With three months still to go, teams of federal, state, and local law-enforcement officials have already confiscated a mind-bending haul of marijuana plants from indoor and outdoor grows across Washington this year, they say. The remarkable seizure of 242,000 plants—38,000 from one Central Washington garden alone—is altogether about 100,000 more plants than all of last year’s record confiscation, says Lt. Rich Wiley of the Washington State Patrol narcotics program, pushing the Evergreen State ever higher on the list of America’s top dope-producing regions. Almost 250 suspects were arrested in the past nine months for tending or aiding the operations, most of them outdoor grows east of the Cascades.
As it is, according to federal figures from 2006, when around 140,000 plants were confiscated, Washington already ranked No. 2, behind California, in U.S. indoor grows and No. 5 in outdoor gardens. With a street value estimated by the state patrol at $472 million so far, the 2007 law-enforcement harvest has turned marijuana, unofficially, into Washington’s No. 4 cash crop, compared to the latest (2005) available figures from the state Department of Agriculture. Dope beats out wheat ($456 million) but trails potatoes ($535 million). Apples, at $1.2 billion, top the list.
via Seattle News – Marijuana Is Washington’s Hottest Agricultural Product – page 1 – Seattle Weekly.
And how much tax revenue does Washington take in from wheat, potatoes, and apples? Marijuana may be #4, but that is based on how much marijuana they found, not how much is actually being grown out there.
Leaving money on the table while your state is suffering a severe financial crisis, cutting programs and services needed by the people. Oh well, what good is a Poison Control Hotline, anyway?
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Washington State, like my home state of TN, relies on a hefty sales tax to fill state coffers, rather than an income tax. At a 9.0% rate, without any sin taxes added that’s $42,480,000 in tax revenue they burned. Along with the money spent on the investigation, there’s no telling how many roads and schools they could have built/funded. With a state population of about 6 million, it’s like every man, woman, and child in the state took $7 out of their pocket and threw it into Puget Sound.