2. Marijuana Should Be Taxed and Regulated Because It Is America’s Largest Cash Crop…

“To get a sense of the disparity in price between legal and illegal drugs,” Reason’s Jacob Sullum wrote in 2007, “compare the production value of marijuana—about $1,600 per pound, by Gettman’s estimate—to the production value of tobacco, a legal psychoactive weed that U.S. farmers sell for less than $2 per pound.”

Let’s go back to 2005, make marijuana legal, and give it an astronomically high production value of $800 per pound, or half of Gettman’s black market estimate: It would have tied with soy beans in 2006 as America’s third largest cash crop, with an average production value of roughly $17 billion. If it had the same production value per pound as tobacco, or $2, its APV in 2005 would have been $44 million; or less than 10 percent of beans, 2005’s 20th most valuable cash crop.

So while pointing to marijuana as America’s largest cash crop is a good indicator of its popularity (and arguably, the safety of its use), it doesn’t follow that taxation and regulation of the drug in a post-prohibition market would be an unlimited boon to government coffers, especially when factoring in the costs of an aggressive regulatory framework.