California Marijuana Industry, Grows More Than Mexico, Depleting Water During Drought

[From article]
a San Francisco-based author with a PhD in Nutritional Ethnomedicine floated an interesting theory regarding those water shortages earlier this week. Speaking on the radio, he suggested that California’s huge crop of marijuana plants is “depleting the water table,” and is partially responsible for the massive shortfalls in water that the state is now facing.
It may sound outlandish, but it turns out that there may be something to the good doctor’s theory.
As anyone who has ever had the misfortune to visit, say, Santa Cruz can attest, there’s a lot of marijuana in California. (This despite the fact that it’s only legal for medicinal use in the state.) Indeed, by some estimates, California now produces more marijuana than Mexico.
[. . .]
Meanwhile, one outdoor marijuana plant requires approximately six gallons of water per day during its roughly 150-day growing season. That means that, over California’s four-year drought, outdoor marijuana plants -- based on the six-gallon a day estimate, and the 2006 figure -- have used roughly 63 billion gallons of California water. (Indoor growing is also rough on the environment; roughly 9 percent of household electricity use in the state is used for marijuana cultivation, reports Evan Mills of the Lawrence Berkeley National Library.)

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/marijuana-plants-soak-billions-gallons-water-california_913101.html

Marijuana Plants Soak Up Billions of Gallons of Water in California
High times are dry times.
7:01 AM, APR 9, 2015 • BY ETHAN EPSTEIN