America's biggest cash crop.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: Data - Marijuana - Brief article

According to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, agricultural price supports cost American consumers about $27 billion a year by making food more expensive. But that figure omits the government's biggest price support program: the war on drugs.

In the December Bulletin of Cannabis Reform, drug policy researcher Jon Gettman uses government data to estimate that marijuana produced in the United States is worth nearly $36 billion a year to growers, making it the country's biggest cash crop by far. Almost all of that value can be attributed to the "risk premium" associated with prohibition, the bounty people earn by dealing in contraband. To get a sense of the disparity in price between legal and illegal drugs...