Pot top crop in US, group claims

[nugget]

Author: news.com.au

Date: December 19, 2006 09:48am

Source: News.com.au

Copyright: Copyright 2006 News Limited.

 

 

MARIJUANA is the most lucrative cash crop in the US according to a study by a group campaigning for the substance's decriminalisation.

 

The study by the Washington-based Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) argued that successive crackdowns against marijuana had been unsuccessful.

 

The report said using conservative price estimates, the marijuana crop was worth $US35.8 billion (45.9bn) this year - exceeding the combined value of corn ($US23.3bn) and wheat ($US7.45bn).

 

The report said that despite eradication campaigns which have seen 103 million marijuana plants seized and an average of nearly 36,000 cultivation sites per year destroyed, production increased tenfold between 1981 and 2006 from 1000 to 10,000 tonnes.

 

MPP communications director Bruce Mirken said the report lent weight to his organisation's calls for the marijuana industry to be regulated.

 

"Our current laws take our biggest agricultural product and hand a monopoly to unregulated criminals and gangs, while wasting millions of dollars and adding to the prison overcrowding crisis,'' he said.

 

"Instead of wasting money on phony eradication campaigns, let's put marijuana under a sensible system of regulation, like we do with alcoholic beverages.''

[God of Assasins]

Marijuana should be free. It's a weed. Regulating it is like regulating Daffodils or Clover. Its called Grass for a good reason. It not only smells like cut grass but grows as fast too. People have been growing pot for thousands of years. To go from prohibiting its use to controlling its exploitation as a crop would typical of our corrupt western Governments.

 

Even in the Middle East you can toke away without the Hierarchy interfering. Its time our Government recognised that they are acting as criminals. By telling us how we can or cannot live they are diminishing our freedom without just cause. If I was Prime Minister I'd hunt down every political and law enforcement figure still living who had a hand in this prohibition and lock the bastards up. Pot smokers harm nobody. Governments hurt everybody.

 

Don't tax it or ban it. Just let people be. Politicians are all the same. Dirty filthy lying scum.

[tomemusic]

Can't agree with you more. The media is deeply involved with keeping it illegal as well, they love printing the usual scaremongering rubbish they have since the 1930s.

 

Ok, sure, just about every article they print about all kinds of things is scaremongering rubbish. .

 

But once you been to an Amsterdam Coffee Shop with their menus and almost bewildering display of goods from exotic places as well as what is grown there, you wont ever want to go back to what we have to go through just to get a decent toke without the paranoia.