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In a very revealing moment not long ago, President Obama showed how out of touch he is - to be fair, most other politicians exhibit the same ignorance - about how rapidly the mood of the electorate is changing toward this nation’s drug policies, and about how sophisticated in general people are becoming in their analysis of the issues involved. In a Town Hall style Q&A where the questions were coming over the Net, the most asked question of our new president, by far, was whether he thought the enormously profitable domestic market in the marijuana trade should be legalized so the government could tap the revenues for the public - instead of it going into the hands of often intensely violent criminal elements - and use the proceeds to help get us out from under. Obama, instead of realizing he might be witnessing a big shift - he apparently forgot he was being asked the the hugely radical question in the first place because it was by far the most asked by the audience! - derisively dismissed the idea as not a good one, his derisiveness meant to let on an attitude perhaps of “these are just Internet kooks anyway asking such an outlandish question!”
Obama regretted his ill considered, and for him unusually impolitic, response because the mainstream media quickly and harshly pointed out it wasn’t some fringe element asking the question, but thousands upon thousands of ordinary Americans. No doubt many of these folks had just been informed of the hugeness of marijuana - it is by far and away our biggest cash crop - by a CNBC report on the marijuana market that aired, as cable does, many times over and was the most watched show in the network’s history. The show wasn't news to any of us who have long followed the War On Drugs from an economic angle, but it was apparently hugely influential with voters, who are just now beginning to be educated in the There is No Way We Can Win This economics of the drug trade.
It’s simple: marijuana, being an easily grown agricultural product, has a very low intrinsic value, akin to say perhaps corn. Yet marijuana - because it is illegal and thus risky business - has often traded at many times the price of gold, a product that, because it is rare and is a historic store of value, has a very high intrinsic value. There will always be someone poor enough, desperate enough or just plain greedy enough to trade corn for gold if we let them and, thus, it will never end until we take the money out of the equation. Thanks to CNBC, people are finally starting to understand what it’s really always been about, - what it’s always been about since time immemorial, really - The Money...Stupid!
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Publisher's Note 
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