A rare, sort-of off-topic post for this blog: Kevin Drum of Mother Jones says of recently-spotted bumper stickers in California’s Humbolt-County pot-growing region that say “Keep Pot Illegal”

....Legalization could take many forms. But the conventional wisdom here is that fully legal weed might fetch no more than a few hundred dollars a pound, as more people grow it and police no longer pull up millions of plants a year. Illegal marijuana “is the government’s best agricultural price-support program ever,” said Gerald Myers, a retired engineer and former volunteer fire chief who moved to the county in 1970. “If they ever want to help the wheat farmers, make wheat illegal.”

Read the quote in context here.

A few hundred dollars a pound? Sorry but it takes more energy, skill, and effort to grow agriculturally-intensive corn and the spot price for that peaked at $7.88/bushel back in 2008 — about thirteen cents a pound.

Commodity price to tobacco growers is maybe a couple dollars a pound, even though retail-quality tobacco is also harder to grow than “retail-quality” pot. Even after intensive processing — which, sorry, pot doesn’t need — fancy imported pipe tobacco costs maybe $35 pound.

Highly-cultivated northern-latitude hot-house tomatoes and green peppers, which are probably most comparable in terms of cultivation technology, cost on the order of four to six dollars a pound.

Therefore its inconceivable that, absent the cost of risk, even highly-cultivated marijuana would cost more per bushel or bale than corn, tobacco, or tomatoes. Consequently I just don’t see the gazillion-dollar gross revenues, let alone tax revenues, materializing should the stuff be legalized.

That doesn’t mean I don’t think it should be legalized. Quite the opposite! The closer to commodity pricing you get, and the lower the profit margin, the less incentive to sell it to those who aren’t already interested.

Of course you’ll notice this sort of policy position isn’t that far off the beaten path for me: I think the same thing is true about roll-your-own porn (which appears to be just killing industrial porn) and destigmatization of “premarital” sex (which in the last 50 years appears to have decimated the traditional market for prostitution.)

The point being that as with opponents and proponents porn and prostitution the positions of both opponents and proponents of legalized pot are almost hopelessly entangled with the taboo/stigma-based status quo than with almost any realistic projections of what’s really going to happen when the cost closes in on zero.