SACRAMENTO – For years, activists in the marijuana legalization movement have claimed that cannabis is America’s biggest cash crop. Now they’re citing government statistics to prove it. A report released today by a marijuana public policy analyst contends that the market value of pot produced in the U.S. exceeds $35 billion – far more than the crop value of such heartland staples as corn, soybeans and hay, which are the top three legal cash crops. California is responsible for more than a third of the cannabis harvest, with an estimated production of $13.8 billion that exceeds the value of the state’s grapes, vegetables and hay combined – and marijuana is the top cash crop in a dozen states, the report states. The report estimates that marijuana production has increased tenfold in the past quarter century despite an exhaustive anti-drug effort by law enforcement. Jon Gettman, the report’s author, is a public policy consultant and leading proponent of the push to drop marijuana from the federal list of hard-core Schedule 1 drugs – which are deemed to have no medicinal value and a high likelihood of abuse – such as heroin and LSD. He argues that […]