Billion dollar baby

It’s easy to spot people who have never been a part of the federal government. They are the ones who think of a billion dollars as being a lot of money. You know, one billion dollars, as in the amount of money Kentucky’s illicit marijuana crop was valued at this year. And this was just the part the revenuers confiscated! It makes you wonder how much the crop that gets successfully harvested will be worth.

Personally, I would have thought the only thing that ever came out of the mountains worth anywhere near one billion dollars would be the coal that is mined every year, money that enriches mainly the non-union coal operators, now that the union has been busted.

Speaking of coal mining jobs, an article in “The Lexington Herald-Leader” Friday confirmed what we here have known for a long time; there aren’t as many of them now as there used to be. As a matter of fact, this article, which concerned mountain top removal around the Phelps community, estimates that the number of coal mining jobs has dropped by 70% since 1980, all of which leaves a lot of once employed miners to pursue other fields of endeavor, such as farming, a field in which a lot of people are apparently choosing to grow what one wag once referred to as “a cash crop”.

Which leads to the obvious question-how do those in the know assess the value of a marijuana plant, anyhow? Easy. It is assumed that every plant has a worth of $2000, whether or not the plant has that amount of pot on it at the time it falls into the hands of the authorities. (The assumption is, apparently, that if a plant were allowed to grow unmolested to maturity, the amount of pot it would contain would be equal to $2000.) So if an eager, if not too bright, connoisseur plants ten seeds, and they all sprout, only to be reported by an alert neighbor, this would count as $20,000 worth of weed.

This method of accounting was first used during the Vietnam War, when the military took the position that if you killed more of the enemy’s forces than it killed of yours, you were the winner. As a result, commanders in the field were encouraged to do whatever they needed to do to “up the body count”. In complying with this order, officers in the field sometimes stretched credulity. This was illustrated in one movie from that era where a platoon called an air strike on an empty field, and then claimed that the enemy suffered some 250 deaths as a result of this action.

So what would it tell us if the value of Kentucky’s largest, but still illegal, cash crop exceeds one billion dollars? It would tell us that one of two things is true. Either inflation is more out of control than any of us ever thought, or this war on drugs thing isn’t working out the way we’ve been hoping. The war on drugs has been underway, after all, since President Nixon’s first term in office, and by this one indicator, we have actually lost ground.

Okay, we’ve actually lost a lot of ground.

Well, it could have something to do with the price of marijuana. One plant may or may not, fetch the grower $2000, but the word is certainly out there now, isn’t it? I mean, how many people read the story in the Appalachian News-Express and cluck their tongue, and allowed as to what a shame it was that our state grows so much of this wicked weed? Not as many, I’d be willing to wager, as said to themselves “$2000 a plant? Blimey, I could buy out Texas if I could only get the south forty out in this stuff!”

But before anyone starts planning on a new crop this coming spring, perhaps they’d do well to stop and think. There is an adage, after all, that goes, “If something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.” After all, there are considerable drawbacks to being a drug kingpin, and prison time is only one of them. That $2000 doesn’t actually go to the farmer. There are any number of middlemen who drive the final price up to that figure.

And if anyone hasn’t been paying attention, we have a lot of police organizations whose main task seems to be to thwart pot growers. And if they are anywhere close to that billion-dollar estimate, they are doing their job well.

So now, the would-be pot farmer should ask himself one question: Which is it better to be, a rich hillbilly in prison, or a poor, but free mountaineer? I think we know the answer to that one don’t we. Maybe we’d all be better off if everyone forgot the get- rich-quick plans marijuana growing induces, and concentrated on other, more legal ways of making money.