Reply #42: The 1972 Presidential Commission on Marijuana found that 10 million smoke it daily. . . [View All]

[Journeyman]

Help me with some math.

If 10 million smoke it daily, let's figure 4 to a joint (or a blunt or whatever the terminology du jour might be -- I haven't smoked in decades). But at 4 to a smoke, that's 2.5 million joints a day. At 30 joints per ounce (??), that's 83,333 ounces a day, or approximately 5,200 pounds a day, or somewhere around 3 tons smoked every day. (Your math may vary depending on how fat your roll your own.) I suspect my numbers are conservative, and even at 1972 numbers the amount smoked was closer to 10,000 pounds a day. Every day. Almost 2,000 tons each year.

And that was in 1972.

So the next time you hear of a "massive marijuana bust," and drug warriors say they captured "700 pounds of the noxious weed," just remember: All they did was impact less than two hours of consumption (at a rate set some 40 years ago). It wouldn't surprise me if today's levels were double those of my youth.