Profiting By Keeping Kentuckians Poor

Hmm.  Decriminalized and taxed at 30 percent, that's $500 million in cold, hard cash - not counting the savings from directing drug war stupidity to actual law enforcement.

Roger Alford at AP:

Federal, state and local law enforcement agencies confiscated more than $1.5 billion worth of marijuana this year in central Appalachia, a region where widespread unemployment may be turning some people to pot farming.

Ed Shemelya, head of marijuana eradication in the Appalachian High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, released preliminary figures Tuesday showing that aerial spotters guided ground crews to more than 760,000 plants during the 2012 growing season in the mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia.
They also arrested more than 400 growers in the region.

Shemelya said nearly 430,000 of this year's marijuana plants were found in Kentucky, a substantial increase for that state over 2011.

Legalized, marijuana and its non-intoxicant cousin industrial hemp are the silver bullet for economic growth in Kentucky, where the stuff grows wild.

But just as bootleggers and preachers work together to prevent legal alcohol sales in dry counties because they both profit from prohibition, there's an unholy alliance of Big Coal, Big Pharma and Drug War Profiteers stopping legal hemp and pot.


Keeping Kentuckians poor and desperate makes some people very rich.