: There are 2.2 million Americans behind bars, another 5 million on probation or parole, the Justice Department reported on Nov. 30. We exceed Russia and Cuba in incarcerations per 100,000 people; in fact, no other nation comes close. The biggest single reason for the expanding numbers? Our war on drugs — a quarter of all sentences are for drug offenses, mostly nonviolent. So has the "war" worked? Has drug use or addiction declined? Clearly not. Hard street drugs are reportedly cheaper and purer, and as easy to get, as when President Richard Nixon declared substance abuse a "national emergency." Drugs crossing our borders have been widely blamed. To stem them, President Bill Clinton launched Plan Colombia, carried on enthusiastically under the Bush administration. The plan's modus operandi is war from the sky — aerial spraying that has covered 2.4 million acres of Colombia's coca plant and opium poppy fields — almost as much territory as Rhode Island and Delaware combined. The U.S. Embassy in Bogotá has become our second-largest diplomatic mission, employing more than 2,000 people. Still, the U.N. reports, Colombia last year produced 776 metric tons of cocaine, enough to supply 80 percent of the world market. Great victory. In Afghanistan, the provider of a huge portion of the world's heroin, production is soaring with the profits funding insurgents and criminals. Drug cartels with their own armies regularly engage NATO forces — as serious a threat as the Taliban. High-level government officials and police are reportedly corrupted. And the U.S. still presses eradication programs that alienate villagers.(...) We'd be incredibly better off if we had treated drugs as a public-health issue instead of a criminal issue — as the celebrated Nobel Prize-winning economist, Milton Friedman, in fact advised us. Friedman, who died last month at 94, witnessed America's misadventure into alcohol prohibition in his youth. "We had this spectacle of Al Capone, of the hijackings, the gang wars," wrote Friedman. He decried turning users into criminals: "Prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse — for both the addict and the rest of us." And in one of his last interviews, Friedman asked the relevant questions: "Should we allow the killing to go on in the ghettos? 10,000 additional murders a year? ... Should we continue to destroy Colombia and Afghanistan?"(...) Race remains a disturbing factor: The federal penalty for crack cocaine, favored in poor black neighborhoods, remains 10 times that for regular cocaine, more popular among whites. READ IT ALL