As more and more attention is paid to the size and economic value of the emerging legal cannabis market its easy to overlook the magnitude and extent of the larger more established and more profitable illegal market. Since the early 1980s the DEA has been funneling money and manpower to state police and various para-military task forces to locate eradicate and suppress domestic marijuana cultivation throughout the United States. They havent been very successful at this but they have kept at it over the years. More importantly their annual reports on the number of grow sites and the number of cultivated plants they have seized provide the only real solid tangible data on domestic marijuana cultivation. When the Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program first began the DEA not only published data on how many plants they ripped out of the ground but also estimates of what percentage of the total they had seized. This enabled NORML (and later this author) to produce estimates of the economic value of the un-eradicated domestic marijuana crop estimates that were later verified in the Office of National Drug Control Policys and State Departments own reports on the subject. Thats old news and anyone doubting the economic value of domestically grown marijuana in the United States need look no farther than reports on legal marijuana sales in many states throughout the country not to mention the tax revenue it has produced. Nonetheless conventional wisdom has been that the DEA and local police are only able to eradicate a small percentage of the total number of cultivated plants in the country perhaps somewhere between 10 percent and 33 percent of the total. But this concerns outdoor cannabis cultivation which has had the unintended effect of driving a great deal of cultivation indoors where it is much more productive and much more difficult to detect. With that in mind here is some interesting data from the DEAs seizure of marijuana plants in 2015. Overall the DEA seized 4257220 cultivated marijuana plants in 2015. Of these 3932201 were cultivated outdoors at6421 sites and 325019 were cultivated indoor at1948 sites. About 62 percent of their total seizures took place in California where 2400699 outdoor plants and 2430090 indoor plants were eradicated. This work keeps a lot of law enforcement officers employed; and they like to keep busy. Nationally this program resulted in 6278 arrests andperhaps more significantly for law enforcementit resulted in the seizure of $29.7 million in assets (which law enforcement usually gets to keep for their own use). In California eradication efforts resulted in 2320 arrests and seizure of $7.1 million in assets. After California the rest of the top 10states in terms of seized outdoor marijuana plants in 2015 were Kentucky (567951) Texas (226322) West Virginia (194120) Tennessee (126626) Indiana (53402) Georgia (48 084) Oregon (36100) Virginia (35926) and Wisconsin (30645). Next were the newly legal states of Washington (28525) and Colorado (26545). The top 10states for seizure of indoor marijuana plants were California (of course) followed by Florida (13606) Michigan (20206) Indiana (10128) Washington (7407) Texas (5338) Nevada (5150) Kentucky (3389) Oregon (3038) and Ohio (2863). On the indoor front the states where the most grow rooms were seized were California (645) Florida (242) Michigan (160) Indiana (159) New York (104) Kentucky (91) Nevada (63) Wisconsin (59) Virginia (43) and Ohio (40). Consider the followingin Kentucky they have eradicated an average of 442123 plants a year from 2002 through 2015 yet in 2015 they eradicated 571340 plants. In fact from 2010 to 2015 the DEA and their allies increased their eradication totals every year. Nonetheless Kentucky marijuana growers find cultivation profitable enough to keep planting knowing that hundreds of thousands of plants will never get to harvest due to eradication efforts. Take this concept and apply it nationally not just in this century but going back to 1981 when domestic marijuana cultivation first began on a large scale in the United States. America grows cannabis. America continues to grow cannabis and legalized or not marijuana consumers will continue to produce demand and incentives to grow American cannabis. Previously in Pot Matters: Marijuana by the NumbersFor all of HIGH TIMES culture coverage click here. by Jon Gettman at High Times