CHINO HILLS, California — Forget wine-California’s biggest crop is bright green and funny-smelling Suburbs don’t come much tidier than Chino Hills, 30 miles (50 km) east of downtown Los Angeles. Last year, the neighbourhood of coffee-coloured stucco houses and three-car garages boasted an average household income twice that of the nation as a whole. In Vista del Sol, one of its quiet enclaves, every house but one has a neatly-trimmed green lawn. And, until recently, the exception was verdant inside. When the police went in, they found more than 800 marijuana plants-a small part of what is turning out to be an enormous harvest. Greg Garland, a local narcotics cop, used to discover about a dozen houses a year that had been turned into marijuana factories. So far this year he has raided more than 40. The production boom is not confined to the suburbs. Since April the state’s annual ‘Campaign against Marijuana Planting’ has pulled 2.9m plants worth some $10 billion from back gardens, timber forests and state lands (see chart). Marijuana is now by far California’s most valuable agricultural crop. Assuming, very optimistically, that the cops are finding every other plant, it is worth even more […]

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