I have read anumber of reviews of a new Book (“Reefer Madness”) which points out that the value of Marijuana is greater than that of the maize (“You call it corn.”) grown in the USA.
OK, assume that is true. How “big” is the marijuana industry?
How much does a ton cost at (let’s say) wholesale? How big is a ton of the stuff? (I presume it is compressed somehow.) How many tons are consumed in the US per year?
As a long-term expat, I am quite out of the loop on this. I presume we are talking tractor-trailer loads of the stuff. It cannot all be moved or stored in people’s suitcases.
Can someone demonstrait to me how big the pot business is?
I know that at one time (and maybe still) it was the biggest money crop in the state of California. I know that an eighth of an ounce goes for $25. I think it’s huge. Really huge.
There was a study done at in end of the '90’s which concluded that California, Tennessee, and Kentucky were the only three states in the union that were net exporters of marjiuana. I grew up in an agricultrual community in rural East Tennessee, and there was no shortage of people making their money growing the demon weed up on the mountain.
My understanding is that much of the street weed in the States comes from large pot plantations in the less-well controlled sections of Mexico. Areas like Humbolt county in Northern California and parts of British Columbia also have reputations for producing a lot of weed, but the quality is generally higher. This could be because the Mexican growers are more conerned with growing high volumes of cheap weed while the California and BC growers are producing lower volumes of expensive stuff. It’s the difference between McDonald’s and fine dining, basically. There are also lots and lots of people with a couple of grow lights in their basement producing just enough for personal consumption or to trade with their other grower friends. This is can be seen as analogous to home beer brewing and is probably not a significant part of the market, although some of these folks graduate to larger operations like the growing warehouse that was busted in Memphis a few years ago.
Now as to the monetary value of the crop, it should be pointed out that prices like the above-quoted $200/oz is the direct result of prohibition. It’s not expensive to produce marjiuana, as there is very little processing that goes on after growing. But since it’s illegal, the risks involved in transporting and the layers upon layers of middlemen add significantly to the price and creates a strong incentive for those willing to take the risks.
BTW. An once of the really good sensimillia heralded in Amsterdam and parts of the US can go for upwards of $500 and ounce. That is more than Gold.
Michael Pollan’s wonderful book The Botany of Desire explores the human species search over the millennia for four essential desires. Sweetness, Intoxication, Control, and Beauty. His 100 page expose on Marijuana can force even the most conservative to view the weed in a different light.
Last I knew Marijuana was the largest most profitable cash crop in the US. You want to know how big the business is. Larger than anyone can guess. That is why the government has the cartons, and boxes already produced for when legalization takes place.
Maybe 20 years ago someone (California Farm Bureau?) estimated the California pot crop by subtracting the legitimate licensed pesticides used from the total pestides sold (or something like that), and concluded that pot was the top cash crop (by cash, not by tonnage) in California. If the report was sensible, it would use the wholesale value of pot rather than the dubious “street value” estimates that law enforcement uses when talking to the media.
Recent pot-growing snippets: California state has decriminalized pot for medicinal purposes, meaning you can grow your own or buy at a licensed facility. The Feds can’t stand this, and make raids.
There have been occasional findings of pot plantations in the back country inland from Monterey for instance. They take the form of hit-and-run agriculture: law enforcement discovers a plantation with drip irrigation fed from tanks, and no one there. Apparently Mr. Entrepreneur picks out a spot on gov’t-owned land (wilderness reserves, etc), buys some tanks and drip-lines, hires some guys (probably illegal immigrants), trucks them all in and gets the plants started, and doesn’t have to hang around much.
This recent article claims that pornography, marijuana and illegal labor now account for 10% of the US economy. That’s a lot of tax money that could be raised from marijuana.
Alas! I have no cite neighbor - paperbackwriter - I seem to remember the article in Newsweek several years back. The only reason the article raised some eyebrows with me, is because it was creating such a stir with some of my students, and raised some interesting questions in a legalization/decriminalization debate in class.
I do not condone the use of Marijuana in a criminal setting, i.e. driving whilst intoxicated etc…etc… But in a casual setting I have little to no problems.
But the Op wants to know how big it is. Well if an ear of corn were worth as much as marijuana of the same weight, we’d have no national debt in the US.
No, the money saved on cheaper MJ will cause an explosive growth in the consumption of Doritos and Mountain Dew, as users with the munchies have more cash in pocket.
Alas and alack, I was actually hoping that you might find one. As I said, it would have been interesting.
I regards to the economics discussion, I have often thought that illegal drugs are as close to a perfect capitalist free market we are likely to see. Because they are totally illegal, the perverse effect is that they are free of all the regulations that bind a “white market” (is that a term?) business. Each market participant accepts that, in order to participate at all, they are violating laws, rules, and regulations. So there are no OSHA regs, no labor standards, no minimum wages, no child labor restrictions, no harrasment or discrimination rules. The only law is the law of supply and demand.
Narcotics* law enforcement artificially restricts supply, while failing to decrease demand. The result is higher prices.
If this market were suddenly brought above ground and taxed and regulated like a normal business, I believe that prices would drop since the supply would increase and the demand would not increase noticeably. Profits would also likely decline as regulatory costs and taxes take hold.
I am not a trained statistician, so this economic analysis is worth what you paid for it.
*I really dislike the way “narcotics” has become a (woefully incorrect) synonym for “illegal drugs”, but that is the current usage in this context.
OK, so as I follow it, there is little large-scale, long-haul transport of MJ to and from market. (I presume large cities might be an exception.) Although the industry is quite large it is also very fragmented and so has a huge number of small players.
I don’t think that this a fair characterization. When a MJ bust makes the news it is in amounts that need a small panel truck not some guy moving a suitcase across the border under his spare tire. I live in San Diego and about every year or two they discover some tunnel from Tijuana to a warehouse in San Diego (really Chula vista but unless you live here it is San Diego). These tunnels are around 1/2 a mile to a mile long to a building in an industrial area so a big truck a day would cause no comment. Drugs in meaningful quantities are not moved by small independent operators. It may be intimately distributed that way .
The Toronto Star, in March 2002, published that in the Canadian province of Ontario, the police estimated the MJ industry moved about CAD$1 billion, which would place it 3rd behind