Just a "Wow, really?" moment.

I'm vaguely in favor of decriminalization of marijuana, with some sort of small fine as a wrist slap for certain kinds of public use, but I don't know much about the issue. (I'm hoping to fill the gaps in my knowledge by seeing The Pineapple Express this weekend.) So David Samuels's New Yorker article on medical marijuana in California had some wild figures:

“Most researchers agree that the value of the U.S. marijuana crop has increased sharply since the mid-nineties, as California and twelve other states have passed medical-marijuana laws. A 2005 State Department report put the country's marijuana crop at more than twenty-two million pounds. A drug-policy analyst and activist named Jon Gettman recently published a report, based on federal-government statistics, estimating that between 1981 and 2006 domestic marijuana production increased tenfold, making pot the leading cash crop in America, displacing corn. Gettman calculated that in 2006 Californians grew more than twenty million pot plants, and that the street value of that crop alone might be as high as fourteen billion dollars. . . According to Americans for Safe Access, which lobbies for medical marijuana, there are now more than two hundred thousand physician-sanctioned pot users in California.”

Twenty-two million pounds? A bigger cash crop than corn? Two hundred thousand physician-sanctioned pot-users? Wow. And all this while the federal government is still trying to shut things down. I'm not making any policy statements here; I'm just kind of impressed.

Of course, we all know that it's only a matter of time before those two thousand users slip through the gateway and become hardcore cheeseball (“that's cocaine, and cheese”) junkies, or something worse.