The Great Pause Week 55: The Secret Life of Weed

Legalization of cannabis may be, for the global climate, like re-creating the fossil fuel industry from scratch.

With the domestication of wheat, some 10,000 years ago, the plant world split. Some became crops and others became weeds.
— Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky (2021)

Cannabis is now the United States’ highest-value cash crop, even where it is still illegal. Thanks to the genius of ATF top gun Harry Anslinger in the 1930s, marijuana moved to that rank decades before it was legally grown.

It sits in the top export product ranks for Mexico, Colombia, too, and likely some nations in the Middle East and Asia, even while enduring the occasional kabuki eradication effort.

Patchy criminalization at the US federal level (interstate transport, for instance) compels each state to develop local markets, irrespective of the suitability of their seasons or climate. The Central Valley of California holds no special advantage over the Rocky Mountains of Colorado or the Green Mountains of Vermont since it’s all indoors now. While the localization of trade is a very healthy development, the indoor grow room is an abomination.