Talk about bubbles. $35,000,000,000 is a large number. What would happen to our economy if this cash suddenly was removed? Or what would happen if it suddenly became taxed, and traded in the futures market?
Pot called top cash crop in America | Chicago Tribune
A report released Monday by a marijuana public policy analyst contends that the market value of pot produced in the United States exceeds $35 billion--far more than the crop value of such heartland staples as corn, soybeans and hay....Jon Gettman, the report's author, is a proponent of the push to drop marijuana from the federal list of hard-core Schedule 1 drugs, such as heroin and LSD. He argues that the data support his push to begin legalizing cannabis and reaping a tax windfall from it, while controlling production and distribution to better restrict use by teenagers.
“Despite years of effort by law enforcement, they're not getting rid of it,” Gettman said.
and of course, the government official quoted uses specious reasoning to splutter that the cannabis crop is evil:
But Tom Riley, a spokesman for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, cited examples of countries that have struggled with drug crops.“Coca is Colombia's largest cash crop, and that hasn't worked out for them, and opium poppies are Afghanistan's largest crop, and that has worked out disastrously for them,” Riley said.
In other words, if the U.S. legalized hemp, the Christian-Taliban would take over our country, and Saudi Arabia would lead a coalition of nations to invade the Eastern Seaboard to kill our leaders and convert them to Islam (or whatever it was that Ann “Demon-spawn” Coulter said). Uhhh, yeah. Perfectly logical. The Christian-Taliban part, maybe already happened, but they seem to be in decline, or at least in remission.
Gettman's methodology used what he described as a conservative value of about $1,600 a pound compared with the $2,000- to $4,000-a-pound street value often cited by law-enforcement agencies after busts.Nationwide, the estimated cannabis production of $35.8 billion exceeds corn ($23 billion), soybeans ($17.6 billion) and hay ($12.2 billion), according to Gettman's findings.
So, $1,600 a pound based on $100 an ounce. Hmmm, seems low really, but what would I know.
