The one thing he didn't touch on is that marijuana is also illegal because hemp products would have been a competitor with other artificially made fibers. The major producers of those products had more lawyers, lobbyists and deeper pockets, bye bye marijuana.

The fact the you can grow strawberries in your garden hasn't ruined the strawberry market.

Most people are too lazy to grow their own stuff so I really don't think that's relevant. People can grow tomatoes but how many actually do? They just buy them at the store.

^ What Mr. Chomsky neglected to mention here was scale & production cost vs payoff.

Yes anyone can grow their own strawberries but how many could you ever hope to produce in the average back garden/greenhouse? Probably not enough to let you eat Strawberries everyday I'd bet, and you certainly would'nt pull much of a profit selling them to people at a domestic scale (the key issue here).

Pot however....... even a modest indoor backroom grow can easily net between 30-90oz when dried (alot!). And this can easily be repeated up to 3-4 times a year.

Tobbacco by comparison yields very little for the space and time taken. There's a reason basically no-one home grows tobbaco, you need a huge farm and large scale processing to produce a profitable quantity. Hence it being the preserve of big business and thus legal (plutocrats sure know how to lobby!).


For what its worth though, I do think the Hemp fiber thing was probably the bigger factor in legislation, but what Chomsky is alluding to here is also pretty valid I think.
Pot is a massive cash crop that is seemingly always in demand and relatively easy for a consumer to produce in their own garden/backroom.

There would be a profit in industrial production (always going to be plenty lazy people), but combined with the hemp industry and the effect it tends to have on people (makes you think!) I can totally see why the establishment fears it so much.
It'd be slow, but legal Pot would start eroding the very foundations of the elites power as it's much more profitable for the lower and middle class of society than the Plutocrats at the top and the scale is huge.

A more equal distribution of wealth/economic power is bad for Plutocracy!

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."
-some dead bald guy

*biopolitics

"....and Love is the law. Love under will." ;-)

I do in fact grow my own tomatoes, its a fun hobby on the porch I have 10 tomato bushes on my porch, I grow them in bushes, since they can take a bit of abuse and still produce a ton of tomatoes, I get around 10-15 tomatoes per bush and as long as I keep them up they last forever, I bring them indoors to storage room in winter and they still produce about a 1/4th of their normal spring/summer batch. Anyhow main reason I started growing tomatoes is at the grocery store where I live we have only 1 store in a 50 mile radius so there is no competition and we get price gouged 4 tomatoes at store is 5.99. 1 gallon of milk is 5.49 which is funny 1 gallon of milk is 50 cents cheaper than 4 tomatoes... it's pathetic though. So a lot of people in town have started "porch" gardens. It saves a lot of money on herbs, spices, and some vegetables.

I grow them too, but still end up buying huge quantities of fresh and tinned tomatoes, so the commercial growers really have nothing to fear from the competition

I should plant some strawberries... they are wonderfully weed-like plants, and like the weather here more than tomatoes and chillies do.

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