More than once, I’ve heard a resident of an Appalachian-area state claim proudly that their state is the “marijuana capital of the US” or “the #1 pot producer in the country.” Usually it’s Kentucky, though I have heard West Virginia and Tennessee.
Is there any basis for this claim?
I thought Mexico was the “marijuana capital of the US.”
If you scroll down to the bottom of this paper (warning PDF file) by NORML, there’s a state-by-state breakdown of estimated marijuana production in 1997. That table puts California on top, but it looks to me like there’s a lot of leeway in those numbers (was fully 50% of Tennessee’s crop eradicated that year?).
True. There’s a good article on it in an old Maxim/Stuff/FHM that I scanned in for a friend a few years back. I’ll see if I can find it, if you’re interested.
How could Mexico be the US capital of anything?
From this page, dated July 2002:
From this report it seems the Appalachia region produces the most, and out of those KY is on top.
Growing up there was a rumor floating around the western Kentucky county I grew up in that we’d been featured on the cover of “High Times” on 3 occasions.
Apparently this place produced some really good stuff.
Apparently most of the big growing counties are in the southeast.
That may be true but we certainly had our share of it in the western part. It’s really easy to go into the middle of a big field and plant it there. Sometimes it grew wild.
This is why you should be very careful walking through a Kentucky cornfield. All sorts of traps to guard pot plants.
Actually, you don’t trap the fields, you just watch them. You don’t want booby traps going off if the cops come to bust you. Cops really hate that.
More often, the plants in question are put there by a neighbor, usually in an area thats being left alone. They figure if you don’t notice, you don’t care.