$3 A Gram

 

Joint Made From Marijuana.  Image by Raihan Rana, retrieved from Wikimedia Commons on 12 May 2018, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

By Clarence Thompson

The last two posts presented a simple example of the usefulness of numeracy in managing one's resources.  In this case, the resource in question is money.  Money management is of course, a big part of the broader science of economics, which can be defined as the wise management of scarce resources in order to provide the greatest lasting benefit to the largest number of people.  Note the key phrase "greatest lasting benefit."

Being good with numbers is a key element of this kind of economics, and this kind of economics is what used to characterize the culture of many American families.  This kind of wise management is a key liberation strategy for peoples who are oppressed by a predatory dominant society.  The natural tendency of people who live under oppression is to believe they have no resources.  However, when they begin to make a careful inventory of what they do have, along with the ways in which what they have is being wasted, they can begin to make progress.

However, this kind of careful economics is very bad business for those sharks in human form who want to maintain oppression by robbing oppressed people.  So these human sharks have spent over a century turning the United States into a society of people who can't control themselves, a society of addicts who can't hang onto their money.  While these predators have historically targeted the poor (especially people of color), they have also themselves become a people completely without restraint, and their Commander-In-Chief is a man who can't control himself.

While this has made things difficult and dangerous for those of us who are among the oppressed peoples living in the United States, it has also provided us with a rare opportunity - an opportunity to take a look at our lives and figure out where the dominant society has led us into addictions that are bleeding our lives and draining our strength.  If, moreover, we are willing to learn how to work with numbers, we can see just how much these addictions are costing us.  That will provide us with the necessary motivation to stop the bleeding by getting rid of the addictions and by separating ourselves from an unhealthy dominant society so that we don't catch its diseases!  Once this is accomplished, we discover that we have sources of strength that are greater than we ever realized.

So here's a word problem involving economics and addiction, and it comes from a hip, slightly profane billboard I've been seeing around Portland lately.  There is a marijuana dispensary in this town that is advertising pot for $3 a gram.  What are the economic impacts for the typical user?

First, note that while only nine percent of marijuana users become addicted to it, most research does indicate that marijuana use can become habit-forming.  Second, note that there is a wide variation in the amount of marijuana smoked by self-reported "typical users."  But if you go through 5 to 7 grams per week, the math works out like this:

This works out to between $780 and $1,092 a year, because a year has 52 weeks.  Now Uruguay has legalized marijuana use, but their government has limited the amount smokers can buy to just 10 grams a week.  This means that people in Uruguay can blow a maximum of only $1,560 in U.S. dollars every year, assuming the same price of $3 a gram.  Here in the U.S., and especially in Portland, Oregon, there are no such restrictions, so if you're adventurous and want to work your way up to a half-ounce per week, the formula works out to this:

There are 28.3495 grams in an ounce, so if you smoke a half-ounce per week, you spend $2,211 a year.  It seems a shame to set that much of your money on fire every year just to enrich a bunch of rich members of the dominant society.  How much are the other addictions pushed by our dominant society costing us?  Do you have the tools to figure out the answer to this question?