{"id":134,"date":"2009-04-09T21:15:14","date_gmt":"2009-04-10T02:15:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elegans.uky.edu\/blog\/?p=134"},"modified":"2009-04-09T21:15:14","modified_gmt":"2009-04-10T02:15:14","slug":"examining-the-marijuana-cash-crop-size-urban-legend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/?p=134","title":{"rendered":"Examining the giant marijuana cash crop urban legend."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;d heard before that marijuana is the biggest cash crop in California &#8230;in Kentucky &#8230;in the US.  Online you can see a <a href=\"www.drugscience.org\/Archive\/bcr2\/MJCropReport_2006.pdf \">2006 estimate that puts marijuana on top by Jon Gettman<\/a>.  It always sounded patchy, and here Kevin Drum links to a critical site that estimates the retail value of the cannabis sales at $10 billion.<\/p>\n<p>Even this seems high according to my estimate.  I recently (can&#8217;t lay my hands on the figure) saw a graph of pot smoking by age in the US within the past month.  Highest for people in their 20&#8217;s, then about 10% until people hit 60.  Older folks smoke very little.  So let&#8217;s say 10% of people from 15-60 (roughly 24 million people) smoke twice a month:<\/p>\n<p>24 million people x 24 joints\/year \/ 40 joints\/ounce x $100\/ounce = $1.5 billion retail per year.<\/p>\n<p>By comparison, the US corn crop is $24 billion\/year.  $1.5 billion\/year is about the size of the US tobacco or orange crop.  But then we are comparing retail prices to farm prices.  So figure growers are getting at best 1\/5 or 1\/10 or the retail price, and now the marijuana crop is tiny, smaller than the peach crop.  Also, considerable marijuana in the US is imported, so the US crop is even smaller.<\/p>\n<p>Running the estimates in the other direction, the $10 billion estimate of spending on marijuana has the monthly US smokers lighting up every other day.  This sounds too high, most smokers are occasional smokers.  Estimating pot spending at $35 billion as Jon Gettman does has monthly pot smokers averaging eleven joints a week, or every man, woman, and child in the country lighting up once a week.  Way high.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;d heard before that marijuana is the biggest cash crop in California &#8230;in Kentucky &#8230;in the US. Online you can see a 2006 estimate that puts marijuana on top by Jon Gettman. It always sounded patchy, and here Kevin Drum links to a critical site that estimates the retail value of the cannabis sales at [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pseudoscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}