SEATTLE – Washington is one of the nation’s top five pot-producing states, its $1 billion-a-year crop second in value only to apples, according to recent analysis by a public-policy researcher.
Virginia-based researcher Jon Gettman, who wrote the report released last week, cited government data in declaring marijuana the nation’s biggest cash crop, generating more money than corn and wheat combined.
It ranks among the top three cash crops in 30 states, Gettman said. Washington ranks fifth, behind California, Tennessee, Kentucky and Hawaii, he said.
Over the past three years, apple sales have averaged $1.15 billion a year, followed by $1.03 billion for marijuana and $500 million for wheat.
Nationally, domestic marijuana production has increased from 1,000 metric tons in 1981 to 10,000 metric tons in 2006, according to federal estimates cited in the report. The value of the national crop is $35.8 billion, Gettman’s report said.
Gettman contends the U.S. is forfeiting millions in potential tax revenue every year though its criminalizing of marijuana. Proliferation of pot across the country shows it has become a “pervasive and ineradicable part of the national economy,” the report said.
Drug-enforcement officials say they aren’t surprised by the estimates; Washington and California have traditionally been hot growth spots for marijuana.
“You can look at anything being a cash crop if you don’t want to make any conclusions about the damage it does,” said Dave Rodriguez, director of the Northwest High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, a Seattle-based division of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Over the past several years, growers in California and Mexico have taken over Washington’s outdoor pot crops, which often are hidden on public forest land east of the Cascades, Rodriguez said. Law enforcement eradicates about 100,000 plants a year.
Washington growers have access to expertise in Oregon and British Columbia, Gettman said.
“Washington is in a situation where they get information and interaction from these two areas and so it’s not that far afield … for Washington to have a thriving indoor cultivation market because they have a lot of local knowledge there,” he said.
“It’s the old real-estate maxim of location, location, location.”
Gettman based his report on a widely used federal pot-production estimate that about 10,000 metric tons of marijuana are produced domestically every year. He divided that amount among states based on how much marijuana was seized in each state.
From that data, he extrapolated that Washington is the second-largest producer of indoor-grown plants, sixth-largest producer of outdoor-grown plants and fifth-largest producer overall.
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