It probably won't surprise people to learn that back when I was a pothead high schooler in Southern California, I got fairly deep into the policy implications of my avocation. I was on the Students for a Sensible Drug Policy mailing list, yo. I was real. And in that context, I think I frequently repeated the statistic that marijuana was actually the Golden State's leading cash crop. You see, I wasn't in this for the highs, but for the agricultural implications. Sadly, Mark Kleiman now tells me that I was full of shit:Cannabis is not "the largest cash crop in California." That zombie statistic has a history: during the collapse of the lumbering industry in the early 1980s, the Ag Department county extension agent in Humboldt County, which grows timber and pot, was so angry about the suffering he saw around him due to unemployment among loggers that when he filled out his annual estimates of crop-by-crop revenues for his county he listed pot as #1, using a completely made-up number. Dale Gieringer of California NORML then projected that out nationally to show that cannabis was the nation's #2 cash crop, ahead of soybeans but behind corn (or maybe it was the other way around. Since then, another NORMALista named Michael Gettman has produced even more fantastic numbers. In fact, the Abt Associates estimate put the total retail value of the cannabis trade at about $10b, about 15% of the total illicit-drug trade. That's retail price, not farmgate price. And not all of that is grown domestically; some of it comes from Mexico, from Canada, and from Jamaica.There you have it.
