Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

The bad news: no blogging from me on Sunday.  Sorry about that.  The good news: in its place, several thousand steaming words on marijuana legalization were produced for the summer issue of the magazine.  You can’t wait to read them, can you?

By coincidence, one of the things I puzzled over a bit while I was researching my piece was the total size of the cannabis business in the United States.  Basically, the numbers I saw didn’t seem to make much sense, but since I wasn’t planning to use them anyway I didn’t bother trying to track down the problem.  Perhaps in honor of 4/20, though, Michael Hiltzik did it for me:

Let’s start, as [Jon] Gettman did, with a standard quantification of U.S. domestic cultivation today: 10,000 metric tons, or 22 million pounds. This figure has a curious history. It first appeared in a 2003 report by the Bush White House. Yet, as Gettman observed, that was nearly triple the estimate of 3,500 metric tons the feds had been using for years.

….The government backpedaled in 2007, when the Justice Department estimated the domestic crop at 5,650 to 9,417 metric tons. That’s a huge margin — like saying the distance from L.A. to New York is between 1,000 and 6,000 miles.

….Gettman acknowledges that concrete information is exceedingly scarce in this field. “When you drill down, the only hard fact is they seize a lot of plants,” he said.

The “soft facts” include the size in dollars of the U.S. marijuana market. Gettman’s 2007 estimate of $113 billion is in the stratosphere compared with some others. In a 2001 report, the federal government pegged the black market at $10.5 billion, a discrepancy that suggests either that we became a nation of total potheads over the following few years, that pot prices experienced an inflation rate that would make the rise in college tuition look sick, or that somebody’s numbers are way off.

In other words, no one really knows.  Which doesn’t surprise me.  One of the things I’ve found out over the past few weeks is that virtually all of the research related to cannabis is, perhaps fittingly, sort of hazy.  The research is hard to do, it often points in contradictory directions, and natural experiments are hard to come by.  We know a fair amount, but our confidence level in what we know isn’t all that great.

But enjoy 4/20 anyway.  Just don’t blog while high, OK?

Fact:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and billionaires wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2024 demands.

payment methods

Fact:

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2024 demands.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate