I ran across the name John Novak this morning, and saw that he ran a site with the intriguing name of 420 Leaks, so I decided to look it up. Mr. Novak seems to be a lot like me in that he loves to pore through old information and records, finding fascinating tidbits that are useful for medical and legal arguments supporting cannabis.

So I started reading through some of his recent articles, and found this great article about the pre-1937 medicinal cannabis market. It quotes a U.S. Department of Agriculture farmer’s bulletin which gives some great hints for growing cannabis plants on a farm, describes how to properly process them for use in the drug market (!), and concludes with the fact that “The market price in January, 1927, for domestic cannabis (U.S.P.) was 23 to 33 cents a pound”. This was the fair, open market price before all the “reefer madness” hysteria we all know so well, so it’s untainted by ideology.

So I said to myself, “Something something inflation” and used the Federal government’s own inflation calculator to find that, at 33 cents a pound, primo cannabis intended for the “drug market” would cost $4.44 a pound today:

I’ve been saying for years that legal marijuana should cost about as much as oregano, and so there goes your proof.

By the way, Mr. Novak, if you read this, please check out some of our own historical articles: