Joe Rogan on marijuana: what the evidence says · JRE #2143
SUBJECT: MARIJUANA
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
Harvest it and bring it out, and they're selling it. He said that, I think, believe, John said at the time of our podcast that 90% of all the marijuana that's being sold in the states where it's illegal is all from these grow ops, a lot of them in California, on public land by the cartels. 90%.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
The 90 percent figure traces to retired California game warden John Nores, but Rogan restates it in a way that conflates two different claims. Nores has used 90 percent to describe the share of black-market cannabis grown domestically by criminal enterprises, and separately to describe how much of that domestic black-market crop was historically grown on public land, not 90 percent of all marijuana sold in states where cannabis is illegal. Nores himself says that share has since shifted heavily toward private property, with roughly 70 to 75 percent of black-market grows now on private land rather than public land. Independent enforcement data supports the cartel-on-public-land phenomenon but at a much smaller scale: federal eradication figures show about 43 percent of marijuana plants eradicated in 2012 came from public and tribal lands, and law enforcement estimates that 95 percent or more of the grows found on public lands are run by foreign drug trafficking organizations (a share of public-land grows, not of the total illegal market). The underlying problem is real, but the specific 90 percent framing about the entire illegal-state market is not supported.