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Money is dirty paper, but dope is business. The business enterprises behind marijuana and hallucinogens are examined in next week's capitalist tool, Forbes. Among the tidbits you'll find in this large, multi-page report:

With prices reaching $2,700 a pound wholesale, the [cannabis] trade takes in somewhere between $4 billion (in U.S. dollars) nationwide and $7 billion just in the province of British Columbia.

[...]

Small growers like David bring in $900 a pound at the low end, with net margins of 55% to 90%, depending on quality, depreciation and labor costs. They produce half a pound to 30 pounds every ten weeks, selling their product to local users or peddling it to "accumulators," who then smuggle it over the border or sell it up the chain to larger brokers. Accumulators and brokers typically add $80 a pound to the cost, as do the high-volume smugglers who buy from them. Smugglers returning money to Canada for other dealers skim a 2% laundering fee.

"The first time somebody gives you a bag of money so heavy that you can't lift it, it's surreal. Pretty soon, it's just dirty paper," says Jeff, who recently retired from smuggling up to a ton of weed a week.

The only other quick way I know to make $100 million gross in a few years is to be a mutual fund CEO market timer, like Lawrence Lasser of Putnam.

In the United States, the game of centamillionaires is called "Choose your enemy": John Ashcroft or Eliot Spitzer.

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