The Orange County Register, not one of the liberal trumpets in the mainstream media orchestra, recently took it upon itself to estimate the value of California’s illegally grown marijuana crop.
These sorts of estimates have been made in the past, and have usually concluded that pot was the state’s most valuable agricultural crop. But the number the Register came up with was genuinely jaw-dropping.
The paper concluded that the value of the state’s illegal marijuana crop is $23.3 billion, which is more than the value of the state’s next five largest categories of agricultural commodities combined.
The paper obtained the value of the state’s five largest categories of legal ag output from the California Department of Food and Agriculture and made its own estimate of the size and value of the state’s pot crop.
Here’s the batting order:
1. Marijuana: $23.3 billion.
2. Milk: $6.28 billion.
3. Almonds: $5.33 billion.
4. Grapes: $4.95 billion.
5. Cattle, calves: $3.39 billion.
6. Lettuce: $2.25 billion.
The combined value of the five legal commodities is $22.2 billion.
The most interesting part of the story is how the Register arrived at the $23.3 billion figure for the value of the marijuana crop.
The paper started by looking at how many marijuana plants had been seized by law enforcement in California in 2015 — 2.6 million. The paper then turned to an estimate from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime that law enforcement seizures of illegal drugs account for only 10 to 20 percent of drugs produced.
This led it to estimate that that 13.2 million pot plants were grown in the state in 2015, based on a 20 percent seizure rate.
It then estimated that the amount of usable marijuana from each plant averaged one pound. Plants grown outdoors can produce more than a pound and plants grown indoors usually produce less, so the one-pound average is plausible. (More than a third of the plants seized in the state in 2015 were grown outdoors on public land.)
Finally, it assumed that the price of illegally grown pot was $1,765 a pound, or about $110 an ounce.
It’s not clear where the $1,765 a pound figure came from. Phillip Smith, who runs the website Drug War Chronicle, thinks the estimate is probably optimistic, “especially for outdoor grown marijuana, which fetches a lower price than indoor, especially for large producers moving multi-dozen or hundred-pound loads.”
Phillips points out there are a number of uncertainties in the Register’s estimate.
“Maybe law enforcement in California is damned good at sniffing out pot crops and seizes a higher proportion of the crop than the rule of thumb would suggest,” he says. “Still, even if the cops seized 40 percent of the crop and farmers only got $1,000 a pound, the crop would still be valued at $8 billion and still be at the top of the farm revenue heap.”
I wonder if there’s another factor that could throw the Register’s calculation off that Phillips didn’t consider: Maybe law enforcement overstates the number of plants it seizes — sort of like the inflated body counts the military used to put out during the Vietnam War.
The Register found California has led the nation each of the last five years in the number of plants seized. The 2.6 million plants reported seized in California in 2015 compares with 1.64 million seized in the other 49 states.
The state with the second largest number of seizures in 2015 was Kentucky, with 571,340 plants seized.
If the 4.26 million plants seized nationally represent 20 percent of all pot grown illegally nationwide, then the amount of domestically produced illegal marijuana comes to 11,500 tons.
Estimates over the years of how much marijuana is consumed annually in the U.S. have been all over the board. The one I’ve thought was most plausible was around 20,000 tons from all sources — legal and illegally grown, and imported. If that estimate is close, then an estimate of 11,500 tons of illegally grown domestic product is in the ballpark.
